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.

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.

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.

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 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.’

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.

[Standing on steps of Parliament House] In 1905 the Act was put in place here. This same building where the ‘breed out the colour’ policy was initiated. Let’s not say our children were taken because they were bad parents. ‘Breed out the colour’ policy was the eugenics of this country, and initiated by A.O. Neville.

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.

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.”