At four, her head was shaved and her clothes burned. Aunty Lorraine doesn’t want her trauma to be forgotten

Aunty Lorraine Peeters only remembers the metal gates opening as she was driven away from her home, at Brewarrina mission in north-west New South Wales. She was taken, along with her brothers and sisters, at just four years old. Her home for the next six years would be the Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Home, where she was separated from her siblings, trained as a domestic servant and systematically brainwashed to be white. “On entry, all your clothes were burnt, and then you were doused, or what they call delousing, and this is back in the 1940s so it was sheep dip,” Aunty Lorraine told Guardian Australia. “And then your head was shaven, you were given a new identity and religion.” Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email “From four until I turned, I think I was 10 years. They had enough time to assimilate me into something I shouldn’t have been. Our mantra was:‘Be white, speak white, live white every day.’” Her experience is just one of hundreds documented in the Bringing Them Home report, tabled nearly 30 years ago. Today, survivors and advocates are still urging governments to do more to support those removed from their families, as outlined in a new national plan for Stolen Generations . The Healing Foundation’s plan, From Sorry to Action: A plan to act on Bringing Them Home, has been released ahead of Sorry Day commemorations on Tuesday. Aunty Lorraine has spent decades pushing for change and healing in her community. …