This is a difficult piece to write. It cuts closer to the bone than most of what I have written; closer to my bones, through my blood and flesh to the bones of truth and country. There is truth here, not disguised but in the open, and that truth hurts. As I caress the truth with my blood and bones I find it increasingly hard to breathe. At the core is a discussion I had with my dad, Graham Coleman, a Noongar man and a member of what some of us have come to call the ‘Hidden Generation’.

The tears of the families traumatised as part of the Stolen Generations are national news; this country has finally stopped lying to itself about what it has done. Most people in Australia now admit that children were stolen from their families in acts of policy that have done incalculable intergenerational harm. What is still hard to get government and those resistant to truth to accept is that the acts performed on the Stolen Generations were acts of genocide. While children are still being taken, while people are still alive and uncompensated, the Stolen Generations will not be the past.