Displaced and Disconnected - a 17yo memory of advocacy, agency and finding my sister in foster care.

Recently i jumped on Osher Günsberg podcast 'Better than Yesterday' , I yarned all things #socialpolicy , Aboriginal Affairs and my #livedexperience of #childhoodtrauma, #homelessness and forced child removal. Check out the full episode here.

Below is an transcript extract from a specific example of my lived experience of forced removal policies and how they displace and disconnect young people. It is an issue that I am still so passionate about today, working with our survivors of the Stolen Generations and still today seeing young people removed at higher rates then ever.

I hope you get an opportunity to check out the episode.

And I was like, "Oh, while I'm here, I may as well." We'd never have sought out help as a young person, you know?

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Never ever, but it was the best clinical community intervention I could have had at that age. And, you know, really great soft entry as well, you know, it wasn't sort of something that was pushed at me or anything like that. But yes, I was lucky I had a small counselling intervention and there's actually a really interesting story about that when we talk about, you know, you've touched on some of the systemic barriers about us getting taken away and families getting pulled apart and when my sister was removed, not long after she was removed, I was in a counselling session. And funnily enough, my phone rings in the counselling session and I'm a 17 year old kid, hands to the phone, or 18, it might've been 18 actually.

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I was still in high school though. I answered the phone and this caseworker at the time said, "Oh, hey, Sam, your sister, she's demonstrated some promiscuous behavior. So we're cutting all contact with you and anyone in the family." Not that anyone in my family had seen her. And I was like, "Oh, okay." And that was it. It was just really blunt. That was the end of the phone call, hung up. And luckily, like I was in this counselling session with this counsellor, the counsellor could read my face.

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She's like, "What was that about? What happened?" So I had the opportunity to unpack what had just happened with a professional in front of me. And she knows that I'm not full of shit because she's literally watched it happen in front of her. And she goes, "This is not right. Let me call you." So she called my Barnardos worker and between her and my Barnardos worker, they coordinated this case conference with my sister's workers and their bosses. And out at the Barnardos office, there was about eight people. And I had, my best mate was there as a support person.

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We all sat in this circle and we said, "This is the only connection that this young kid has to her family. And this is the only connection he has to her family. This doesn't make any sense that a knee-jerk reaction like this would happen where you'd completely cut their contact." And they all talked about it. Anyway, the decision was made, "Let's keep the contact as it is. We'll monitor what's going on. We'll all keep talking. And we'll make sure everything's all good."

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And so, and the worker that made that call, she never looked at me and never said nothing, never apologized, just walked out. And I remember I was, 17-year-old kid, Osha, and I just felt like, "Fuck man." Lucky I was in that room with that counselor

when I got that phone call or I never would have seen my sister again because I didn't have the agency to be able to advocate for myself. And that's the story of what happens to our families and our communities.

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That's how we get torn apart. That's how we get dislocated and disconnected. And I was just so, so lucky that I was just in the right place at the right time and had a couple of support services that could be there for me.

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- Sorry, tears coming in my eyes, man, just thinking about if that was my brother or,