AUSTRALIA'S National Day of Healing, formerly known as National Sorry Day, is a significant time for Victoria Point's Margie Kennedy.
Her mother and two of her older brothers were part of The Stolen Generations.
The National Day of Healing is held annually on May 26 and is a time for communities across Australia to honour and commemorate the children of Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander descent who, under State and Federal Acts, were forcibly removed from their families from the early 1900s to the early 1970s.
Margie, a Kabi Kabi/Gurang Gurang woman, said her mother Katherine, formerly of Thorneside and who died in 2002 aged 70, was taken from her family during the 1930s.
She said despite her maternal grandfather trying to protect his family by hiding his wife and young daughter in bush close to their home in Lowmead, near Bundaberg, government officials at the time found them and took Margie's mother and maternal grandmother to a mission.
"Grandma was then forced to work on the stations as a housemaid and Mum was left on the mission by herself," Margie said. "She was only four-years-old."
Margie said when her grandmother's brother heard she had been sent to work on the stations and wasn't permitted to leave, he fought to get his niece out of the mission.
"If it wasn't for my uncle, who knows what would have happened?" she said.
"Uncle took Mum to my great-grandmother, but Mum didn't see her mother again until she was 12-years-old."
Margie said her mother's experience was "one of the better" stories because she was returned to family, but gaps in documentation and her mother's reluctance to speak about it meant she didn't know for how long the young Katherine was alone in the mission.
She said her mother experienced further grief when her own two eldest sons, Harry, now deceased, and George Robertson, were taken by officials from a school in the Redlands in the late 1950s.
"They were taken from the school grounds and put out at a place where Mum and Dad didn't even know where they were," Margie said.
"Mum and Dad had no car and would walk for miles in search of their sons."
Margie said, for her, Australia's National Day of Healing was "a day to come together to honour and respect those who were stolen away from family, from culture and from land".
"Some of that hurt can't be repaired, but by coming together we can work on the healing," she said
