We all went through hell and back, and that’s why a lot of them died through alcohol poisoning, O.D. on drugs, car accident whatever, but you know I never got to see many of them before they passed on.

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.

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.

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.”

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.’

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.”

When our kids were taken away the churches kept our kids. There was a lot of money involved. So the churches need to be made accountable too. Not only the government but the policies that allowed the churches to keep our children away from their parents.

They called them the Protectors at that time, would call us into the room. We used to go to sleep at night they would come and tap you ‘Come along, come along, wake up. Come on, it’s your turn now. Come along. […] I was taken down the back steps and down into their little quarters, and then he would have a strap out and he used to beat me, and then he used to whip me with the strap and saying I was not a good girl, ‘bad girl!’, and then he would have his way with me. He would sit me on his lap and rock me on his lap, and then penetrate me.

My father and my mother never got the chance to be parents to me. I’m 66 years of age now and the only thing I can do to moving forward and to spare my children of the torment and the heartache and the trauma that I’ve gone through is always be there for my children.

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.