Stolen Generations survivor Aunty Lorraine Peeters is 88 years old.
The Wailwan Gamilaroi woman was taken at four years of age, along with her siblings, and raised under the assimilationist policy at Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls.
There, her culture and identity were repressed.
“That identity, at four years old, was not allowed in that place at all,” she said on Tuesday.
Speaking at an event hosted by The Healing Foundation, Aunty Lorraine was in Parliament House to mark National Sorry Day, which commemorates the anniversary of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report.
The landmark report detailed the harrowing experiences of the Stolen Generations, and made recommendations of how those injustices could be rectified.
Aunty Lorraine contributed to that effort by sharing her story, but the hopes she had for justice have changed in the decades since.
“I was pretty energetic back then, but very tired now," she said.
“Nothing's been done. Why did we give evidence to this inquiry? Why?
“We're still waiting. I know my group of women that went through Cootamundra, we’re on the edge of being too old now to fight the fight anymore.”
Federal Member for Lingiari, Marion Scrymgour, also appeared at the Healing Foundation event on Tuesday.
She shared stories of her parents' removal under Aboriginal Ordinance laws in the Northern Territory, and the 1996 discovery of four siblings who were also removed.
She also stressed justice had to be delivered to survivors while it was still possible.
“Human life is finite, and when there is not much sand left in the top of the hourglass, a failure to take available measures to enhance quality of life cannot be made good later,” the Tiwi and Anmatjere woman says.
“The title of the Healing Foundation's 2025 review into the progress of the Bringing them home Report recommendation was, Are you waiting for us to die? The unfinished business of Bringing them home.
"That title focuses our attention on helping those Stolen Generation survivors who are still with us.”
New plan to bring justice to survivors
The Healing Foundation says only five of 83 recommendations from Bringing Them Home have been clearly implemented.
On Tuesday, it revealed a new two-year action plan aimed at changing that.
Chief Executive Shannan Dodson says it’s intended as a reform roadmap for governments and private institutions like churches.
“You can’t close the gap while leaving the unfinished business of Bringing Them Home sitting on the shelf,” the Yawuru woman says.
“Sorry without action is not enough. It never has been, and it never will be."
The action plan covers records and redress, education, research, funding for organisations that support Stolen Generations survivors, and health, with culturally safe and equitable access to aged care identified as a key focus.
Child removals continue
Aunty Lorraine also described the impacts of intergenerational trauma.
“If I don't heal in my generation, I pass this down to my children and my grannies and now my greats,” she said.
“Can you see really see that that is the gap? In that gap for my healing is my age care, is my records, it's my everything within there, and not a thing is being done.”
She also spoke about her fears and fragile hope for today’s young generations.
“I live in hope that our kids will be safe from this. I really do.
"We have kids being taken at a rate you would not believe, and I do hope there's somebody there to help them."
Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, whose mother was a Victorian Co-commissioner as part of the Bringing Them Home report, said the country can’t move forward until child removals are stopped.
“Sorry means you don't do it again, but ... we have 24,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out of home care in 2026. It is still happening,” the Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman said.
“It is still real, and babies are still being ripped out of their mother's arms.”
The co-chair of Children’s Ground, William Tilmouth, an Arrernte man and Stolen Generations survivor, said governments apologise every year on Sorry Day while continuing to uphold harmful systems that remove First Nations children at “staggering rates”.
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children account for around 41 per cent of all children in out of home care despite making up only around 6 per cent of the child population,” he said.
“In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal children make up almost 90 per cent of children in out of home care.”
Hope for the future
Shannan Dodson from The Healing Foundation said 29 years after her father Mick Dodson handed down the Bringing them home report, there is no more time for delay.
“What that report found was that you'd be hard to find any Aboriginal family that has not been impacted by forced removal,” she said.
“That ongoing impact is being felt still by many of us in this room, and that's who this is really about, and acknowledging that there are families where the grandmother, the mother, and the grandchildren were all taken in turn.”
She welcomed recent reforms that exempt redress payments received by Stolen Generation survivors from means testing for residential aged care, but called on the government to go further, and include services under the Aged Care Act in the exemption, among other reforms.
I think that’s really encouraging, to see you are listening, and hearing, and we’re hoping with this plan that will go further.Shannan Dodson, Chief Executive at The Healing Foundation
On Tuesday, Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy announced $2.6 million in additional funding to support Stolen Generations survivors through the Healing Foundation and Link-Up service providers.
She said in a statement that the funding comes in addition to a four-year investment of $87 million announced in February.
Ms McCarthy was represented at the Healing Foundation breakfast by Marion Scrymgour, who suggested there would be more action to come.
“I look forward, just like the Minister for Indigenous Australians, to supporting all the measures that you have in that action plan and I thank the Healing Foundation for their report,” she said.
