I never got my Mum; I never had her in my life. [visibly anguished] Because I was aiming that she would be with me for the rest of her life, you know? But ay, I was able to get over that trauma.

Fifty-seven percent of Aboriginal people in our state today are connected to the Stolen Generations people. So that’s every second Aboriginal person you walk past in the community, they have that trauma, that intergenerational trauma that’s impacting their lives.”

You know it’s a long time now since Bringing Them Home national inquiry happened. They found there was genocide against Stolen Generations people, a policy of genocide. Which is about the most serious offence that there could ever be under international human rights law. And there was an absolute clear duty on the state responsible to make reparations for that crime of genocide.

I went in from two months to nearly ten years of age. And then went home to my mother. Just got packed up one day and driven to this house in Albany. Didn’t even know it was Albany, just got driven. You were never told, and that, where you were going, because you had no rights to know anything. And then just dropped at this door, and that. No authority explained where you were going. No authorities that were with you explained who these people were.

When I was taken to the mission, I was eight months old. I was taken away with my Mum, probably because I was being breast-fed. That’s why they took me so young, and my brother and my other two sisters. And we we’re taken to Carrolup Mission. When we arrived at Carrolup Mission, we were put in what they called ‘The Jail’, and it was a red tin shed. Mum told me all about it. And they locked us in The Jail, and it was in December so it was hot. And the elder boys at the mission went and told the supervisor or whatever they called him, ‘if you don’t let Auntie and the kids out, we’re going to break the door down.’

But they knew about New Norcia. [it] was the capital of… like a place of sexual abuse, but they kept on sending us there. So, the Native Welfare was in on this, and the government at that time.

We had to readjust into the community. We didn’t act like our people. We didn’t talk like them. We were different so we was more or less like outcasts. Out families could only feel sorry for us for what we went through, but as far as understanding, the only ones that understood what we went through were our brothers and sisters at the mission.

So you know we really need to bring that awareness into the justice system, into the government, you know, the government were the ones that put all these policies down in our past to make out live like this, to keep us oppressed, and we now need to empower ourselves, our children and grandchildren and we need to start healing them before they have children so that we can break this cycle of intergenerational trauma.

When we tried to tell someone about the abuse, we were told, “There’s some things God does not want you to talk about. How dare you.”

Mum had our last brother Dean, and when he was born, they took him off her, because we were in the mission. They took him from her. And even though he was in the same mission as Anthony, Timothy and Cynthia, he had no idea that they were his brothers and sister. And neither did they.
And when I mention ‘stolen’ I’m specifically talking about our language, our culture, our totemic connections and our connection to families.