Stolen Generation Stories
Stories from Indigenous children stolen from their families.
Australian Aboriginal voices - from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report on Stolen Generations.
I remember this woman saying to me, `Your mother's dead, you've got no mother now. That's why you're here with us'. Then about two years after that my mother and my mother's sister came to The Bungalow but they weren't allowed to visit us because they were black. We were transferred to the State Children's Orphanage in 1958. Olive [aged 6 weeks] was taken elsewhere -- Mr L telling me several days later that she was admitted to hospital where she died from meningitis. In 1984, assisted by Link Up (Qld), my sister Judy discovered that Olive had not died but rather had been fostered. Her name was changed.
We were told that our mother was an alcoholic and that she was a prostitute and she didn't care about us. They used to warn us that when we got older we'd have to watch it because we'd turn into sluts and alcoholics, so we had to be very careful. If you were white you didn't have that dirtiness in you ... It was in our breed, in us to be like that.
I didn't know any Aboriginal people at all, none at all. I was placed in a white family and I was just -- I was white. I never knew, I never accepted myself to being a black person until -- I don't know if you ever really do accept yourself as being ... How can you be proud of being Aboriginal after all the humiliation and the anger and the hatred you have? It's unbelievable how much you can hold inside.
