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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.

In most cases of forcible removal government officials and agents were responsible for the removal under legislation or regulations. However, there were early cases of removal of children by missionaries without the consent of the parents. In Victoria the absence of government oversight of welfare services enabled churches and other non-government agencies to remove children from their families…

This report is a tribute to the strength and struggles of many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people affected by forcible removal. We acknowledge the hardships they endured and the sacrifices they made. We remember and lament all the children who will never come home.

My family went to Cherbourg. They volunteered to go there during the Depression. So I would have been about 6 months old when grandfather, who was, I mean, he was independent. He had eight kids all birthed out in the trees you know, under the stars. My mother spoke her own language. She had me with the promise to marry my father. And then when the Depression came they talked to the policeman. He…

Hobart December 4,7,8 Flinders Island December 4-5 Cape Barren Island December 4-5 Wybalenna December 6 Bringing them Home Launceston December 11,13 Burnie December 12

Amended by Aborigines Protection Amending Act 1915 (NSW) Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1918 (NSW) Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1936 (NSW) Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1940 (NSW) Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1943 (NSW) Repealed by Aborigines Welfare Ordinance 1954 (Cth).

Lots of white kids do get taken away, but that's for a reason - not like us. We just got taken away because we was black kids, I suppose - half-caste kids. If they wouldn't like it, they shouldn't do it to Aboriginal families. Confidential evidence 357, South Australia.

I was born on Cape Barren. At the time I was taken the family comprised mum, my sister and [my two brothers]. And of course there was my grandmother and all the other various relatives. We were only a fairly small isolated community and we all grew up there in what I considered to be a very peaceful loving community. I recall spending most of my growing up on the Island actually living in the…