<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/12/valerie-and-her-siblings-were-taken-from-their-mother-and-placed-in-institutions-during-australias-stolen-generations-two-didnt-survive>
"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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
