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.’”
Wenberg never got the chance to know her mother. She was forcibly removed by the state as a toddler, along with her siblings. They were sent to different children’s homes, and two – including her brother Johnny at Kinchela Boys Home and her baby sister Dorothy at Bomaderry Infants Home – died in those institutions.
After Wenberg turned nine she was transferred from Bomaderry to Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Home where she forged tight bonds with the other girls and was trained as a domestic servant to be sent out to work on nearby farms.
She recalls being sent out to work as a young teenager where she was raped by the station owner. The man would beat her with fence wire post which would leave blood running down her legs. Police eventually removed her from the farm but she refused to return to Cootamundra and so was sent to Parramatta Girls Home.
This week, Wenberg gathered in Canberra with 100 other survivors of the Stolen Generations for an event hosted by the Healing Foundation to mark the 18th anniversary of the national apology.
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“The apology hit me hard, really hard,” she says. She’s wearing a yellow blouse which features an image of children stolen from their homes, painted by her sister before she died. It’s the same blouse she wore to attend federal parliament in that day in 2008, when the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, gave his famous speech.
“When Kevin Rudd apologised that went all through my body and through my heart,” she says. “It just brings back so much hurt and memory and when [he] said, ‘I apologise on behalf of the nation’. He had the guts to do it, the others were cowards.”
Also at the breakfast was Robert West. He was raised on a remote station in central Queensland before being taken, along with his mother and siblings, to Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission at 10 years old. There, he says, he was subjected to strict discipline, beatings, and repeatedly told never speak to his mother and sister who were in the women’s dormitory.
For seven years, he says, he was separated from his mother by a wire fence and saw her only a handful of times. “I was brainy enough to keep away, and I never spoke to my mum even if I got a glimpse of her, I wouldn’t go anywhere close. I’d just vanish,” he says.
West was also in parliament on the day of the apology and was the only member of his immediate family who lived to hear it. “It was emotional hearing that apology,” he says. “My parents, my brothers and sisters already passed away as well, so I’m the eldest in the family now.”
That was his first visit to Canberra, this week is his second.
Queensland is the only state not to have established a dedicated reparations scheme for Stolen Generations survivors, after Western Australia announced a scheme last May.
“It’s frustrating”, says West. “In Cherbourg, they gave me four bob. But then when they sent us out to work they kept a lot of that money for themselves.
“They all settled very well … on stolen ground, stolen wealth, and they don’t want to even want to think about it.”
In his speech to mark the apology’s anniversary on Friday, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will say the apology was “an honest reckoning with our history”.
“It was a recognition that children were torn from their families and from their culture, and that what was broken could not be easily put together.”
The Healing Foundation, which supports and advocates for survivors, says there is more to be done to support survivors, particularly in aged care. The chair, Steve Larkin, says there is an urgent need to support ageing survivors, many of whom are dealing with chronic health conditions.
“The imperative is to get in place systemic reform to address a number of what are quite a significant range of acute and chronic issues that Stolen Generations survivors and descendants have,” he says.
“There are some immediate and medium term solutions that could be available to us that might just ease the burden on the Stolen Generation survivors.”
The minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, did announce some more funding this week: $87m to improve support services, including family tracing and reunification for affected families, and help advocating for trauma-informed health and aged care services.
McCarthy said the government recognised the strength of survivors and the need to provide “meaningful support”.
“Past government policies caused immeasurable harm to Stolen Generations survivors and their families,” McCarthy said.
“Sadly, for many of our people, the distress and hurt continues today. This is why understanding and supporting the needs of the Stolen Generations is so important.”
