Ninety-eight years after one of Australia’s most notorious Stolen Generations institutions was opened, local survivors are revealing their experience of some of Australia’s darkest history in a short film. 

Kinchela Boys Training Home (KBH) brings traumatic memories for Aboriginal men across the state during its operating period of 1924 to 1970. 

During that time, forced Aboriginal child removal policies saw an estimated 400 to 600 Aboriginal children exposed to routine acts of cultural genocide. 

Coonamble’s James (Widdy) Walsh, is one of the survivors of the Kempsey-located boys’ home, and tells his story through the narration of the new short film ‘We Were Just Little Boys’.

“If you don’t talk about it, it’ll kill you from the inside out,” Uncle Widdy said.

The short animated film takes viewers through the traumatic journey of one group of Stolen Generations Survivors, where they were stripped of their names, given numbers, and subjected to ‘reprogramming’ and strict regimes of manual labour. 

“My kids used to poke me with a stick to wake me up, because I’d wake up swinging thinking it was the staff (from Kinchela) coming to wake me up. I would swing because of fear of what the staff would do with me,” Uncle Widdy said. 

The story is retold by survivors through the 19-minute film, sharing as they remember the moment being taken from their families and through to the ongoing impacts of trauma once they were released as adults onto the streets. 

Uncle Widdy recounts years of intoxicated nights, waking up to find himself in gaol. 

“I drank because I couldn’t take it anymore, I needed to block it out. I’d wake up in jail or busted up. I’d have punch ups, I’d have fights,” he said. 

Now in his seventies, Uncle Widdy is learning to live with the trauma of being split from his seven siblings, of one of his own children being taken away from him, and of his mother dying at 52, ‘broken hearted’.

He’s one of many survivors wanting people to hear their story through the ‘We Were Just Little Boys’, as an important contribution to truth telling. 

“We don’t want people to be angry about it, we don’t want anybody to be punished. But we do want the right to be treated equally, not only ourselves but our children,” Uncle Widdy said, reflecting on seeing his children take a similar route from his own after being rejected from the community. 

In dedicating the film to their parents, partners, and children, KBH survivors remind us that they are not the only ones who suffered as a result of these past policies, but that trauma reverberates through generations and its impacts are still felt today.