Women with children in front of Girls Dormitory at Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement c1930

“The thing about it was the structure of the place. Your whole life was mapped out for you. Say you were in the babies dormitory, you turned five, your mother had no choice of keeping you. If she wanted to keep you the choice wasn’t hers until she married and moved out of the dormitory. Your mother was sent out to work and you were packed over to the girls dormitory.
You stayed there until you turned fourteen when you were sent to work… Some girls were sent to work in the hospital but a lot like myself were sent out to domestic work. When you came home for holidays, you were never allowed to go to the camp, you had to stay in the dormitory… I left the dormitory when I was twenty-one to get married.”
— Ruth Hegarty, interview, 1988″