It was raining fit to flood the day Heather Alley, then aged nine, and her sister were put on a boat and sent some 700 kilometres away from their mother.
‘I remember it so clearly,’ the 85-year-old artist says. ‘I was crying and crying – we were petrified.’ Welfare officers had come to their town in a remote part of Northern Territory (NT) to inform her mother that, because she had not sent her daughters to school, they would be taken to a new home for so-called ‘half-caste’ children in Alice Springs. Their forced removal was sanctioned by the NT Aboriginals Act of 1910 which established a governmental ‘Chief Protector’ body as the legal guardian of ‘every Aboriginal and half-caste child’ until they were 18 years old.
