The last time Laurette Burgess saw her mother she was gripped as much by terror as the hands of those who tore her away. She was aged 3.

Her mother was in despair as the little girl was taken by boat from her home in Cape York, in the far north of Queensland, and delivered into the hands of missionaries.

When she returned more than half a century later as Aunty Lauri, an Aboriginal elder, a woman told her of Rosie Butt’s anguish as the boat was rowed away. “She was the one who was told by the missionary to take me from my mother,” Aunty Lauri, now 72, said. “She said my mother was holding me. My mother just threw herself to the ground crying.”

Little Laurette Butt stayed with missionaries on a tiny island between the mainland and New Guinea for several years until she was shipped to an Anglican children’s home in Brisbane in 1942. “I can remember the morning we left – it was very dark and drizzling and the missionary woman, Sarah, wrapped a blanket around me,” Aunty Lauri said. “I didn’t understand a lot – all I knew was fear.

“Sarah said, ‘Your mother will come for you after the war – you’ll be safe here’. I lived for that day, but it never happened. I stayed under their care for 13 years. It was terrible, like a prison. But my mother was with me in spirit for as long as I can remember.”

Aunty Lauri said that her mother would not have been able to find her because her surname and records of her birthplace and date of birth had all been changed. “The nun used to tell me she was my mother now, and I hated her for it,” she said.

In 1980 she found details of her real name and mother’s name in church records and was heartbroken to find that her mother had died in the 1950s.

“It would have been lovely to have had our family together, if my mother could have put her arms around me and said, ’I love you’. It wasn’t meant to be.”

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