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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

This week, a group of stolen generation survivors visited a site from their childhood that holds a lot of painful memories.

The notorious Kinchela Boys Home in New South Wales.

The gathering marked 100 years since the home was opened, a home that institutionalised hundreds of Indigenous boys, and subjected them to torture, abuse and reprogramming, in order to assimilate them into white society.

Now, the survivors and their families want to take ownership of the site, to make it a place of healing for future generations.

Today Gunaikurnai and Wotjobaluk writer and contributor to The Saturday Paper Ben Abbatangelo on the enduring legacy of the Kinchela Boys Home.

It’s Wednesday October 23.

And just a warning, today’s episode discusses abuse and suicide.

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RUBY:

So Ben, you've been looking into this home, this institution where Aboriginal children were sent for the decades, it’s called Kinchela Boys Home. Tell me about the place.

BEN:

Well, Kinchela is known as one of the most notorious homes. It was open in the 1920s and closed down in the early 1970s. Young boys from across New South Wales predominantly were taken from their families and institutionalised at that home and just went through some of the most torturous years of their lives.

So the children were as young as six or seven, you know, up to 14, 15, 16 years of age. And, you know, across varying periods of time, we're just subject to humiliation, to torture, to slavery, to sexual assault, to rapes, to indentured servitude, to just the most brutal re-programming and re-engineering that I think this country has seen. So, yeah, it's a really tough story to cover. There's now only 49 of the 600 survivors remaining. Four of those uncles have passed in the last four to six months. So there's a real sense of urgency around the fact that a lot of these young people who are now old that went through that home, you know, are now coming towards the end of their lives.

RUBY:

Okay. So these boys who who made it out, who survived that torture that you describe, can you tell me more about them, about their stories?

BEN:

I was really humbled to get the opportunity to hold stories of people like Uncle Roger 'Pigeon' Jarrett.

Audio Excerpt - Ben Abbatangelo:

“Can you just start with me, unc, by just telling me your name in full?”

Audio Excerpt - Roger Jarett:

“My name's Roger Jarrett…”

BEN:

He speaks about June 25th, 1958, when he was merely 11 years old. And he speaks with just vivid clarity about the day that the big black English Riley rolled on to the mission and how the sergeant stepped out of the car, came up to the house, sat his mother down on the veranda outside of their little home.

Audio Excerpt - Roger Jarett:

“Mum had a little verandah where she went out to have a smoke. They sat mum down there…”

BEN:

And just said to Mrs. Jarrett, If you sign these papers, your kids will return within 12 months.

Uncle Roger's mother didn't have a formal education. She knew that she was confronted with an ultimatum, and within the confluence of those circumstances, she signed those papers. Now, Uncle Roger reflects on, you know, only being 11 years of age. His other brother was only six. And he speaks again with just real clarity about the moment that the sergeant who was acting on behalf of the Aboriginal Welfare Board grabbed him.

Audio Excerpt - Roger Jarett:

“I didn't know what the bloody hell was going on, I was only 11 years old. So they grabbed me and I grabbed Mum's dress…”

BEN:

He says that, you know, as I grabbed him, he clutched his mother's dress and, you know, the sergeant just was wrangling him like a piece of meat.

Audio Excerpt - Roger Jarett:

“Mum was crying, and to this day I can still feel her tears hitting my arm…”

BEN:

He said that the sergeant basically grabbed him, dragged him to the car and threw him in the back. And, you know, he can still remember sliding across those seats, hitting his head on the window wiper and basically splitting it open. And it was from there within a matter of hours that he was at the front gates of the Kinchela Boys Home.

Another survivor that I was fortunate to sit with was Uncle Richard ‘Bear’ Campbell, and he was only 8 or 9 years old when he was stolen from his family in 1966.

Audio Excerpt - Richard Campbell:

“My name's Richard Campbell and I'm a Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti man of the north coast of New South Wales, around Nambucca heads, Coffs Harbor…”

BEN:

But his first memory of Kinchela was being wrestled out of the car and being separated from his three young sisters. And, you know, he tells this really graphic story of, you know, his sisters screaming in the car and, you know, him being at the gates of Kinchela in the car, driving off.

Audio Excerpt - Richard Campbell:

“We can hear them screaming and, you know, as the car was going around the corner away from Kinchela, we could still hear them screaming, you know, fading away in the distance.”

BEN:

You know, that was his first and most enduring memory from Kinchela, because it was also the last time that he saw his sister in approximately 20 years.

RUBY:

And so these men, well, they were children at the time. They were taken from their families, taken to Kinchela. So what did they tell you about what happened next, about what their life was like in the home?

BEN:

I think the first really significant point is that, you know, Aboriginal families were stolen from their country and rounded up onto missions and these young boys were then secondarily from that, you know, stolen from their communities, so stolen from their country, stolen from their communities and sent to these institutions where they were then stolen from themselves.

Uncle Roger ‘Pigeon’ Jarrett basically says that, you know, the moment that you get to those gates is where you lose your identity, your culture and your name. Now, for him, when he walked in those gates, he was no longer Roger Jarrett. That's when he became number 12. And it was the same for Uncle Richard, who as soon as he walks into the gates, he says the first thing that happened to him and his brothers was that they just started getting bashed.

Audio Excerpt - Richard Campbell:

“Just belting, belting us in the head, and saying “okay, your name's not Richard Campbell anymore, you are now Number 28.” And they said the same thing to my older brother: "You're not Robert Campbell anymore, you are now Number 29.”.”

BEN:

They spoke about the minutes feeling like hours and hours, feeling like days. The boys were humiliated, they were beaten, they were sexually assaulted and raped, they were starved, they were enslaved, they were indoctrinated and re-engineered.

You know, Uncle Widdy Walsh, who is another one of the survivors that I spoke to, you know, reflected on the fact that boys would go missing, that, you know, they were classified as flora and fauna at the time. In one of the testimonies from Uncle Widdy, he spoke about basically the ex-army men that ran the site, you know, would have animals that had names. But for the young Aboriginal boys that were on the site that were just subject to the most barbaric of treatment, they had numbers.

RUBY:

Right so, Ben, when the survivors say that some of these boys went missing, do we know what happened to them?

BEN:

Yeah, we know that recently there was a report from experts who used ground penetrating radars at the homes, and essentially what they found were readings consistent with clandestine burials in other places around the world. And at Kinchela now, there's approximately nine sites where that could hold graves of young boys.

Now, that report has been tabled with the Minister, the New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, and his Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Treaty, David Harris, have committed to further investigations at the sites and to engage further specialists to explore in full, you know, the really serious question marks that are lingering over the place. But when I speak to the uncles around whether or not they are surprised about the prospect of there being potential burial grounds, there's not.

So life at Kinchela from listening to these stories, the one thing that was a constant in all of these testimonies was that terror was just there at every moment of the day.

RUBY:

After the break… the survivors on a mission to reclaim the Kinchela Boys Home.

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RUBY:

So Ben, Kinchela Boys Home, it closed down in 1970. Hundreds of boys were taken there. Can you tell me a bit about what life was like for them once they were old enough to be able to leave?

BEN:

I think Uncle Richard summarised really aptly by saying that, you know, most of he and the other survivors were basically on a suicide journey, having stepped out of there. Now, today, there's only 49 survivors remaining, four survivors who have passed away in the previous four to six months. You know, we really are getting towards that later chapter, you know, of the Stolen Generations survivors lives. But the impacts from Kinchela have permeated every single aspect of these young boys' lives.

Uncle Richard spoke about the story of, you know, him sort of being thrusted out of the gates of Kinchela and back into society, thinking that he was a whitefella. He speaks to how powerful the indoctrination, the re-engineering was that he was subjected to. But at the same time, you know, large sections of the Aboriginal community also turned their back on him because they didn't see these boys that went through Kinchela as one of them anymore. So they were stuck in this no man's land, not belonging anywhere. And just with these really deep wounds and no support to mend them.

For Uncle Roger Jarrett, you know, he spoke about going out into the world and just not knowing how to love. You know, his words are that when you come out, you've got no idea of what love is. You can spell it, you can write it. But to feel what love is, it's been killed.

Uncle Richard has had multiple kids with multiple women. He speaks about not having strong relationships with his children, about his children having challenges with substance abuse.

For Uncle Widdy Walsh, he talks about, you know, his children being removed from him, his grandchildren being removed, you know, from his sons and daughters.

Audio Excerpt - Widdy Welsh:

“I put a gun in my mouth when I was about, I think, I was about 19 at the time when I was going to shoot myself because they took our son away from the woman that I married…”

BEN:

We've seen Kinchela act as this really fractious moment in these people's lives. And that has continued to reverberate every day, every week and every generation.

We know that the number of First Nations children being removed from their families today is at record rates. The projections are for the years to come that those rates will continue to increase. They currently make up 43.7% of the children in out-of-home care. We know that, you know, the pipeline of children from out-of-home care into youth juvenile detention centres is also ever expanding. So in the uncles’ eyes, it's what is old remains new.

RUBY:

And so then 100 years on from when Kinchela was opened, some of the survivors want to try and reclaim that site. Can you tell me a bit about that? Because I imagine that it would be complicated trying to work out how you might mark a place where all of these horrors happened to you in a way that feels right.

BEN:

It's a great point, Ruby. And the first hurdle has been the survivors, being able to reimagine what the site could be, that the place that was a catalyst for so much harm and heartbreak could be actually repositioned as a site of healing. So that first hurdle was one of the hardest, I think, for many of the now men to overcome.

The second hurdle has been negotiating a just timely and fair agreement with the Kempsey Local Aboriginal Land Council, who is the owner of the Kinchela site. Now a lot of the survivors believe that, you know, their own community continues to turn their back on them and that that is playing out within these negotiations.

You know, Uncle Richard spoke to me about the fact that when they first endeavoured to put an offer forward to reclaim ownership of the land, a lot of people within the community saw that as a land grab and saw that the uncles were trying to take land from other members within the community.

And I suppose what's really important from their perspective and what I've captured is that ownership matters, absolutely, but it's an endeavour to have custodianship over the site. It's not ownership in, as I would say, white fella way. Its ownership in black fella way. And by having that, it means that they can not only repair themselves, but importantly, ensure that that site remains standing until the end of time. So people will never forget what went down there. And as importantly, to ensure that it never happens again.

RUBY:

Ben, thank you so much for your time.

BEN:

Appreciate it. Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The British Prime Minister has defended King Charles, after news of senator Lidia Thorpe’s protest against him made headlines around the world.

Sir Keir Starmer said the King is doing a fantastic job, particularly in light of his recent treatment for cancer. The monarch’s trip to Australia was his first since the diagnosis.

And, students at the Australian Catholic University have staged a walkout during a speech by former union boss Joe de Bruyn. The former national president of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association was accepting an honorary degree at the university when he began sharing his views on same sex marriage, IVF and abortion.

Mr de Bruyn said abortion was the “single biggest killer of human beings in the world” before the majority of the audience left the auditorium while he was still speaking.

Tomorrow on 7am, we’ll look at how abortion became a surprise issue in the run up to Queensland’s state election this weekend.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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