Uncle Roger Jarrett was 11 when he was stripped of his name, culture and identity – for the next six years he was known as No 12.
He was taken to the notorious Kinchela Aboriginal boys home, to where children from all over the state were removed under brutal government policies designed to cleve children from kin and culture from 1924 to 1970.
“I didn’t exist any more … I still just can’t understand why they took us. ‘Why?’ I still ask,” the Gumbaynggirr man tells Guardian Australia.
Jarrett describes being kidnapped by the New South Wales government in June 1958 and forcibly removed from his mother’s care in Bowraville mission, on the state’s mid-north coast.
He still remembers the day a “big black government car” stole him and his siblings from all they knew.
“You can steal a car, steal a TV, but when you steal a human being that’s kidnapping,” he says.
Physically, emotionally and sexually abused, Jarrett hopes the horrors of life at the home are never forgotten and that the past can bring truth and reconciliation.
Through his work with the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation he hopes to return the site to the stewardship of the remaining survivors and transform his trauma to healing.
“I died in that place,” Jarrett says. “My brain, my blood is still there, but if we get it back it’s like I’ve conquered this and I can get my heart and love back.”
Uncle Richard Campbell, a Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti man, was stolen from his family and brought to Kinchela Aboriginal boys home. He was known as No 28 there.
Campbell says he was also emotionally, physically and sexually abused at the home. “We call it the gates from hell,” he says.
“We were used as slave labour and sexual toys. If kids done anything wrong we would get locked up and chained to this big tree.”
A powerful exhibition of 20 black and white portraits of survivors taken between 2002 and 2014 by the photographer Sarah Barker is now being displayed for the first time at Redfern’s National Centre of Indigenous Excellence.
Jarrett says it’s an opportunity to remember the lives of the home’s 600 child inmates. “There’s only about 57 of us left now, it’s so important that people hear about it, learn about it, and know about it,” he says.
Campbell says the exhibition pays tribute to those survivors still living and those that have died in the hope that Australia learns from the past injustices.
“It’s about letting everyone know that we’re still here, and our families and kids are out there and they are our future,” Campbell says. “We need to let them know that this should not happen again.”
Tiffany McComesey, the chief executive of Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation, says it’s important that Australia reckons with its past and acknowledges the pain and loss.
“On Sorry Day, it’s very much a family and community day of recognition,” she says, adding: “[We are hoping to] transform the former Kinchela Boys Home site into a living museum and a healing centre.”
As survivors of the stolen generations, their children and community gathered to remember national Sorry Day on Friday. Campbell says it is difficult to reconcile the day with today’s removals of First Nations children from their home into out of home care.
“There were 23,000 kids being taken away from their families this year,” he says. “The prime minister said sorry but we also say, ‘Sorry means you don’t take our kids away again.’”
