WELFARE workers have swooped on the opal mining town of Lightning Ridge in northwest NSW, removing more than 40 Aboriginal children from decrepit homes in shanty towns.

Those removed included a four-day-old baby who had barely learned to suckle when taken from his mother's breast, while she was still in the local hospital, recovering from giving birth.

Aboriginal women, stunned by the removals, say it amounts to a "modern-day Stolen Generation", but the most recent statistics on child removals show Aboriginal children are being taken from their parents in numbers much greater than the Stolen Generations.

Official figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show there are now more than 9000 indigenous children in state care -- a figure that far outstrips the number that were taken in the 1920s and 30s.

Both NSW, with 4316, and Queensland, with 2085, have this year set records for the number of indigenous children taken from their parents.

In both states, Aboriginal children are being taken at 10 times the rate of white children.

Nationwide, Aboriginal children comprise just 4.4 per cent of all children, and yet make up 24 per cent of all children in care.

Vanessa Kirk, of Queensland's newly formed Aboriginal Women For Change, said: "The Stolen Generation hasn't stopped."

She argued that children are being taken today for exactly the reason they were last century: poverty.

Helen Howlett helped to form the Wirringah Women's Group in Lightning Ridge after local mothers counted 41 children removed from the opal fields, and the surrounding towns of Walgett and Wee Waa. "The effect of the removals is just shocking," Ms Howlett said. "Everybody is just stunned."

The group believes that welfare workers "have heard all the stories about sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities (and experienced the outrage at the death of an Aboriginal toddler, Dean Shillingsworth, whose body was found in a suitcase in a duck pond) and now they are spooked into just taking all the kids".

The Wirringah group has demanded a meeting with the NSW ombudsman's office, which will send four workers to Lightning Ridge on Monday. They will meet parents, and lawyers attached to the Walgett Children's Court who are likewise concerned about the number of children being taken. The meeting has been convened under the banner "Bring Our Children Home".

The Ombudsman's office would not comment, citing concerns about the privacy of the parents who had lost their children.

Ms Howlett said the mother who had an infant taken from her breast, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has dozens of supporters in town, including nurses, lawyers and elders. They say she and her husband are "wonderful people who would not harm their children".

There is no doubt they lived in what urban Australians would call squalor.

The children's father, who is not indigenous, staked a claim outside Lightning Ridge and digs for opals.

Their home was a hand-built shanty-style dwelling. They had no running water, just a garden hose pipe attached to a water tank and there were serious hygiene problems, particularly in the kitchen.

The mother told The Weekend Australian welfare workers got in contact with her family when one of her daughters, who also can't be named, told a teacher her father had hit her with a stick. He has since been charged with assault.

The teacher reported the assault to the Department of Community Services, as is required under mandatory reporting guidelines. Welfare workers went to the site where the family lived and saw they did not have water or sewerage, and the rooms were filthy. They asked the other children if their father ever hit them; two of them said yes.

The five children were immediately taken and separated into different foster homes, many hundreds of kilometres apart.

The mother, who was pregnant, went into labour soon afterwards. Two days after the baby was born, welfare workers turned up to remove him, but The Weekend Australian understands nurses turned them away, saying it was inhumane to remove a suckling baby from its mother. The workers returned on day four to take the child. The baby is now with foster parents in Dubbo. His parents are making the eight-hour trip three times a week for access visits, and to deliver him fresh breast milk.

"It really is the most outrageous case because these are wonderful people," Ms Howlett said. "It is the case that has really pushed the community over the edge."

The NSW Children's Care and Protection Act specifically says poverty alone is not a reason to remove children. There must be abuse, neglect or an "immediate risk" of harm.

Vaughan Bryer, a community volunteer in nearby Walgett, said: "They are taking babies from their mothers because they don't like the way they live. That's the reason they were removed (during the last Stolen Generations)."

Mr Bryer said it was not clear to anyone who worked on the most recent case how the child was at "immediate risk" of serious harm. "They are a very loving, supportive and well-liked pair," he said.

"It is safe to say that all the people in their community who have had dealings with them find this situation incredible. There is no drugs, no alcohol, just an alternative lifestyle."

He agreed there were "serious social problems" in Lightning Ridge. "Some children do need to be removed, and that's what the department is for, but the recent examples have amazed the community."

The parents in the most recent case are understood to have sworn affidavits that they did not hit their children and to have consented to the children going into care, but their supporters say they did so only because they believed they stood a better chance of getting them back if they agreed their standard of living was poor and moved from the opal fields. They have since taken a place in town.

In Queensland, where a record 2259 indigenous children are in state care (compared with 660 in Victoria and 467 in South Australia), opposition child safety spokesman Jack Dempsey said he, too, feared "another Stolen Generations being created".

"Time and time again we have heard of families who have asked for help from child safety workers only to have their child removed and put into care," he said.

www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25964264-601,00.html