CELIA is softly spoken, but straight to the point.

"I'm black and I use drugs," she says. "That doesn't make me a bad mother. It doesn't mean any Aboriginal woman who takes drugs is a bad mother whose kids should be taken off her.

"They don't take kids off girls who take legal drugs or who drink and smoke. And they don't take kids off some violent parents until it's too late.

"But when it's a black girl and they suspect drugs, they come in with security guards to restrain the mothers and grandmothers and they take our children away.

"It just kills you, every day you don't have your kids. It's the new stolen generation and we've got to stop it."

Celia is an Aboriginal woman and occasional heroin user from an inner city location in urban Sydney. She has seen the lot: drugs, police, courts, jail, violence and murder.

She once had her children taken from her and now it's happened to her daughter and other young Aboriginal relatives and friends.

She says DOCS (the Department of Community Services, or Family and Community Services as it is now known) is destroying families.

This is Celia's story, told to news.com.au and also published in the New South Wales Government-funded pamphlet User's News.



"I was born on the Block, in Redfern, Sydney. Like a lot of city Aborigines, my Dad was stolen generation, which means he was put to work like a slave, about 80 hours a week when he was a teenager.

My mother grew up with her parents in Kempsey. Her father still hunted kangaroos and went fishing with a spear. My mother and Nan used to speak Dunghutti language in the kitchen, only after dark with just a candle because they were frightened.

They'd been told by the government not to speak your own lingo, just in case they plotted things. I had a beautiful childhood in a very loving family.

Dad worked hard and we never wanted for anything. But when I was five or six I realised the way we were treated was somehow wrong. Back in those days, you would just get pulled up for being black.

Dad had a truck for his tyre-fitting business and he used to drive a lot of Kooris to football games, and the cops were always pulling them up and getting them out to question them. Dad was a black rights campaigner and after he stood up for the family of an Aboriginal man who was shot by police, they targeted us.

But even after Dad had all his teeth knocked out by police he told us 'everything's going to be OK, don't be frightened'. The police were always after my brother Jimmy. When he was 16, they broke his jaw.

I don't know why but I started playing up. My first drug was petrol. I started sniffing when I was 14. My uncle found us one day, he was wild.

Then I started smoking pot, and I got into speed. It wasn't until much later I got into heroin, and that was after Jimmy died.

I had my first daughter when I was 18, and my second girl when I was 20, different fathers. Then I had my two youngest girls. I broke up with their father and the girls were living with him in my house and he was having an affair. Then DOCS took my kids and I had seven years of misery before I managed to get them back.

I was living in a refuge when Jimmy was murdered in his jail cell. They took him from Long Bay to Prince of Wales hospital to this special wing with prison guards.

Why did they bother? He lay there for three days brain dead. I had to tell them to turn off life support. We buried him on St Valentine's Day, 1997.

You could say that's when I really started self medicating. The Block (in Redfern, Sydney) was full of heroin back then. I didn't know heroin made you sick. I didn't know you could get hep C. I thought I could just stop.

In the past, I've been in 'business' to support my heroin use. Now after 20 years of using heroin, I'm on methadone, and just use on payday.

I did a photography course at Eora College (in Chippendale, Sydney) and got into video and started filming Aboriginal rights marches and interviewing people. Everyone's got a story.

Lately I've been meeting with elder women in the Aboriginal community because everyone of them, me included have got a story about DOCS taking our grandchildren from our daughters. My daughter is on the methadone program. She had a heroin habit, but she did everything they asked her to do. Then at Newtown probation and parole they had a machine monitoring for dirty urines and it was throwing out false positives.

The probation people even wrote a letter on my daughter's behalf saying the machine couldn't be relied on, but they took her little boy anyway. He was five days old. I was so worried that she might think about killing herself. She went down for a long time, but now he's four months old and she's doing really well, except every day she wants her child back.

She's not a bad mother. She's never been given a chance to be a mother and they tell her she won't unless she goes into rehab. She doesn't qualify for rehab unless she's actually taking heroin again, so how's that for a Catch 22?

There's a stigma attached to have a record with drugs and I'm not only talking about black girls, it happens to white girls too. It breaks my heart. DOCS are breaking families apart and killing us.

They take away these young girls children and then the girls go down a destructive path. Having a baby should be a beautiful thing, but when you have an Aboriginal girl get pregnant that's one of the first things they ask - will DOCS take my baby when it's born.

If a child is taken from one person, it affects the whole family and the community. We all grieve. So I've been getting together with the elders and saying 'Auntie, we need to do something'. The Aunties know everything that's going on in the community and they are the ones to straighten up someone if they need a wake up.

What we need to do, and it can start here and then spread because this is happening everywhere around the country, is get a group together.

So when DOCS comes in and says 'I'm going to take this child', we will have 20 women there to support the mother. And if they try and bring in more security, we can have a mass gathering. DOCS needs to know we raise children as a community. That's the best place for our children to be with our people, so they can be proud of their Aboriginality and know their culture

My daughter is suffering and there are many other girls hurting and angry. Just because you take drugs or took them in the past doesn't mean you hurt or neglect your kids.

Aboriginal life is a matriarchal society and that's being taken from us. And by doing that they are making things worse. Girls end up depressed and do silly things and end up in jail.

And then they're on a turnstile.

Taking our kids is becoming an epidemic. Just because you've made a mistake with drugs doesn't mean you should be denied the chance to be a mother."

What do you think about Celia's story? Comment below.

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