“I would have ran, if I knew where to run to. If we had somewhere safe to go, we would have gone.”
As a boy, Daryl Sloan didn’t realise a lot of things — and at two and a half years of age, how could he?
Mr Sloan is a survivor of the Stolen Generations.
Now, 60 years on, there’s a lot that still sits with him.
“My mum fled a domestic violence relationship,” Mr Sloan said.
“She fled it many times, she returned and fled and returned but eventually one day, she didn't return.
“She took the five children and left for good, and what money she had was soon gone.”
Finding shelter in Shepparton with her parents, there was room for only herself and her two daughters, which left Daryl and his two brothers without a home.
In her best efforts to house them, she approached different organisations asking for support, but none was given.
In a last act of desperation, she went to the police.
“The response was for us three boys to be charged with criminal offences, and those offences were no fixed place of abode and no visible means of support, what is, in effect, vagrancy,” Mr Sloan said.
From there, the boys were moved between children’s homes before landing at the Ballarat Children’s Home, an orphanage that housed both orphans and those in state care.
To this day, Mr Sloan finds it sad to reflect on why they were there, looking back and knowing they weren’t the only Indigenous children taken from a parent.
“Remember, many of us weren’t orphans, we had a parent that cared, but there was no accommodation, and here we are 60 years later saying, where’s the accommodation?” he said.
“Love and attachment weren't things that were provided ... I hardly even saw my own brothers because we were separated by age.
“I remember big platters of sandwiches being brought down to us kids and trying to wipe this grey stuff off them, and there was this strange taste, which I now know was beer and cigarette ash.
“These were the lunches that sat in the pubs all day and were brought down to feed the needy children.”
Eventually, Mr Sloan’s mum was able to take her kids back from state care, but his displaced childhood had only set him up for further struggles through his teenage years.
“Mum had to form a relationship that was deemed appropriate by the state,” Mr Sloan said.
“The house they got had to be inspected by the local police officer and the man she was in a relationship with was deemed to be appropriate, but the reality was he was a thug and a bully.
“We moved around a lot, I went to 17 schools in my schooling years and I left in Year 10 because I had to go out and earn a living.
“There were no youth workers, no chaplains in schools, there was no support available — and so leaving school to get a job was part of the reality.”
This was the story Mr Sloan shared at the Shepparton Region Reconciliation Group’s Sorry Day event on Friday, May 26.
There were a lot of things Mr Sloan went through in those children’s homes that he refused to bring up in his speech, understanding that some of it would be too traumatic for the children listening.
However, he maintains that his experience has propelled him into helping others in a way he wasn’t able to be helped.
“My wife and I are foster carers and we have been for a long time,” Mr Sloan said.
“We don’t know how many children have gone through our house, we don’t count them, but what I do know is for every night that a child stays in our house, that child is safe.
“If we can do that for two nights, three nights, a week, that’s a marvellous thing; there’s some that have been at our place for months, some for years, some for decades.”
His story captured the dire and unfortunate circumstances of his childhood as part of the Stolen Generations, which in turn, highlighted why Sorry Day needs to be recognised.
“I loved hearing ‘sorry’ in 2008 and I was lucky enough to get up to Canberra in 2009 when Kevin Rudd gave the second apology, which included mainstream Australians and and the migrant children,” Mr Sloan said.
“But sorry means it shouldn’t happen again, but it is, and we need to look at what’s going on and we need to make some active steps.
“To this day there are still a lot of young Indigenous people being taken into state care.”
Looking at the statistics behind this, Mr Sloan isn’t wrong.
According to Australia Bureau of Statistics data, in 2020-21, 134.9 per 1000 First Nations children in Victoria were removed from their families and placed in the out-of-home care system.
For non-Indigenous children, the rate was 6.7 out of 1000.
This means that despite First Nations people representing less than one per cent of the Victorian population in 2021, almost 30 per cent of children in the out-of-home care system were Indigenous.
“It’s just too many,” Mr Sloan said.