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Donna Meehan passed herself off as Maori or Fijian when she was growing up because she was scared of what white Australians would think if she told them the truth - that she was an Aborigine.
Mrs Meehan, now 57, was taken from her parents in an Aboriginal camp when she was 5 - one of a "stolen generation" of 17,500 Aboriginal children who were given to European foster-parents between 1936 and 1967.
When she told her story in Hamilton last week at the International Foster Care Conference she had an audience of 450 people from foster care agencies around the world in tears.
She spent the first five years of her life in a camp with her parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and cousins at Coonamble in northwestern New South Wales. The men went away shearing, rabbit trapping or breaking-in horses, leaving the women and children to sleep in the camp's corrugated iron buildings.
"It was just our family, aunts and uncles - about 10 adults and maybe 15 kids," she said. "My grandparents were there. My grandfather actually used to play the violin. You'd always go to sleep every night with a singalong.
"Inside our tin sheds you'd have maybe two, three or four children sleeping in the bed. But you only slept inside. Everything else was done outside.
"It was a happy life. Being a 5-year-old, all you think about is playing with your cousins and having a feed."
But the local welfare officer decided that she and her six siblings, then aged from 9 down to 3-month-old twins, were neglected. They were escorted by train to Newcastle.
"My mum was never told why," Mrs Meehan said yesterday. "She was never given any counselling. She tried to suicide many times but my grandfather said 'no, we have to be here when the children come home'."
All the children were placed in different foster homes or institutions. Mrs Meehan went to a European couple then aged 40 and 50 who did not have any children.
"They were old enough to be my grandparents. I was in total isolation," she said.
"In my other home you could laugh and talk and make noise. In a European home you didn't ask questions."
She was loved. "They were beautiful parents. I was very, very fortunate," she said. But they were not her people.
"Being 5 and being taken away, I used to cry, 'When are they going to come and get me?' " she said.
"By the time I was 9, I hated them [her parents] because I thought they had sent me away.
"By 13, I was in denial. I hated saying I was Aboriginal. When I went into the workforce you said you were Maori or Fijian - that was acceptable, but if you were an Aboriginal the facial expression I got was that they would look down on you."
She married young, to a white man who encouraged her to find her original family. But she resisted it and at 24 almost killed herself - saved only when her 4-year-old son brought her flowers from the garden and she realised that she didn't want to leave him motherless as she had been.
Some time later, at a women's meeting, she saw another Aboriginal woman with the same surname as her mother. The woman was married to her cousin, in the camp where her mother lived.
She wrote to her mother, but it took her three more years to pluck up the courage to go back to Coonamble. It took her birth mother the same time to stop drinking.
"She didn't want to meet me till she had given up the grog. When we met, she didn't drink after that."
Mrs Meehan has written a book about her life and is now a community worker with Aboriginal people for the NSW Department of Community Services, the same agency that took her from her family.
She also visits a group of young Aboriginal, Maori and other prisoners at the Gosford detention centre and runs a mentoring group for Aboriginal girls.
Although Aborigines make up only 2 per cent of the NSW population, they still comprise 28 per cent of children in state care. Official policy is now to place them with Aboriginal families, but Mrs Meehan said most families were already looking after nieces and nephews so there were not enough black foster parents to go around.
She accepted that Aboriginal children would therefore continue to be fostered by white parents.
But she urged those parents to make contact with Aboriginal communities to make sure the children kept a link with their own culture.
"Don't raise them up to think that you want to change them, save them, rescue them, make them better," she said.
"We need love and nurture, but don't make the decisions for us."
