Valerie and her siblings were taken from their mother and placed in institutions during Australia’s Stolen Generations. Two didn’t survive

Aunty Valerie Wenberg was taken from her family as a toddler under government policies which resulted in thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait children being forcibly removed from 1910 to the early 1970s. Photograph: Sarah Collard/The Guardian

Valerie Wenberg vividly remembers the first time she saw her mother’s face. It was in a photograph tucked away in a box of black and white pictures under her older brother’s bed.

“I said to my brother, ‘who is that?’,” she recalls. “He said: ‘Don’t you know? That’s our mother.’”