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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Sarah Collard Indigenous affairs correspondent

At four, her head was shaved and her clothes burned. Aunty Lorraine doesn’t want her trauma to be forgotten

Aunty Lorraine Peeters
Aunty Lorraine Peeters in 2022. Peeters was four years old when she was forcibly taken from her parents at Brewarrina mission and removed to Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Home in 1942. Photograph: Sarah Collard/The Guardian

Aunty Lorraine Peeters only remembers the metal gates opening as she was driven away from her home, at Brewarrina mission in north-west New South Wales. She was taken, along with her brothers and sisters, at just four years old.

Her home for the next six years would be the Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Home, where she was separated from her siblings, trained as a domestic servant and systematically brainwashed to be white.

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