The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.

Official government estimates are that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.

The Bringing Them Home Royal Commission report (1997) described the Australian policies of removing Aboriginal children as genocide.

Numerous 19th and early 20th century contemporaneous documents indicate that the policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their mothers related to an assumption that the Aboriginal peoples were dying off. Given their catastrophic population decline after white contact, whites assumed that the full-blood tribal Aboriginal population would be unable to sustain itself, and was doomed to extinction. The idea expressed by A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia, and others as late as 1930 was that mixed-race children could be trained to work in white society, and over generations would marry white and be assimilated into the society.

The Colony of Victoria was the first to pass acts (1869 and 1886) that allowed for the removal of mixed-race persons from Aboriginal reserves. An 1899 regulation expressly granted permission for the removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

Some European Australians considered any proliferation of mixed-descent children (labelled "half-castes", "crossbreeds", "quadroons", and "octoroons", terms now considered derogatory to Indigenous Australians) to be a threat to the stability of the prevailing culture, or to a perceived racial or cultural "heritage". The Northern Territory Chief Protector of Aborigines, Dr. Cecil Cook, argued that "everything necessary [must be done] to convert the half-caste into a white citizen".

In the Northern Territory, the segregation of Indigenous Australians of mixed descent from "full-blood" Indigenous people began with the government removing children of mixed descent from their communities and placing them in church-run missions, and later creating segregated reserves and compounds to hold all Indigenous Australians. This was a response to public concern over the increase in the number of mixed-descent children and sexual exploitation of young Aboriginal women by non-Indigenous men, as well as fears among non-Indigenous people of being outnumbered by a mixed-descent population.

Under the Northern Territory Aboriginals Act 1910, the Chief Protector of Aborigines was appointed the "legal guardian of every Aboriginal and every half-caste child up to the age of 18 years", thus providing the legal basis for enforcing segregation. After the Commonwealth took control of the Territory, under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918, the Chief Protector was given total control of all Indigenous women regardless of their age, unless married to a man who was "substantially of European origin", and his approval was required for any marriage of an Indigenous woman to a non-Indigenous man.