When they came to take the children, it was in police cars. Four police officers and two Docs workers coming to the door. They were not there to arrest criminals, they were there to take four children, aged six to 12, into care.

“The children were scared out of their wits because they knew the police were there for them.” Jody Galloway* sits in her neat house in Cherbourg as she recounts this. On a dresser behind her are photos of her children, a shrine to them. On the sofa is a tiny newborn baby, her granddaughter. When the baby squawks three generations of women leap up to attend to her.

Galloway is a mother of seven. Three grown-up children by her first marriage, four young children by her second. She radiates competence, steadiness, but back then, at the end of 2016, she had been going through an “emotional” time. Less than a year before her husband had died of a heart attack in this room, in front of her and the children.

“My children were going through an emotional thing, I was hurting for my babies, I was worried about my babies.” It was the Christmas holidays. On a Tuesday she had gone to Child Safety and asked for vacation care. “I was asking for help and they have used that against me.”

She had only known her 25-year-old caseworker for a month. On the Thursday she was asked to attend court. While she was there they came and took her children from her home. “Everything just happened so fast. It was all in one week.”

“They tried to say my children weren’t going to school. But the principal wrote and said they had 99% attendance.”

Galloway was not able to comfort her frightened children or tell them she would be fighting to get them back. That she loved them. She wasn’t allowed any contact. Just one phone call when her eldest, Jasmine*, had begged the caseworkers. “The baby girl Breanna* was finding it very hard to adapt, she was playing up all the time, crying. Jasmine got the carers to ring me so I could settle her.”

The children were split up and taken to two different towns. Her children had already lost their father, now they were losing their mother and everything they knew.

Galloway’s half-brother was traumatised too. When he saw the police he broke down and cried; he had been taken when he was a child. And so it goes on, generation after generation. Broken families, heartbroken mothers, fractured young people.

‘Like the apology never happened’

The road to Cherbourg runs through peaceful pastoral country, softly curving hills, blue gums, soft wood scrub.

Jody Galloway’s great grandmother came down this road in a cattle truck when she arrived at Cherbourg, 250 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. The settlement was established at the turn of last century under a policy of segregation. Aboriginal people were forcibly rounded up across the state and brought here, where they were used for cheap labour on surrounding properties. They lost language, culture, family.

“There is emotional trauma from history all the way down,” says Cherbourg elder Irene Landers, who has banded together with other grandmothers in the region to fight the disproportionate rates of child removals from Aboriginal families and communities.

Protesters gather for a march organised by Grandmothers Against Removals . Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

These days children being taken away by the police in Cherbourg is not news. It happens so often that it is at crisis point. Families feel under siege, they are scared. And now some children are frightened to go to school, says Landers, after four cop cars came to take three boys away at the end of last year. The normally noisy playground went silent.

“All the kids saw it happen” says Landers, “it had a big effect on them. My granddaughter loves school but now she is worried someone’s going to come and take her.”

Since Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen children 10 years ago and his insistence that the nation had learned from its mistakes, the rates of child removal have increased dramatically. A report released by Family Matters last November found that Indigenous children are nearly 10 times more likely to be removed from their families than non-Indigenous children. In April of last year a UN investigation found Australia among the worst countries in the world for forced removals of Indigenous children.

“Now they are saying that it’s a new stolen generation, but it never stopped” says Landers. “It’s like the apology never happened.”

And, says Yamaji filmmaker Janine Kelly, whose film Cherbourg Women –My Struggle, My Fight, was released earlier this year, “it’s not just happening here, it’s happening right across the country. I will call it racism. They are creating another traumatised generation.”

Taking them off country ‘is where this all starts’

Auntie Cephia Williams is sitting on the veranda of her corner house in Chinchilla, 184kms from Cherbourg. At 58 and a great grandmother, she doesn’t look like a warrior but that is what she has become. “A lot of our families don’t know how to come up against Child Safety when they take their children so I am the voice for them. This is the first time anyone has spoken up for these children.”

Williams has seen what happens to children who are taken away, and what can happen to devastated mothers.

“The children are traumatised over and over. Taking a child from its mother, that is traumatic, then moving them into another home, foster home after foster home. They are lost in the system, they don’t know who they are. They say ‘why don’t my mum and dad want me?’ Most of those children turn to drugs, alcohol, they end up dying. They have lost their past, their culture, everything. It leads to suicide, health issues, depression.”

For reasons that can’t be published, Williams has her own heartbreak. She voluntarily left the kids in her care – some of them her own – with a relative when she found out they would be removed and separated.

“I gave up for a long time, I gave up for nearly a year, I succumbed to alcohol and depression, I used to get drunk and cry. Until I got up one morning and said no more drinking, we’re not going to go down this way. That is not going to be me. I fought for contact and I’m proud of that. We had all the holidays and all the birthdays.”



Kevin Rudd turns to Indigenous people in the House of Representatives after giving his apology speech. Photograph: Stefan Postles/EPA

Through her own troubles she has been fighting for others. She is a co-founder of Brisbane Sovereign Grannies, which mediates between families and welfare services. She believes elders need to be consulted: “The elders need to sit at the table and we place children on country. Because who knows best in communities but the elders? We need to stand together and fight.”

Grieving mothers who have lost their children often turn to alcohol or drugs. “That is the only way that can sleep at night without worrying about their children” says Williams.

Janine Kelly says, “People just give up ... they can’t fight the system. They get angry and Docs see them coming around and shouting, but actually they have taken their life away.” Then they are branded as aggressive and lose all hope of getting their children back.

In the film, Sarah Reynolds admits that she has been drunk “every day since they took my babies.” She still wakes up at 3am to feed the baby who was only four days old when she was taken into care.

It is the children who are innocent who will suffer the most.

“I know children who have been in care” says traditional owner Cynthia Button. “It stuffs up the rest of their lives. They are virtually nobody, these kids. They can’t come back to their home because they are talking like white people and they don’t get accepted.” She says the authorities “don’t understand our culture and our kinship. They might have 10 dads and eight mums, aunties and uncles. It is a big family in a big circle.”

Placing the children with white people and taking them off country, says Williams, “is where this all starts. They come back and take it out on their mother. ‘Why couldn’t you save me? Why couldn’t you help me?’ The forced removals are tearing our families apart.”

Williams believes Indigenous children can be abused in care: “It is swept under the carpet.” She shows a photo on her phone of a one-year-old child with a black eye, and a two-year-old with swollen genitals. Their 22-year-old mother had taken them to hospital for asthma and eczema problems and they were taken from her with claims of medical negligence.

“They ripped them out of her arms,” says Williams. It was on an unsupervised visit that the mother saw the injuries. Her two-year-old would hide in a cupboard when officers came to collect him. When Williams went to Child Safety in Kingaroy she discovered an incident report had not been filed and the children were still with the same carer.

“No one had addressed the issues,” says Williams. “I asked the case worker and team leaders why, and no one answered me.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women stated that “removal of children from their families is a last resort, used when a child is immediately unsafe and it has not been possible to arrange a safety plan with parents.”



A year ago the Queensland government committed $162 million in extra funding to try and reduce the number of Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families in a 20-year plan. On 21 February, Brisbane Region Child Safety made a pledge. It promised “to listen to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander families and work differently, respectfully and better so that their voices are heard.”

But Kelly is sceptical: “We need more than a pledge and an apology, we need respect.

Meanwhile, Cephia Williams works tirelessly to help mothers “get back up”.

“It is a big struggle when you have to fight for your own family. I say ‘come on, you can do this’.’’

With help from Williams, Landers and strength gained from speaking out in the film, Sarah Reynolds is getting her act together, getting up again with a fighting spirit, consulting the elders before going to Docs meetings.

After an 18-month battle, Jody Galloway finally has her children back. But it was hard. When they took the children they took away her benefits and put her on Newstart.

“I was just worried about keeping my home for my kids to come home to.” But she found it very difficult to pay the bills or buy the children treats on visits. Working with Landers and Williams they were able to get the children brought back on country, cared for by close relatives, with visitation rights.

“I find this hidden anger there,” says Landers of the children she sees, “and because of the age they don’t know who to lash out at. They have got plenty of pent-up anger.”

As Jody Galloway says succinctly, “how would you like it if a big black woman came into your house and took your children?”