Andrew Bolt writes: I debated Prof Robert Manne, our top "stolen generations" theorist, at the Melbourne Writers Festival after he gave me his top 12 list of "stolen" children. But I asked him: how could anyone call these children "stolen"?

To name just 10.

Robert has now given me 12 names -- his latest attempt in eight years of research to name the most undeniable examples of stolen children.

But anthropologists have noted that even in Aboriginal communities before, say, 1980, there was little talk, or awareness, of children being stolen.

So, I wasn't surprised Robert had had trouble before this in trying to identify stolen children. Look at those he once claimed were stolen, but who fail to make his latest list.

There was Lowitja O'Donoghue, a co-patron of the national Sorry Day Committee, who turned out to have been sent with four of her siblings by her white father -- with her mother's consent, she says -- to South Australia's Colebrook Home because he no longer wanted his Aboriginal family.

Also once named as stolen by Robert was Malcolm Smith. In fact, Malcolm in 1965 was an 11-year-old son of a drunk widower, who'd let his six sons run wild, wagging school, going hungry and stealing. His dad agreed in a court hearing that he could not look after Malcolm, who was sent to a boys' home.

Then there was Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner -- also stolen children, said Robert once. Both had compensation claims heard by the Federal Court in the most famous test case of the "stolen generations", investigating the history of child removals in the Northern Territory.

So, what did this investigation find in what Robert said was the worst area of child removals? That, said the judge, "the evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children as alleged". Or, to use Robert's phrase, there was no policy of stealing children just to "rescue them from their Aboriginality". Nor were Gunner and Cubillo found to be stolen.

Cubillo, it turned out, had been taken from a remote mission in 1947 when she was just eight, with her father gone, mother dead, grandmother dead and a debate over whether her auntie was around to look after her.

Would you have left a little girl out there?

And Gunner had been sent to Alice Springs to get an education with the express agreement of his mother.

That's not the first time a hunt for victims came up empty for Robert.

He's also been on the board of Victoria's Stolen Generations Taskforce, which hired consultants to find stolen children. It could find no Victorian Aborigine, who had been truly stolen, and concluded that in Victoria there "was no formal policy for removing children".

So, to his latest list of 12.

Robert includes Molly Craig, 14, and her cousins Daisy and Gracie, apparently because he saw the film Rabbit Proof Fence. But when Molly as an adult saw it she said, "That's not my story" and if Robert checked the book on which it was based he would know why.

The girls were not stolen by racists, but were taken with the consent, at least, of the tribe's head man, Molly's so-called stepfather, and only after warnings to the Chief Protector of Aborigines that the fatherless girls at that Depression-era camp were running wild with whites (men, presumably) and were badly treated by full-bloods.

The eight-year-old Daisy had also been promised in marriage to a tribal man.

Are you really saying, Robert, that these children should not have been sent to safety and school?

Robert also lists as stolen the late Robert Riley, citing as his source the biography by Quentin Beresford.

But Beresford says he doesn't know why Riley went to Sister Kate's home as a two-year-old, although a file letter to the Minister of Child Welfare records he was simply "left at this Home, by his mother". A welfare officer later noted Riley's mother showed no interest in her son.

Then Robert lists Rosalie Fraser, who was made a ward of the state at two in 1961 -- but why? She was in fact removed by child welfare officers, not Aboriginal welfare, and sent with a sister to live with her father's relatives. (Her father went to jail.)

Next, Margaret Tucker. She was 13 in 1917, when she was sent to a girls' home, but if this was to save her from Aboriginality, why was it done so late? Could it be that authorities worried her father had left, her mother had gone to Sydney and some auntie was looking after her, or kind of?

Robert, you don't have here 10 names of truly stolen children. Not even close.

Yes, you have stories of great loss, betrayal and pain, and also stories of lives saved -- of children rescued from great need to become artists, businessmen and writers.

But what you don't have are stories of children stolen by racists from caring families simply because they were Aboriginal.

This is an edited extract from my speech at the Writers Festival on Sunday. For the full speech, with links to the evidence as well as to Manne's speech, go to blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

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