Back to Cootamundra – Transcript

00:05It's been a long journey of healing for former residents of the Kudamundra Girls' Home in southern New South Wales, but nearly a hundred years after it opened, members of the Stolen Generation still find the memories as fresh as they are painful.

00:19Dan Conifer has the story.

00:37It's just, you're still crying today. You know, my father, he was a rattled brook. They were at the fort for this country.

00:52Being the daughter of a World War II veteran didn't stop Faye Clayton being taken from her parents the age of 10 and put in the Kudamundra Girls' Home. She was to spend six years there, a nightmare from the first days.

01:08Oh, it was shocking. I couldn't stop crying. And all I wanted to do was to go back home because, you know, we'd never been away from our families. I couldn't beg for a couple of months.

01:23I thought I was deaf and dumb. I couldn't speak. I'd just sit on the well and look down the road to see if Aunty Becky was coming up. The staff used to say, nobody's coming up there.

01:43Nobody's coming there. And the girls meant cut on me. Lila Johanneson was taken from her Aunty Becky's home in Bowerville on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales and was with Faye Clayton at the home in the 1950s and 1960s.

02:05There were around 40 girls there at a time from 1912 when the training home was established by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board in the town's Disused Hospital. The girls were trained to later work as domestic servants. Their days were predictable.

02:23When we had to get out of bed and what we had to do before we got out of bed and we had to do our duties, that was from 7.30 onwards or 6.30.

02:38Then we had to, then they hit the bell and we had to go and have breakfast. And then after breakfast we got dressed and went to school. And when we came home the same thing, hit the bell to do your cleaning up. Pack all your clothes, school clothes away, clean up.

02:58Help with the kitchen duties, help with the washing on the line, things like that. And then if you were on punishment when you got home you had to do that punishment. So everything was determined by the bell.

03:14Faye Clayton says the girls' education wasn't a priority. With this 1961 report card showing the matron encouraged Faye to leave school. And she did, working on a number of farms, leaving Kutumundra for good.

03:31A few years later the Aborigines Welfare Board was abolished and Kutumundra Aboriginal Girls Training Home closed. But now the girls are coming back in August for the 100-year commemoration of the training home.

03:47Michelle Lester has been working on the event for the last year. We've actually had a really overwhelming response from former residents, family members' descendants of former residents and also community members, whether they're Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal.

04:05So far we've had over 400 people who've put through an expression of interest and that's been great. There's so many people that actually want to show their support for this historic event. More than 50 former residents are expected back in Kutumundra for the event, some for the first time since leaving.

04:25There'll be formal events and the home itself will be open all weekend. You know, growing up in Kutumundra because we were always the Kutu girls. So just getting back up there, reconnecting with a lot of the girls that I haven't seen for many years and just sitting down and finding out where we're at and what's happening to our lives.

04:52Its hopes coming back will help the healing process for the ladies. This is Kutumundra and this is everyone coming from everywhere to meet at Kutumundra.

05:07Phase contribution to the commemoration will be a series of paintings on show at the Towns Arts Centre. It's my personal journey and it's my personal healing because it's being able to get me to bring out the hurt through the art.

05:29This painting is all the girls paintings. It's about all of our hurts. For Lila Johanneson getting to know her family is helping her heal. She met her granddaughter and great-granddaughter for the first time last summer and she's going to more and more family events.

05:49Yeah, starting to feel, you know, that I belong to them. I feel one of them. And she's bringing her biological sister when she goes back so she can meet Lila's Kuta sisters.

06:05They come first. They're my pre-book but the girls are my family. The family we grew up with, they'll be all my, always be my family, always. These ladies have long left Kutumundra girls home but it will never leave them.