‘No one is left behind’: Isaiah Dawe acts for change after four generations of trauma

When Isaiah Dawe was 18, his definition of success was “just to be alive”.

Dawe, a Butchulla and Garawa saltwater Murri man, was taken into the child protection system when he was two months old and came out when he turned 18. In that time, he suffered abuse, lost all contact with his extended family and was bounced through 17 different foster homes in country towns across New South Wales.

These days he “pinches himself” at how different life is.

This week, Dawe launched a mentoring program for Aboriginal children in out-of-home care. The program bears his initials: ID Know Yourself. But ID is important in another way: Dawe is the fourth generation in his family to be forcibly removed and taken into the non-Indigenous system.

“My great grandmother, a Butchulla woman, and my great grandfather, a Gawara man were a part of the stolen generation,” Dawe says.

Clive Palmer's $100m Aboriginal foundation only has $109 in it, records show Read more

“They were both separated from their family and eventually taken to Cherbourg where a lot of Aboriginal people were technically jailed, they were abused physically, emotionally, sexually and neglected with the most basic of human rights and their culture and identity was stripped from them.

“Nanna and Poppa had children and then they were all taken away into girls and boys dormitories, and when my grandmother had children of her own, those children were taken into foster care, my mum and her siblings.

“And then my siblings and I were taken into foster care. This trauma has lasted four generations in my family, but this is the generation where it stops.”

Dawe remembers being told he was worthless. He would run away from home a few times a week.

“I’d go to sleep and pray that I wouldn’t wake up, that I’d die. But I’d look at my little sister and think: if I go, there’ll be nobody left to care for her. It was horrific,” he says.

He won a scholarship to a private boarding school, which gave him some stability, but the stress returned when he turned 18 in his HSC year, and was sent “the official letter that I was no longer a ward of the state”.

“I wasn’t even focused on my HSC. I was thinking, how the hell am I going to survive after school? I was doing my exams and worried, because under the scholarship I had to leave school as a boarder once I’d finished my last exam.

“I had no family, no home, no money. Luckily a friend offered to put me up.”

Dawe found his extended family on Facebook, and all the things he was told – that they didn’t want him – were untrue.

“Everyone always says we never forgot about you, we just didn’t know where you were. We haven’t ever stopping loving you, but when you were taken that was the last we saw of you.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Isaiah Dawe with his family at the NSW Government House at the launch of ID Know Yourself last month. Photograph: Cyndee Macchia/Supplied

“Connecting to culture and family helped me to know who I was and what I was worth, and it taught me I did have a choice in who I was going to be.”

ID Know Yourself will begin this term with six girls and six boys aged between 15 and 18 years old, some of whom are in the juvenile justice system. They will receive support during the school term, but there will be holiday activities as well, including a trip to Butchulla country, K’gari (Fraser Island), for a cultural camp.

ID Know Yourself is aimed at addressing the service gaps at the end of care, when children turn 18 and leave the system. It focuses on building six strengths: cultural identity, yarn time counselling, life-skills such as cooking, budgeting and cleaning, education, health and giving back.

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my ancestors staying strong. We need to celebrate our resilience, our strengths,” Dawe says.

Calling myself an Australian is not enough to make me feel like I belong | Stan Grant Read more

“ID Know Yourself is a family, and that means no one is ever left behind or forgotten.”

The most recent survey by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW) found that Indigenous children were eight times more likely to come into contact with the system than their non-Indigenous peers and 11 times more likely to be living in out-of-home care. More than 40% of Indigenous children are with non-Indigenous carers.

The NSW government says a long-awaited review of Aboriginal children in the out-of-home care system, Family is Culture, will be finished in July.

Family is Culture was commissioned in 2016 and is said to include a review of the circumstances of the 1,153 Aboriginal children and young people who entered out-of-home care in NSW between July 2015 and June 2016.

The most recent figures available from the NSW Department of Family and Community Services show that 38% of the children removed and placed in out of home are Aboriginal children, and that number has increased steadily since 2012.

The number of Aboriginal children reported as at risk of serious harm has also risen by 21%. The majority of reports were for “neglect” or “domestic violence”.