Neville Austin was only 15 months old when he taken from his mother’s custody and made a ward of the Australian government after his mother failed to pay £8 in fees to the boarding home where he was being cared for.
More than 45 years after their separation, Mr Austin has received the first compensation payment from the Victorian Government to a member of Australia’s “stolen generations”, the term used to describe the Aboriginal children taken from their parents by Australian Federal and State government agencies from at least the early 1900s and until as late as the 1970s.
Eileen Austin lost custody of her son after she fell four weeks behind in boarding fees to the St Gabriel’s Babies Home in East Melbourne, The