'Like so many Aboriginal kids who were removed from their family under the raft of 'assimilation' policies in place throughout Australia between the 1920s and mid-1970s, I was removed from my mother who was a 'ward of the state'. She was transported from Alice Springs to Mulgoa mission near Warragamba, New South Wales, when she was thirteen. My mother's fate at that time was to spend the rest of her life in domestic service.'