The Uncles of Kinchela have a strong bond. They tease one another all the time. They finish each other’s sentences. They know when to fall silent. They shout numbers at each other – the ones they were given when they were taken away from their families and incarcerated in the “hellhole” that was Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home.
“Hey, 36!” Uncle Richard “‘Bear” Campbell shouts at Uncle James Michael “Widdy” Welsh, who responds immediately. Thirty-six was Uncle Widdy’s number in the home when they were boys.
“Whatdya want, 28?” Uncle Widdy shouts back.
Kinchela boys were known by a number, not their names. It was one humiliating detail in a childhood lived under a regime that was unrelentingly harsh and punitive.
There are 56 survivors left of the hundreds of boys who went through Kinchela as part of the Stolen Generations. Uncle Richard, number 28, is among the youngest at 66 years old.
The Uncles have gathered at the former Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home, 20km north-east of Kempsey in New South Wales, because they say they have urgent and unfinished business. A ground-penetrating radar survey of the site has identified at least nine “anomalies” that may be consistent with “historical clandestine burials”. They want the sites excavated so they can know for sure. This is horrific information but it comes as no surprise to the Uncles, who have long said that boys disappeared and may have come to harm.
“I’m hoping that there’s nothing there. Just simple as that. But with the way that those people were and the way that they flogged us, it wouldn’t surprise me at all,” says Uncle Michael “Widdy” Welsh, the chairman of the survivor organisation Kinchela Boys’ Home Aboriginal Corporation (KBHAC).
Uncle Roger “Pigeon” Jarrett was stolen from his loving home on Bowraville Mission in 1958 with his two siblings and, as he writes in caps in his scrapbook, “taken to hell”. Uncle Roger says his mother, who never received an education, was tricked into signing the papers and told she could get her children back in 12 months.
He remained at Kinchela for six long years. “Roger Jarrett stayed on the other side. I became number 12,” he says, sitting in the room at Kinchela that was once the dining hall.
“I used to go to Catholic school with God on the cross. They’d say: ‘You scream out to him and he’ll come and help you.’ Well, I screamed out and screamed out … Nobody can hear you, so I gave up on that God,” he says.
Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home was run by the Aborigines Protection Board, later called the Aborigines Welfare Board, under the NSW government from 1924 until it closed in 1970. An estimated 400 to 600 Aboriginal boys between the ages of five and 15 were taken away from their families and incarcerated there under the laws and policies of the Stolen Generations.
Until 1969 in NSW, the Aborigines Welfare Board removed Aboriginal children from their families. There were dozens of homes run by the state and churches across NSW, but it was common for Aboriginal babies to be sent to the Bomaderry Aboriginal Children’s Home for infants on the NSW south coast. Boys aged five and up were sent to Kinchela and the girls went to Cootamundra.
The stated aim was to assimilate them into white society by training them to be labourers and domestics. Kinchela, on the banks of the Macleay River, included a dairy and farm, where the boys did all the work. Education was minimal.
It was known during its time of operation as a violent and unregulated place. A series of staff, many of whom were ex-military, ran the place “like a concentration camp”, says Uncle Bobby “Bullfrog” Young, number 24.
“We had animals in there and they had priority over us. They all had names. One horse we used to call Sue and they had three German shepherd dogs. One was called Prince and if you didn’t call him by the name there was another punishment – they would cane you,” he says.
“It was a concentration camp, it wasn’t a happy home. Even now when cars are driving by they don’t know the background of this place. It was terrible.”
Punishments were regular and violent. Survivors recall being flogged or chained to a tree overnight for wetting the bed. They were told they weren’t Aboriginal, that their mothers didn’t want them or their parents were dead. The boys were not allowed to have shoes except on days when authorities from the city would visit.
Uncle Bobby and the others point out the fig tree at the rear of the property, where four “anomalies” have been identified that display signal patterns “similar to historical clandestine burials identified via GPR”. Still embedded in the tree are links of the chain where they would be left overnight as punishment.
“See the chains there? Where they tied you up at night with nothing on, head shaved, wintertime, they would chuck cold water over you, wouldn’t give you a feed,” Uncle Bobby says. He was 11 or 12 when they did it to him.
“What we used to do when the boys was tied up [long pause, he is crying ] … we used to boil eggs and corn to give them something to eat, cos they wouldn’t feed ’em, that’s how bad they was. So you can imagine [being] cramped up there, for one night or two nights, and they come and keep chucking cold water on you, especially in wintertime.”
The boys’ home had neighbours, he says.
“One of them was good to us . The one that did come over [would] give blankets to the boys and a feed,” Uncle Bobby says.
Punishment, deprivation and physical and sexual abuse were well documented. The treatment of boys was the subject of several inquiries over time.
In 1937, manager AJ McQuiggan was sacked after a police investigation found he was a sadistic drunk whose punishments included tying boys to fences and trees, whipping them with hosepipes and a stock whip, and withholding food.
Another survivor told the 1995 Bringing Them Home inquiry of extreme neglect during his time at the boys’ home in the 1960s: “One boy, his leg was that gangrene we could smell him all down the dormitories before they finally got him treated properly.”
John (not his real name) who was removed from his mother as a baby and sent to Kinchela at the age of 10, told the inquiry about daily beatings and being “sent up the line”.
“Now I don’t know if you can imagine, 79 boys punching the hell out of you – just knuckling you. Even your brother, your cousin. They had to – if they didn’t do it, they were sent up the line. When the boys who had broken ribs or broken noses – they’d have to pick you up and carry you right through to the last bloke. Now that didn’t happen once – that happened every day.”
Uncle Richard says: “I blame the government itself … If there’s actually bodies there, they’re the people who’ve got to bloody commit to saying something, doing something about it. It’s their history, they created it. They tried to deny it for so many years and they’re still denying it by taking our kids away.”
Uncle Richard ‘Bear’ Campbell Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
Kinchela survivors first publicly expressed concern that boys had died on site in 1995, in a submission to the Bringing Them Home inquiry. Survivors recommended the area be surveyed as they firmly believed children “may have met with foul play”.
In 2008, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations, the son of a Kinchela survivor said his father had been traumatised for life after being forced to bury other boys who had been bashed to death by drunken supervisors.
But it was not until 2016 that the NSW government agreed to work with survivor organisations to “locate the remains of any Aboriginal children” at the site, and a further six years before the first ground-penetrating radar survey took place at the end of 2022.
Uncle Ian ‘Crow’ Lowe #41 Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
Researchers and archaeologists visited the rural site in three stages, working with survivors to obtain oral testimony, researching the history of the grounds, and finally conducting scans over several visits.
The report says the decision regarding excavation must rest with survivors of the home. But it also recommends that Kempsey Local Aboriginal Land Council and individuals who hold cultural knowledge relevant to the area, including Dunghutti traditional owners, are consulted.
Uncle Roger assisted the researchers with oral testimony to prioritise areas for the scans. In light of the report, he wants the “high-priority areas” to be excavated and the entire area thoroughly scanned.
“It needs to be, if they want to know the truth,” Uncle Roger says. “We’ve got to get some truth done, because they’ve got away with all these lies for that long. I’m 76 and I want to see some truth in my lifetime and make the government accountable for what they’ve done to us.”
He said he and other boys often wondered about children who were “there one day and gone the next”.
“You’d play with a little brother one day, you wouldn’t see him the next day or a couple days later, when you dare ask the staff … they flogged the hell out of you. You didn’t know if they were adopted out, thrown in a river or buried somewhere. The staff were men. They raped that many boys in the home that they could have killed some of the boys.”
Uncle Allan Roosevelt ‘Boomp’ Cooper #4 Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
He said some of the boys had told stories of children dying or disappearing but feared speaking out at the time because of the savage treatment meted out.
“They were flogged so they couldn’t say nothing but when they got out it haunted them that much that they talked about it,” he says.
The chief executive of KBHAC, Tiffany McComsey, says the Uncles want to be able to move forwards with their hopes to turn the site into a healing centre and museum. Until the anomalies are investigated, they are stuck in limbo.
“Every generation of survivors that went through Kinchela boys’ home has this story around missing children and boys being there one night and then the next morning, not there any more. And it’s that pain, it’s that unfinished business that they just want finished,” McComsey says.
“They died with that pain, and their descendants continue to feel that pain. And the Uncles, in the logo that they created for this organisation, have a question mark: why? And I don’t think that ‘why’ will ever be fully answered.”
For information and support in Australia call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for a crisis support line for Indigenous Australians; or call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636
