A West Australian Aboriginal corporation has embarked on an ambitious plan to help members of the Stolen Generations.
The Sister Kate's Home Kids Aboriginal Corporation intends to build a state of the art, multi-million dollar healing centre that will be run by Aboriginal people.
The state's Mental Health Commissioner has thrown his support behind the plan.
Ryan Emery reports.
In pristine bush in suburban Perth, plans are underway -- plans to build a centre that will be by Aboriginal people and for Aboriginal people.
Sister Kate's Home Kids Aboriginal Corporation is proposing to build a healing centre on a vacant bush block across the road from the former Sister Kate's children's home.
Initially, it will be for the former children of Sister Kate's, who call themselves homees, and their families.
The centre's director, Tjalaminu Mia, known as TJ, says the centre will be the first of its kind in Australia.
"We will be inundated with homees and their descendants and families. It's also going to have a community perspective as well, where we'll hold gatherings to bring all the community together to discuss issues. But also just to celebrate our Aboriginality."
TJ Mia says their Aboriginality was taken from them when they lived at Sister Kate's.
The children's home was active from the early 1930s to the 1970s.
The Indigenous children stayed with non-Indigenous carers in cottages on the property.
TJ Mia says members of the public thought the children were orphans but, in many cases, they had been taken from their parents for different reasons.
"We also got our identity stolen from us. We had no-one to pass on our knowledge, our language, or even a sense of our own Aboriginality. So that's one of the core factors of the healing centre is to bring that sense of identity back."
That loss of identity has been passed on to the ensuing generations.
Dezerae Miller's father was a homee who became an absent father.
The 26 year old says she did not begin to search for her culture and identity as a Noongar woman until she was 17.
"(I,) myself, have been affected by a trauma, which is abandonment from my father, because he wasn't around. So that, in turn, affected me, and I don't want that to go down and affect my children. So it starts with me. A lot of that might have been done and dusted,* but I don't think it will be until we start healing ourselves. It might be in the past, but the past still lives in us."
The centre is set to include areas for elders.
There will be places to make art, to sell it and exhibit it.
There will be rooms for counselling, and parts of the untouched bushland will remain that way for areas of reflection and meditation.
In short, it will be a centre designed with Aboriginal culture and practices at its heart.
That principle has the support of Western Australia's Mental Health Commissioner Eddie Bartnik.
"I think Aboriginal people don't tend to talk about mental illness. They tend to talk much more about social and emotional wellbeing and the importance of culture and empowerment in their lives. So I think we've had to let go of some of the more clinical aspects and just put them to the side a little bit and also balance that with a stronger cultural perspective, where we understand what's important to Aboriginal people and also what's happened to Aboriginal people."
Something Chris Dixon, one of the corporation's directors, knows all too well.
He was caught up in the system for more than 20 years and, after a string of children's homes, ended up in jail.
He made the decision to do something with his life.
He wants to help others break that cycle of trauma and disempowerment.
"Now that there's an opportunity for us here to do something to help people to better their lives and save them from going down that same road that everybody else goes down ... here, we can enlighten them in a way that they see that their identity can come back to them. They can identify with being Aboriginal again and not having to hide behind the bush and hide our true identity."
The corporation is hoping to raise millions of dollars and is even looking at benefactors overseas to help make the centre a reality.
The organisers, who already have about half the construction money, feel confident they can get building underway next year and be up and running by 2015.
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