The Truth
Sharing your words is a powerful act of truth-telling. This space is dedicated to documenting the reality of life after the National Apology—the gulf between the State’s promises and the lived experience of survivors.
These collective statements of the original crime and post-apology harm form an overwhelming indictment: personal experiences that can no longer be ignored or diminished. Individually, we are strong. Together, we are undeniable.
Statement on Post-Apology Harm: Forced Adoption
By Dorelle, Mother
I am a mother whose baby was stolen during the Queensland Forced Adoption era. To the system in 1970, I was nothing more than a number in ward M15 at RBWH. At nineteen years old, single and pregnant, I was told by my own mother that I could not come home. In that instant, my value was reduced to nothing. I was sent to St Mary’s Home for Unmarried Mothers, where I was forced to work and pay rent while being bombarded with the lie that I was "selfish" for wanting to keep my child. I was never advised of my legal rights; I was only groomed for adoption.
The birth of my son at 2:37 am in August 1970 remains an image burnt into my memory. I was alone, sutured without anaesthetic, and treated with utter contempt by staff who told me to shut up because I was "disturbing the married mothers." The moment he was born, he was stolen. I was not allowed to see or touch him. For nine days, I was held in that hospital and told that the only way I would ever be allowed to leave was to sign the adoption consent papers. I left that hospital with empty arms and no discharge papers—as if my son and I never existed.
I tried to get my baby back. I even tried to get a job at the orphanage where I believed he had been placed, but that didn't work. I returned to the government begging for him, but I was told to go away because I had "signed my rights away." Like any mother would understand, I spent years searching crowds for a baby that might be mine. Every birthday was a silent memorial for what had been taken from me.
When the law in Queensland finally changed in the early 1990s, we both sent letters to the government stating we wished to make contact. The decades that followed proved that the State’s "care" was a fabrication. When we finally connected twenty-three years later—not "reconnected," as that would be a lie since we were never allowed to connect at birth—I discovered a harrowing truth. The Government gave my baby to a dangerous family. I do not have the words to describe the incredible guilt and grief this discovery has had on my life.
Forming a relationship has not been a simple "reunion." We are both living with deep-seated hurt, processing our own separate harms, and navigating how the trauma of our pasts has shaped who we are today. The connection we are building is a testament to our strength, but it is a connection the government's legislation and laws have made unnecessarily or deliberately difficult.
Our legal path to healing has been publicly endorsed but privately blocked by the State at every turn. In 2018, we were forced into a distressing, all-day Supreme Court battle just to discharge the adoption order and reinstate my son’s legal connection to me. I stood in that court and spoke my truth about the coercion, the manipulation, and the drugs I endured to force my signature, yet I was met with a cold legal reality.
The adoption order was eventually discharged, but not on the grounds of "Improper Means," "Fraud," or "Lack of Voluntary Consent." The court refused to acknowledge that my consent was obtained through threats and undue influence, or that the order was based on false and misleading representations. Instead, they took the easy way out, granting the discharge under the vague label of "Exceptional Circumstances." By choosing this path, the State avoided any admission of guilt. They effectively silenced the truth of the crime committed against us, treating the destruction of our lives as a mere legal technicality rather than a systemic failure of human rights.
Through this court process, I learned the darkest truth of all: the Department of the day removed other children from my son’s adoptive home because it was deemed unsafe. They had internal records stating that no other children should ever be placed with the woman they allowed to adopt my son. Yet, despite this knowledge, child care officers and the Department left my son there to endure years of physical, mental, and sexual abuse at the hands of the very family the government had hand-picked and approved.
This was the "normal family" and the "better life" that was drilled into me in 1970. What is most devastating is that the Department sat on this information until our day in court; they chose to keep this a secret from both my son and me until the judge finally forced their hand. Their silence wasn’t an oversight—it was a deliberate choice to hide the truth.
Despite my written requests for an explanation of how my child ended up in this family and for a formal apology, the Queensland Government has refused. The Minister has informed me they will not be entering into further correspondence with me or my son regarding this matter.
Today, we live in the shadow of National and State apologies that have proven to be hollow gestures. The word "sorry" means nothing when it is not followed by action. I have written countless letters to Prime Ministers, Premiers, Ministers, and the like, only to be treated like a political football. Instead of access to unredacted records, the removal of legal barriers, or redress, the Government offers us "anniversary morning teas" and plaques on rocks. This tokenism is an insult to our lifelong trauma.
The rhetoric I have received again and again is: "You have been given everything you are entitled to." Is that the truth?
This is the reality of life after all the apologies and, apparently, all we are entitled to.
The Government is not seeking to heal us; they are waiting for us to die so the problem disappears. We are not "nothing." We are survivors of a State-sanctioned crime, and we will not be silenced by a cup of tea and a piece of cake.
Statement on Post-Apology Harm: Forced Adoption
By Michael, Adoptee
I cannot pinpoint the first time I heard the phrase "forced adoption". It was sometime in the mid‑1990s, when I met my mother. She said the words plainly, as if they were self‑explanatory. I believed her, though the scale of it seemed impossible. There was no internet then, no archive to consult, no history to verify. Just her voice, and the shock of realising that what happened to me had a name.
At the time, I didn’t think about the era or the system that produced it. I was trying to understand the woman who had given birth to me. I had always known I was adopted. That part was not a revelation. What has stayed with me was a cold piece of manipulation my adoptive mother repeated: that nobody else wanted me, that she alone had stepped forward. I carry that sentence to this day—a small, deliberate wound planted early and left to do its work. And it has. I knew my mother was out there somewhere. I imagined siblings. I imagined an origin story. At times I pictured an alien ship landing and me being left behind, like E.T.—a fantasy that made more sense than the truth. The truth was less imaginative and far more brutal: I was a product of Queensland’s forced adoption machinery.
When my mother and I first spoke, we talked for hours. But I didn’t meet her first. I sent my partner. I was cautious, unsure how to enter a relationship that had been severed before I could form a memory. My hesitation had nothing to do with her. It came from the home I grew up in, where the words home, family, mother, father were stripped of meaning. Even now, the word "mother" catches in my throat. Even now, writing the word "home" drags up a childhood I work hard to keep quiet.
From the mid‑1990s to now, we have built and rebuilt a relationship. It has fractured, reformed, and grown. In 2016, she asked me a simple question: would I like to be legally recognised as her son? I didn’t need a document. She was my mother. But I thought it might help her. I thought it might repair something of what was taken from her the day I was born.
Being adopted did not define me. I didn’t talk about it. Not out of shame, but because I wanted people to see the person standing in front of them, not the mystery, the drama, or the pain that sits underneath who I really am. I don’t like labels. I don’t call myself a victim. So, when I contacted the Queensland Government to understand what was required to formalise our connection legally, I approached it openly, trusting the system to do what it claimed to do. I believed the government would help. The unit responsible was called Adoption and Permanent Care Services—with an emphasis on the word "care". I am shocked they still operate under that name. It is spectacularly misleading. They have certainly “taken care” of me, just not in any sense the public would recognise.
What followed is something I cannot yet describe in full. What I can say is that it has been genuinely shocking to endure in Australia. The abuse I suffered as a child could be traced to mental illness and substance abuse. What I have faced from the Queensland Government is different. It is darker, and I cannot justify the way I have been treated. I am still bound by an ongoing legal process, but I have spent the past ten years simply trying to survive it. The government’s shifting explanations have obstructed my search for the truth. I have been told, repeatedly, that I have been given “all I am entitled to.” Yet when I ask to see specific documents, I am told they cannot be located or do not exist. If that is true, it is an indictment of post‑apology conduct in this country.
When I question the gaps, I am told the information I seek is “not in the public interest.” When I write to the Premier, Ministers, senior executives, or civil servants, the first reply is polite. The second is final: they will not enter into further correspondence.
One day, when I can speak freely, you will see what has been done, who has done it, and what has been buried to protect the system. This is how Australia treats the people harmed by its own policies. I know the apologies were hard‑won. But I read something recently that stayed with me: people don’t just want an apology. They want the person apologising to list every terrible thing they did, so you know they know.
Over the past decade, I have been educated—unwillingly—in the political and judicial systems of this country. I am not anti‑government. I am simply shocked. Disillusioned. I have been treated as an inconvenience for trying to correct something that should never have happened. I am searching for my own history: how I ended up where I did, why, and who is responsible. In Australia, it seems I am not entitled to know that. Especially if the truth is inconvenient to the system that placed me in harm.
There is more to come. This is only the beginning of my forced-adoption story, and I use the word "story" deliberately. What has happened to me is so implausible it should read like fiction. Sadly, every word of it is true.
Record Your Truth
If you are a survivor, your experience is part of this truth. We are now accepting accounts of post-apology harm for inclusion in this archive.
Click to our Personal Account page and fill in the submission form.
If you prefer to write a free-form account, please reach out via our Contact Us page. Let us know you would like to submit a Personal Account, and we will assist you through the process.