Reconciliation and Social Justice Library

Bringing them Home - The Report

Part 6 Contemporary Separations

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 that the Government kept. It was hard for the people on the outside to prove we was there when the government said we weren't. My grandparents waited for me to come home and I never came home. My grandfather died in 1978 and my grandmother died in 1979. I came home in 1980. This was the last generation that went through the system and it really hurt. I thought our people forgot us. If Bomaderry Children's Home was closed down at the same time those other two homes, my generation would not have gone through that. We could have avoided that. A lot of the churches and government wanted to say that it's all over. It happened in 1930, 1920 was when children was going through the homes. This is what they were saying in the 70s to my people that it was all over. Yet me and a lot of other Koori kids was in the bloody Home screaming, pulling our hair out, `Somebody come and get us'. But nobody could hear us and that was really frustrating.

Confidential submission 522, New South Wales: woman removed at 3 years in 1969 and placed in Bomaderry Children's Home.

• 20 Introduction
• 21 Child Welfare Care and Protection
  • Australian welfare systems
  • Aboriginal Child Placement Principle:
    State and Territory review
  • Failure of the welfare approach
• 22 Adoption
• 23 Family Law
• 24 Juvenile Justice
  • The processes of juvenile justice separations
  • Juvenile justice legislation
  • Juvenile justice policy and program responses
  • Causes of separation
  • Conclusions
• 25 Underlying Issues
• 26 A New Framework
  • Self-determination
  • National minimum standards