AUSTRALIA
NT News
BY ELLIE TURNER NT NEWS SEPTEMBER 22, 2014
BARBARA Cummings is among thousands of victims of cultural genocide.
She was stolen from her mother at the mission-based Kahlin Compound and raised at the old Retta Dixon Home to be a laundry maid, discouraged from contact with the world outside the wire.
“I got terrible thrashings. we all did,” the grandmother said, remembering leather belts and a cane.
“We were separated from society.
“I always liken (missions) to the Amish – the only thing we didn’t have is the duke and the buggy.”
But some children had it worse.
The Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse will begin a public hearing in Darwin on Monday September 22, delving into the sinister past of stolen children at Retta Dixon from 1946-1980.
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