Howard Riley stands next to the burnt-out 1940s Chevrolet ambulance, the carcass of the rusting old truck resting on its side amid scrubland and bush.
“Imagine being taken away … and put here in the middle of winter? A lot of kids got pneumonia and other stuff. They died,” he says.
“My grandfather’s three sisters and two brothers are buried here. There were eight of them taken away, and only two walked out.”
The “here” they walked out of was the Moore River Native Settlement – once one of the largest Aboriginal missions in Western Australia, about 135km north of Perth.
Hundreds of Indigenous children from the state’s vast regions were taken from their homes, from their families, communities and culture and incarcerated here.
The settlement, most well known as the setting for the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, opened in 1918 and was run by the state government until 1951, after which it granted control to the Methodist church until its closure in 1974.
Uncle Howard, 58, is a survivor of this mission. His early years were spent with other children, sick, cold, hungry and denied the comforts of home, family and language.
Unsanitary, overcrowded and bleak conditions contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Indigenous people, many of them babies.
Generations of Uncle Howard’s kin are buried in shallow unmarked graves here on Noongar Yuet country. But he doesn’t know where.
“A lot of people [are] buried here who shouldn’t have been buried together. There’s too many tribes all buried together. We can’t help them be at peace, it’s sad,” he says.
Guardian Australia has spent nearly a year investigating missions and institutions in Western Australia that incarcerated children taken from their families and removed as part of the Stolen Generations policies.
The investigation has identified as many as 741 people who are likely to have been buried in unmarked graves at three former Indigenous missions, with 412 of them children and babies.
The investigation examined public records, including WA births, deaths and marriages records, state library and public cemetery records and contemporary media reports, with hundreds of mostly young children, babies and stillborns being recorded as dying at New Norcia, Moore River and Carrolup.
There are no records identifying where they are buried in any of the available cemetery records. There are also instances of children reported as dying at institutions within those media reports who are not found in available burial registers.
Last week a Guardian Australia investigation revealed the identification of nine suspicious anomalies found by ground-penetrating radar scans at the former government-run Kinchela Aboriginal boys’ home in New South Wales, with survivors calling for the entire site to be investigated.
Survivors of other institutions in Western Australia are also calling for more recognition of unmarked graves.
Some believe bodies should be repatriated to their homelands, while others want similar ground-penetrating radar scans to identify all potential burial sites.
A history of ‘barbarous treatment’
Contemporary media reports and the 1935 Moseley royal commission paint a bleak picture of life on the missions, with survivors’ oral histories describing the devastating scale of loss and trauma within the Bringing them Home oral history project
In 1925, a state daily newspaper called for an “investigation” after Alice Ronan, an Indigenous inmate at the mission, spoke out about the poor treatment of children at the institution. Ronan died at the age of 30, with state records indicating she had “lungs and heart trouble”, and is buried in an unmarked grave at Moore River.
Media reports from the 1935 inquiry detailed the “barbarous treatment” of inmates, including being locked in a tiny bare shed for weeks at a time, “dilapidated dormitories” and “inadequate food” with children ending up in hospital because of a lack of nutrition.
Deaths from influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis and starvation were common.
In 2018, the WA government and the WA state library commemorated the 100th centenary of Moore River, unveiling a remembrance wall honouring the names of all those who died.
But Uncle Howard says the memorial isn’t complete. Only two of his relatives are recorded there.
“My grandfather said there’s more here,” he says as he gestures to the wall. “[He] reckon hundreds more.”
Uncle Howard says he was told that his family members assisted in the burials, carrying carts filled with those who perished from disease and sickness.
“They used to go from cottage to cottage, campsite to campsite, and at the end of the day they could have 10 or 12 bodies in it, that were taken away to be buried,” he says.
“We know a lot about what happened on the missions, us younger ones; I lived it. But we pass it down to our younger ones, too. It’s history.”
Beverley Port Louis is a Yuet elder and traditional owner of the lands that hold Moore River and calls it one of the “saddest places in Yuet Country”.
“It’s difficult,” Aunty Beverley says with a sigh, her eyes scanning the large unmarked burial grounds.
“It’s hurtful”, to think that this is not really a cemetery, “like what you’d get in a country town, where it’s all cleared, with tombstones and their people’s names on it”.
Aunty Beverley believes that her people have an obligation to those who died and are buried in unmarked graves, and visited the site to tend to the grounds long before the memorial was created.
“It’s not the fault of the people that got brought there from … all these different cultural groups, all living together on one property, that’s how my family looks at it. While we’re still alive, we’ll be custodians for the rest of our lives.”
Carrolup mission: an ‘unknown graveyard’
Scanning a gleaming paddock in Western Australia’s great southern region, Leon Wynne looks for his great-great-grandmother’s grave.
The dirt road that leads to where he stands is marked with a new street sign: Cemetery Road.
Already pock-marked with bullet holes, it points to a desolate grassy field. Beneath the soil here are the loved ones of Aboriginal men, women and children who died and were hastily buried.
“She would have been the matriarch,” Uncle Leon says.
“She would have been buried there,” he says, pointing to the field. “She died of some cough, whooping cough. They would have buried her as soon as she passed away, they would have bundled her up and had her ready for burial the next day.”
Uncle Leon is at the former Carrolup mission run by the Western Australian government, a site acknowledged as recently as 2007 as having an “unknown number of burials” when the former mission was registered as a historical site.
Aboriginal children and families from all over the south-west were sent to Carrolup after being removed from their parents’ care.
The children were trained up for hard labour – maids, farmhands, station workers, paid in a few coins if they were lucky, more often soap or rations. Conditions were often deplorable, with overcrowded living conditions, abuse, malnutrition and no healthcare – leading to sickness and death.
The site opened in 1915 under the first superintendent, WJ Freyer, who made headlines in 1918 when he was forced to resign after chaining a young girl by her neck to her bed for three days to stop the child from running away.
The site closed in 1922 before reopening in 1952 under the name Marribank, which operated until the 1970s.
At least 51 men, women and children died here, according to WA’s births, deaths and marriages records for Carrolup.
Twenty-eight of those likely buried here are children, babies and stillborns with no markers or gravestones. Their names are not found on any of the three local cemetery registers in the nearest town, Katanning, or the shire districts.
Uncle Leon believes all those who died during the “Carrolup era” are buried here on the grounds.
“A lot of them kids would have been buried here … They just called it a cemetery road … This was where the cemetery was and where they buried the people from Carrolup days,” he says.
For Garry Ryder, the mission, last known as Marribank, was a home, but rarely a good one: inmates were emotionally, physically and sometimes sexually abused, and food and clothing was often poor.
He still bears the scars, wearing hearing aids after a staff member roughly shoved sharpened pencils into his ears for scratching them.
His hearing was never the same: “I wasn’t able to tell nobody about it. My eardrum was busted, it was so sore, pus and blood. In school, I had to pretend I could hear what the teacher was saying.”
The 67-year-old remembers his time at Marribank grimly. “There was quite a lot of rapes here by older boys to us younger boys. I’m a victim,” he says, standing outside the former mission church.
“I just couldn’t fight them because they was stronger than you. I mean, I was only a primary school kid.”
Despite his trauma, Uncle Garry still comes back, preferring to remember the good times – kids playing and laughing. Over the years, they had grown up together and forged tight bonds.
“We formed a bond that the missionaries tried to break but they couldn’t … We played brandy, played the world, hopscotch – you name it, we did it.”
But the site’s darker history was something well known to the children who played here. Uncle Garry says he can feel the children who never grew up and who are interred on the mission grounds.
“I say to people ‘if you get the hair on your neck it sticks up, or if you feel cold, don’t worry, it’s only the Carrolup kids, welcoming you back here’,” he says.
The carelessness of the unmarked graves at Carrolup is not unique.
Jim Morrison is chair of the Western Australian Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation and a longtime advocate for Stolen Generations survivors. “I’d expect there to be [these] stories right around the country,” the Noongar elder says from home.
“Mission days were pre-citizenship, pre-voting, pre us being considered as human beings. So therefore, why would there be any respect and proper protocols about a death? The records are highly questionable I think and not accurate.”
He says Aboriginal family’s oral histories passed down from families reveal a greater untold story: “We know people have passed on and there’s been no record.
“Oral histories speak volumes. That’s about the resourcefulness of our communities. They are relying on our people not having memories or evidence.”
New Norcia mission: a dark history beneath tourist town
Dallas Phillips has long campaigned for the recognition of unmarked children’s graves at the New Norcia mission. It operated under the control of Spanish Benedictine monks and nuns from 1848 until 1974.
The 2013-17 royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse found that the mission had the highest proportion of alleged child sexual abusers.
Aunty Dallas was an inmate of the mission as a child and suffered abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to care for her.
“When I think of my mum and dad, how they were groomed and told (that we will) go and be educated. It was all bullshit. A lot of kids went there but they didn’t come home,” she says.
The Ballardong Noongar elder has advocated for the mission’s true history to become known. New Norcia is now a popular day-trip destination, the town becoming a drawcard for tourists buying expensive olive oils and breads.
She wrote to the then premier Mark McGowan in 2021, urging the state to recognise and uncover the unmarked graves of the children, and has now written to his successor, Roger Cook, with the same plea.
“Those kids belong to somebody. They had a name, they had a mother and father, and if they came from all over the countryside, they should be exhumed and sent back to their country for full honours at the expense of those monks.”
She wants the graves investigated and for the church to be more transparent with families and descendants as a form of truth-telling and reckoning with its own complicity in this painful history.
“They should allow those ground-penetrating machines to go over there … let the records be shown,” she says.
Aunty Dallas says her own records and those of her sister who passed away decades ago have not been provided.
“It’s about time that the world knows what has been going on. We were all broken and damaged.”
Abbot John Herbert, the head of the remaining Benedictine monastery at New Norcia, says the number of New Norcia inmates buried in unmarked graves is “highly concerning”.
“This is a historical thing that we’ve had to deal with but I can assure you we’re committed to finding out as much as we can.
“Many of the graves, we don’t know the history behind them and that’s what we’re trying to work on.”
He says a project is under way to go through the former mission’s records and burial registers. He would support ground-penetrating radar technology on the site “if the government supported it”.
The state government declined to answer questions about whether it would commit funding to ground-penetrating radar scans on former mission sites but said in a statement it was committed to supporting and helping Aboriginal people uncover their history and heritage, including strategies important to “truth-telling and healing as a foundation for improving the lives of Aboriginal West Australians”.
The state government said it also provides advice to assist people on accessing records.
Herbert, who was ordained to the priesthood in 2004, says the monastery fully acknowledges the trauma and abuse experienced by inmates at the institution and does not shy away from it in its educational tours and history.
“It’s part of our daily tour now and this history is acknowledged. We use the terms emotional, physical and sexual abuse, so that it’s very real.”
He says none of the current monks living on site are in any way associated with the historic abuse.
Wandering mission: stories of deaths and burials
Wandering mission is a sprawling property off a dirt track not far from Perth along a picturesque drive of farms, stables and orchards. The road gives way to woodlands where the mission was established in 1944 until it closed in the 1970s.
Frances Wernblom lived at the mission for eight years, leaving when she was 16. In the more than 60 years since she left, this is only her second visit.
Her memories are still vivid, but the sight of the mission grounds overgrown, neglected and decaying is a shock. “It’s been left to deteriorate, you only just have to look at the place … I don’t know why they leave it like this,” she says.
She reminisces about memories both good and bad. But there is one place on the mission that Aunty Frances remembers with fondness: the mission church. Its walls remain intact along with the carved wooden pulpit at the front.
“It used to be beautiful, that church,” she says. “They used to have all around the wall the stations of the cross. I used to love going to midnight mass at Christmastime, all the saints days, Eastertime and the church on Sundays, and I made sure my flowers were the first ones there.”
Every Sunday “we used to wear navy blue [dresses] with white jumpers underneath and white crochet berets on our heads, white socks, brown sandals”. The other six days of the week the children went to school, carrying out manual labour in bare feet and scrappy clothes.
But beneath those lighter memories, far more traumatic ones remain. Standing outside the old schoolroom, she recalls abuse from one teacher.
“I was sexually abused here in that classroom. I had the chores to do and he used to keep me back in the classroom,” she says.
“There was a lot of sexual abuse and whatever else that went on at the time, there are a lot of stories to these missions.”
But Aunty Frances believes that there are more untold stories about an area known as “the green patch”.
“Well, I know it, my sister knows it,” she says. “We were all sitting here one day in the circle. And they [the returning survivors] say the same thing that I’m saying, there were little graves over there. That’s the convent.
“It was like little graves, you can see the mounds and this wrought-iron fence,” she remembers. “Why would they have it fenced off with wrought iron if there weren’t graves there?”
Other survivors Guardian Australia spoke to say they too heard the stories of deaths and burials near the Wandering mission’s convent. They now hope for recognition of the lost graves and for the sites to be established as places of healing, remembrance and hope to future generations.
‘Hiding atrocities is wrong’
Uncle Jim Morrison believes former missions and orphanages should be investigated for unmarked graves to acknowledge wrongs of the past and as a form of truth-telling.
“There [should] be a concentrated effort to search the places and do radar or whatever it is that needs to identify there’s burial places or skeletal remains,” he says.
“It is so important. I think it’s important purely from a truth-telling point of view of politicians to understand what their old people have done to it. And that’s the reality of what we don’t talk about.”
Uncle Leon Wynne hopes the Carrolup site can be investigated so that those buried from generations ago can be remembered and honoured with a memorial to ensure future generations do not forget.
“It’s not naming and shaming. It’s a history that needs to be shared so we can all move forward together.
“Hiding atrocities from Australians and New Australians is wrong. We need to never let this happen again.”
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
