`I must say, they were very good towards us', recalls Phyllis Bin Barka, who grew up in the Holy Child orphanage established by the John of God nuns in Broome in the 1940s. "They didn't have much but they tried to give us what they could. They taught us a lot - how to sew, be clean within ourselves, look after your own children."
She bears no grudge over her mother's denial of her. "She was upset. She hadn't seen me since I was three. She was broken-hearted." Through her son, Mark, who runs the local indigenous radio station and chairs the Stolen Children committee in the West Kimberley region, Phyllis has acquired the papers documenting her case. "My father was Irish. He worked on a station (ranch). My mother worked there as a domestic. He didn't stay with her, just used her for a naughty, like they say. When I was three, she took me to the hospital for a fever. I was there a few weeks and, when I got better, the doctor wrote on my file I should be taken to the orphanage now rather than separate me later when she'd be used to having me round again."
"When they took me I could speak my language," says Daisie Howard, who was stolen with her brother at the age of three. "But there was no-one to talk to and we just lost it." Daisie's mother worked at the pub in the remote mining settlement of Hall's Creek. Daisie doesn't know who her father was. While she grew up at the Holy Child orphanage, her two full-blood half-sisters remained in the bush. When she met them a few years ago, she felt awkward. "Really distant, you know - not close."
Now in her 60s, Daisie attends an Aboriginal language school, where she is laboriously relearning the words and ways that connect her to "her" country in the East Kimberley outback. "I was so excited when I found out my Aboriginal name, Jangali, and the water-hole where I was born. When I go back there I still feel a connection. I cry too, just thinking how we were, just roaming the bush. I fit in really well. A lot of people there said: `Come back home, bring your family.' I just think, well, where's home? I'm sort of caught between two worlds now. My children were born in Broome. I'll always be a Catholic, go to Church. But I know home is there. I would have loved to live in the bush with my mother."
Despite her personal sorrow, Daisie bears no ill-will towards the John of God nuns who raised her. "They made us feel that we were part of a family. We were still lonely, missing everyone. I can remember crying myself to sleep. But they were more or less like mothers to us, and we loved them and felt a lot of respect for them.'
By the 1950s, when Sister Pat Rhatigan went to Beagle Bay as a 19-year-old postulant, the Irish nuns were an integral part of the isolated community.
"We gave them the best of what we had," Sister Pat recalls. "We never gave them second-best. Okay, the best in our eyes now was certainly not what they should have had, but it was the best of what was there. The big kids minded the little kids like in a family and everybody looked after everybody and at meal times they didn't have any less than what we had, so you bonded together naturally.'
The young postulants became especially close to their female charges, to whom they were quite close in age. They also had in common the sexist treatment meted out by the Pallotine priests, who - perhaps still seething over Mother Antonio's digs at their pigs - reserved the one mission vehicle for the use of the priests and boys. On Sundays, the nuns and girls had to trudge for an hour in the unbearable heat to a picnic area, while the males drove. "We'd be wearing the stockings, all in black, the lot," recalls Sister Pat, "and carrying the little ones. When we got there I'd keep the babies under a tree while the big girls foraged for food. All we had was water. If they didn't find us something, none of us ate."
As well as the "orphans", the nuns taught full-blood Aboriginal children, who lived in dormitories at the mission while their families camped within sight. Vera Dann believes that gave her the best of both worlds. Today, she moves between her Ngul Ngul language and a word-perfect version of Hail Glorious Saint Patrick with ease.
Esther Bevan, another Ngul Ngul, acquitted herself at Beagle Bay with such distinction she won a scholarship to a Catholic secondary school in Perth. It was a highly unusual route for an Aborigine in the 1960s, especially a full-blood. "They did not want smart blacks," Sister Pat Rhatigan says dryly. "We were to give them just enough education to let them function in the white world. The authorities did not want them challenging the system." But the feisty spirit of Mother Antonio O'Brien had been kept alive by her successors, who instilled a subversive message in their pupils. "I can still hear it, ringing in my ears," grins Esther Bevan. "You are as good as, if not better than, anybody else."
But the rest of Australia had no such ideas. Until 1967, the first Australians did not even have full citizenship rights. "We were counted among the unique flora and fauna of the land," says Esther.
Now Esther works at the Catholic University of Notre Dame at Broome, raising funds for a creche to allow Aboriginal students with children to go to college.
The Dean is Sister Pat Rhatigan, whose own journey has been remarkable for a girl who left school at 14 and for years kept one step ahead of her pupils through correspondence courses. The strength of Aboriginal heritage is evident everywhere, from the stunning indigenous artworks in every room, to the university's innovative policy of making Aboriginal history mandatory for every undergraduate. So how did the John of God nuns, with their egalitarian spirit and gut feminism, end up colluding with the government's policy of undermining Aboriginality? Pat Rhatigan winces at the word "collude" but does not evade the question, over which she has agonised for some years now.
"We really didn't know much about the wider world. Religious life didn't allow for that. We weren't allowed to listen to the wireless, we had no access to newspapers. Life was very regimented and the priests controlled everything, down to your mail. There was no open debate.
"I think as women, we reacted to kids that came, we took them, cared for them, loved them, grew them up. We would have heard the kids were there for education. I suppose how they got there, we didn't question."
In 1996, when the order's Jubilee was imminent, the nuns discussed how they should mark it. "We didn't want to celebrate anything, because we felt we had participated in this dreadful tragedy. So we decided instead to go round to each of the communities where we had been, and publicly apologise to them for the role we had played in the children being taken. It was very moving. A lot of tears and emotion, naturally some hurt and anger."
The nuns were, again, ahead of the time. A year later, when the formal report on the Stolen Children was handed down, one of its recommendations was that an annual Sorry Day be established to commemorate those whose lives had been destroyed by the practice. Although the Federal parliament passed an expression of "deep and sincere regret" for past injustices to aborigines in 1999, the prime minister, John Howard, has steadfastly refused to apologise in person, saying his government is not responsible for past actions. One million ordinary Australians, who have signed Sorry Books in public libraries, do not agree.
This year, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron, exacerbated the tensions by dismissing claims of a Stolen Generation, saying one in 10 children does not constitute a generation.
"It's hurting them just to say sorry," says Daisie Howard. "But what about the hurt we're going through? It's an everyday thing with us. And why did they do it in the first place? They shouldn't have done it." Some say Howard won't apologise for fear of becoming liable for compensation to the victims. But numerous international precedents exist, from the Japanese apologising for their treatment of prisoners-of-war to Tony Blair for what happened in the Famine. Saying sorry is a simple, and vital, step on the road to healing.
Phyllis Bin Barka would also like compensation - not, as Aboriginal detractors would have it, to cash in on a good scam - but for a practical purpose. "I'd like to fix my mother's grave, put a tombstone or something. She's just thrown in the bush. They're not animals. But I can't do it. Haven't got the money." She feels Howard's refusal to apologise belittles her and others' suffering. All she asks for is basic human empathy. "How would he feel if anyone happened to take his children away? And not seeing them again, most people would lose their memory, go silly in the head or something. Taking your children away - that's hard. That's half of you."
Siobhan McHugh is an award-winning writer and broadcaster specialising in Australian social history. Her next book, Rebels to Rulers, will be on Irishness in Australia. ozmchugh@eircom.net
The Australian National Library: www.nla.gov.au. The Bringing Them Home report: www.nla.gov.au/oh/bth