The rain may have led to the cancellation of events for the larger crowd, but it wasn’t enough to stop three generations of Felicia Morgan’s family from commemorating National Sorry Day with their traditional walk.
For five years Ms Morgan has been leading The Flats healing walk along the Goulburn River from Shepparton to Mooroopna.
“We just wanted to keep the message going, that we haven’t given up on the children still being removed,” she said.
In previous years the walk travelled across The Flats, and Elders shared their stories along the way, many having been taken under government policy as part of the Stolen Generations — Ms Morgan’s father among them.
Ms Morgan said the walk served as a reminder that “nothing has really changed from the past to the present”.
The Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care 2021 Family Matters report found 21,523 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were in out-of-home care at June 30, 2020.
The Australia Institute of Health and Wellness reported from 2019 to 2020 non-First Nations children under one year old were removed from their families at a rate of 4.6 per 1000, whereas Indigenous infants were 10 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home or permanent care.
“As soon as these mothers have their babies, they’re removed, so there’s no memories of their parents or anything, which I feel is deliberate and on purpose,” she said.
“Assimilation is still happening, if you’re not brought up with your parents or you don’t understand anything about your land or cultural connection — that’s assimilation.”
The Family Matters report showed children are predominantly placed with non-First Nations carers.
The proportion of children placed with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander carers dropped from 53 per cent to 42 per cent over the span of 2013 to 2020.
"Sixty-thousand years of knowledge that's been passed down orally and through papers is still with us, so when you're removing a child, that child then has to grow up, come back and re-learn that,“ Ms Morgan said.
“But the history of our people is not taught in the schools and so unless you're accepted back into your community, you never really get to re-learn who you are, and so therefore it's lost forever.
“And that creates trans-generational trauma, it creates identity issues, then those issues become ingredients for high incarceration, for another family having their children removed ... it becomes a vicious cycle.“
Ms Morgan is the chairperson of Maya Living Free Healing Association, an organisation focused on keeping families together.
She said it was crucial that the government stopped removing children from their families.
“Australia must be sick of hearing about the same problem, it's the same problems because it's the same methods, and we say, ‘no, we want to turn the corner with it’, we are only three per cent out of 100 per cent,” she said.