Two decades have passed since the release of the report into the stolen generations. Survivor Aunty Lorraine Peeters is still fighting and healing.
“I’m one of eight children that were taken, all at once,” Aunty Lorraine Peeters says quietly, without preamble or fuss. We are talking at her granddaughter’s kitchen table over tea and sweet Queensland strawberries. A little dog yaps at our ankles and birds whistle through the windows as she tells me about being one of tens of thousands of Indigenous children that make up the Stolen Generations.
Lorraine, a Gamilaroi and Wailwun woman, now lives north of Brisbane. Her daughter, Shaan, sits beside her at the table. Her granddaughter Meagan has just left to pick up her three-year-old son from childcare.
Lorraine is now 79 years old. She was taken from her family when she was four. Originally from Warren, NSW, 120km northwest of Dubbo, the children of her family were scattered across the state. Her two brothers were put into Kinchela Boys Home in the northeast of NSW and the six girls of the family were sent to Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Training Home in the south. Lorraine was institutionalised there until she was 15, when she was sent to work as a domestic servant on a white family’s sheep station.
“I don’t have memories of family or the mission,” she says. “They took that away from us, our identity. We weren’t allowed to speak language, we weren’t allowed to even talk about culture. They turned you into a false identity.”
In 1995, after years of campaigning from the community, Australia’s Attorney-General commissioned an inquiry into the history of the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families.
On 26 May 1997 – 20 years ago – a report was tabled in Federal Parliament. It was 680 pages long. Bringing Them Home weighed 1.8kg.
More than 500 people recounted their stories at the Commission hearings, and many more gave evidence through lawyers, NGOs and Indigenous service organisations – 1100 people in total. Aunty Lorraine was one of them. But it took her a long time to get to that place.
For the 50 years after she was taken, Lorraine never went home. She didn’t want to. She had been told that her family didn’t want her, that they didn’t care about her.
“We were told all our mob were dirty, all our males were drunks and not to go near them,” she explains. “And when that’s drummed into you time after time as a child, you soon believed what they were telling you.”
Her childhood was brutal and blanched clean of any love or affection. She was pointedly separated from her sisters, was cruelly disciplined and wasn’t educated in anything except domestic service. Two years of her childhood she just cannot remember. “There’s nothing there,” she says, plainly. “I know there’s some very severe stuff in there, but I’m too old to be wanting to know.”
As soon as she could get away from the sheep station, she set out to Sydney to look for her sisters. Some had already gone back to country, but she managed to find two of them: “We weren’t separated ever again.”
At the age of 23 she married her Dutch husband, and, with their two children, went to Darwin, running as far as she could from the trauma of the girls’ home, from the loneliness and hardship of the station, from the fear of the government’s policies.
“My two were born under the policy as well,” she says. “That wasn’t going to happen to me. I’d have ended up in prison if somebody ever attempted to take my two kids away from me.”
And Lorraine lived the life that had been drummed into her: the life of a white person.
“I wasn’t an Aboriginal person. I hadn’t deprogrammed myself, decolonised. So I’m still thinking white, still acting white,” she explains. She remembers a plaque that was on a wall at Cootamundra. “It said: You have to think white, dress white, speak white, do everything white. It was like a mantra. Every day you’d have to read this thing. So you do that over years, you soon learn that there’s nothing else apart from that.”
Her children never learned anything about their mother’s culture or background. “How could they?” says Lorraine. “I was a white person.”
"I wasn't an Aboriginal person. I hadn't deprogrammed myself, decolonised. So I'm still thinking white, still acting white."
But at the age of 54 she had a startling moment of transilience. She went to a reunion with other women from the institutions, and although she didn’t know the term “stolen generations” then, she was suddenly cognisant of what had happened to them.
“What really triggered me was the people that weren’t there. I was thinking, where have all these women gone? A lot of them had passed on, because they couldn’t handle the trauma. That was the start of my journey right there.”
Something inside her came untethered. “I couldn’t handle what was coming at me. I just didn’t know what to do. For weeks I cried. I just had tears coming, which I didn’t understand where from, until I worked through it.”
And so it was that Aunty Lorraine finally went home. “All I thought was, I’m not the person I’m meant to be,” she says. “I didn’t know there was another world for me out there. Nobody tells you that you have this big family somewhere waiting for you.”
Her parents had both died not long after the children were taken; she never saw them again. But her sisters took her back to Warren to meet the rest of the family.
“They were there all that time… Waiting.” Lorraine’s voice is almost inaudible. “An old aunt approached and said, ‘Where have you girls been all this time?’”
For three years, Lorraine worked compulsively on her healing. Eventually, she was taken back to the very tree she was born under.
“All our birthing trees are still out there and protected, and that’s where my healing sort of really completed. I had a rebirth there. It was indescribable.”
That renascence was essential. Not just for Lorraine’s own recovery, but for the recovery of her family, for the future generations.
“We were fortunate that I had done the healing process. But if I had triggered, if I had no support, and I needed to kill that pain that was coming up…you reach for something, self-medication, whether it be drugs, alcohol or whatever.”
And that trauma sends sickening ripples, echoes of pain, through a family.
“Behaviour is learned,” she says. “The same with my mob, my kids and grannies. They behave the way that I’ve shown them. So if you get a family that’s really struggling, with no help… That’s where it needs fixing,” she says. “If I haven’t healed, all my line are lost.”
Healing – for the children taken, for their families and communities – was an essential part of the Bringing Them Home report. Its pages were heavy with wrenching testimonials, quoted in unprecedented and enlightening detail.
The public learned that these decades of trauma were official government policy. Documents from the time are rigid with dehumanising terms, and frequently discuss “breeding out the colour” of Indigenous children. The report showed how the 1921 Report of Aborigines Welfare Board stated: “The continuation of this policy of disassociating the children from camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem.”
The inquiry concluded that the forcible removal of children was an “act of genocide”, in violation of the Convention on Genocide ratified by Australia in 1949.
"I didn't know there was another world for me out there. Nobody tells you that you have this big family somewhere waiting for you."
Bringing Them Home landed in Australian society with a thud. Politicians at the time openly wept in Parliament.
For Aunty Lorraine and others who had given evidence, hopes were high.
“We were so excited that at last we were being heard,” she says. “We were happy to give evidence. All we wanted was better services, better understanding of where we were coming from and the trauma that was associated with that removal… But it just never came.”
The report handed down a number of recommendations, and one of the most important of them was a “solemn apology” from the government and churches that had been involved.
But, notoriously, Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise.
“We were so excited 20 years ago, expecting something to be done,” Lorraine says. She waggles her finger and folds her features into an exaggerated frown. “And then we have this man throwing his fingers at us saying that Australia’s not to blame for what happened to you. I will always have that visual in my head.”
It was another 10 years until the Stolen Generations got an apology. When it finally happened in February 2008, when then PM Kevin Rudd said “sorry” to the stolen generations and their families, Aunty Lorraine was chosen to present him with a ceremonial glass coolamon.
“Oh, I was very proud,” she says. “At last, not so much for myself, but somebody at last had said sorry to my parents. Nobody had ever given them a thought, what it did to them. But that really put a lot of closure on it for me.”
Using the learnings from her own journey, Aunty Lorraine and her family developed the Muramali Program, which focuses specifically on the spiritual and cultural needs of the survivors of the Stolen Generations. For 17 years they have been helping people take the essential journey of discovery and healing. In 2011, Lorraine was the co-winner of the World Council for Psychotherapy’s Sigmund Freud Award for the program.
“Our spirit is the very core of who we are as individuals,” says Lorraine. “But over time it just got covered with all this damage that was done to us. So until we work through all those issues, we’re never going to be at peace.”
***
On 26 May this year [2017], it will be 20 years since the Bringing Them Home report dropped upon the polished tables of Parliament. It is National Sorry Day (sometimes called National Day of Healing) – a day established on the one-year anniversary of the report.
Upon the release of the report 20 years ago, Sir Ronald Wilson – president at the time of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and one of the two people who led the inquiry – said something of remarkable prescience: “Many of our fellow Australians are still suffering from the wounds inflicted by past laws, practices and policies… [But] it is not too late for the nation to gain release from the burden of this shameful part of its history.”
Aunty Lorraine is on a reference committee for a new independent report highlighting the funding, services and compensation that still haven’t been implemented or provided as the report suggested 20 years ago. It will be handed to PM Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on 23 May.
“Twenty years later, I’m hoping it will be different,” Lorraine says. “But I’m not going to build myself up to be let down again. I think a lot of us have given up hope that help is coming.”
I ask her if she’s given up. She sighs and looks deeply into her mug.
“I’m 80 next year. And I’d like to sit back and say, ‘well I have achieved something’. I have changed some attitudes, but it’s not enough for me. I want another 20 years.”
by Katherine Smyrk
Bringing Them Home is available for download at humanrights.gov.au. There are also many books available that detail the report, the reaction and the policies that led to the Stolen Generations.
This article was first published in The Big Issue in June 2017.
Comments