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Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report Bringing them Home Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families April 1997 back to content page / next page Appendices Appendix 1.1 New South Wales Appendix 1.2 Australian Capital Territory Appendix 2 Victoria Appendix 3 Queensland Appendix 4 Tasmania Appendix 5…

The Protector of Aborigines made the legal guardian of every `aboriginal and half-caste child' whose parents are dead or unknown, or one of whom agrees, until the age of 21. Any two Justices, with the consent of the Governor and one of the parents, may apprentice `any half-caste or other aboriginal child having obtained a suitable age' until the age of 21 provided that `due and reasonable…

Established Aborigines Protection Board. Its functions include submitting proposals to the Governor relating to the care custody or education of the children of `Aboriginals' and exercising a general supervision and care over all matters affecting the interests and welfare of the `Aboriginals'.

For the `better protection and care of the aboriginal and half-caste inhabitants of the colony' and `for restricting the sale and distribution of opium'. Established positions of regional Protectors and later Chief Protector.

Every morning our people would crush charcoal and mix that with animal fat and smother that all over us, so that when the police came they could only see black children in the distance. We were told always to be on the alert and, if white people came, to run into the bush or run and stand behind the trees as stiff as a poker, or else hide behind logs or run into culverts and hide. Often the white…

My grandmother, Rebecca, was born around 1890. She lived with her tribal people, parents and relations around the Kempsey area. Rebecca was the youngest of a big family. One day some religious people came, they thought she was a pretty little girl. She was a full blood aborigine about five years old. Anyway those people took her to live with them.

Children's experiences following their removal contributed to the effects of the removal upon them at the time and in later life. In this chapter we briefly survey the evidence to the Inquiry concerning those experiences which have had the most significant impacts on well-being and development.

At the age of four, I was taken away from my family and placed in Sister Kate's Home - Western Australia where I was kept as a ward of the state until I was eighteen years old. I was forbidden to see any of my family or know of their whereabouts. Five of us D. children were all taken and placed in different institutions in WA. The Protector of Aborigines and the Child Welfare Department in their …

There were a lot of families on the outside who were saying my daughter hasn't come home, my son hasn't come home. You had a lot of families still fighting and then you had the bloody welfare saying to these families, `We're not doing what was done in the sixties'. Bomaderry Home was left open as a big secret by the government and the welfare. And it must have been one of the best kept secrets…

When I accessed my file, I found out that the police and the station people at B... Station felt that my mother was looking after me. And they were unsure of why I was being taken away. They actually asked if I could stay there. But because I was light-skinned with a white father, their policy was that I had to be taken away. I was then the third child in a family of, as it turned out to be, 13…

Just as there are many homes, there are many journeys home. Each one of us will have a different journey from anyone else. The journey home is mostly ongoing and in some ways never completed. It is a process of discovery and recovery, it is a process of (re)building relationships which have been disrupted, or broken or never allowed to begin because of separation (Link-Up (NSW) submission 186).

John was removed from his family as an infant in the 1940s. He spent his first years in Bomaderry Children's Home at Nowra. At 10 he was transferred to Kinchela.

Where a child under the age of 19 is convicted, court may assign care and custody of the child to such persons as make application where the court is satisfied it is for the benefit of the child.

I was adopted as a baby by a white European couple. They were married at the time. They couldn't have children and they'd seen the ads about adoption and were keen to adopt children.

When I was three months old [in 1965] the welfare department sent the police to my grandparents' house. They came armed with a warrant to have me removed. Despite any opposition my fate had been decided. I was taken away. My family were left with the guilt of being accused of child neglect.

Indigenous children throughout Australia remain very significantly over-represented `in care' and in contact with welfare authorities. Their over-representation increases as the intervention becomes more coercive, with the greatest over-representation being in out-of-home care. Indigenous children appear to be particularly over-represented in long-term foster care arrangements. A high percentage…

Dad died when I was about two. My parents were married, but they often lived apart. When I was a little kid, they gave me to an Uncle and Auntie and the police took me away from them and put me in a Home. I have never been with my brothers and sisters at all. They were also put into the same Home. My brothers and sisters did not know that I existed until a nun said, 'Come and meet your little…

We always lived by ourselves. Not that we thought we were better than any other Koori family. It's just that the white welfare, if they seen a group of Koori families together, they would step in and take their children away never to be seen again.

Actually what you see in a lot of us is the shell, and I believe as an Aboriginal person that everything is inside of me to heal me if I know how to use it, if I know how to maintain it, if I know how to bring out and use it. But sometimes the past is just too hard to look at. Confidential evidence 284, South Australia.