Fair-skin Aboriginal children were painted with charcoal and animal fat to make them look darker and prevent police from taking them away from their parents under a genocidal assimilation policy, a human rights report says.
Some, like Millicent, were sentenced to a life of beatings and rape after being snatched from their families to be raised as white people, according to the report from Australia's Human Rights Commission released on Monday."Hurt and humiliation was a part of our everyday life, and we had to learn to live with it," Millicent says.
The report, "Bringing Them Home," charges Australia with genocide. It is a 700-page litany of physical and sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in government and church missions and private homes.
Tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were taken from their parents between the 1880s and 1960s under welfare laws that were based on white racial superiority.
"The half-caste is intellectually above the Aborigine, and it is the duty of the state that they be given a chance to lead a better life than their mothers," James Isdell, a white man with the title protector of Aborigines, is quoted as saying in 1906.
Paul, who was taken away at 5, said he was told to drink milk by his foster parents who said, "Then you will look more like us." "At no stage was I ever told of my Aboriginality or my natural mother or father," Paul said.
Some Aboriginal girls were put in white dresses and lined up to be inspected like "slaves" by white foster parents looking for a healthy, strong child.
"We was all lined up in white dresses, and they'd come round and pick you out like you was for sale," said an Aboriginal woman taken at 10 years of age and raped by her foster father.
But the story of Millicent, a half-caste Aboriginal woman taken at age 4, epitomizes the brutal lives of those known as the "Stolen Generation."
Millicent lived with her parents and six siblings in the sand hills at the back of Geraldton in Western Australia state in the 1940s.
"There were lots of families living there happy and harmonious. It was like we were all part of one big happy family," Millicent said in the report.
In 1949 the protector of Aborgines with the Native Welfare Department visited the camp and shattered her life forever - she never again saw her parents.
"They told me that my family didn't care or want me and I had to forget them. They said it was very degrading to belong to an Aboriginal family and that I should be ashamed of myself."
Millicent said the beatings started when religion arrived in the government mission.
"We used to get whipped with a wet cord and sometimes had to hold children (naked) while they were whipped, and if we didn't hold them, we got another whipping," she said.
During school holidays, Millicent was sent to a farm where she was raped. Despite complaining to the government mission, she was sent back to the farm the next holidays and raped again.
She was belted when it was discovered she was pregnant.
In 1962, Millicent's daughter was born. "I was so happy, I had a beautiful baby girl of my own who I could love and cherish and have with me always," she said.
"But my dreams were soon crushed: The bastards took her from me and said she would be fostered out until I was old enough to look after her."
Millicent was reunited with her daughter, Toni, last year, 25 years after being told that her daughter had died.