This project is being undertaken on behalf of our community, those still alive today and their descendants, directly affected by their time as children at the Mona Mona Mission.

We have an opportunity to submit your personal stories to the Royal Commission and I want to help you get compensation.

Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

There are members of our community who are still deeply affected by their time as children and young people at Mona Mona.  Although, I have heard, in the many ‘local transport’ (hitching) pickups in our community of positive stories of the Mission Days.

Having read* Conspiracy of Silence by Cairns Historian, and otherwise Awesome Cairns Local, Dr Timothy Bottoms, and in particular the pages 90-95 of the book I was struck by the severe descriptions of the abuses – sexual, persistent, violent, very young children, both girl and boy children – to be frank – it broke my heart.
*actually to be honest… I read enough.  It is such hard going because it’s so gruesome.  All of it… the Frontier Wars were bloody and cruel.

[excerpt]

As I came to understand the history of Mona Mona myself through my own research, I started to see the older members of our community and I wondered how old they all were in the Mission Days.  I started to understand that the ‘dispersal’, capture, and imprisonment on missions and how that process was undertaken – in the day.  Because it was in the day.  Unfortunately, the days up this neck of the woods… weren’t so long ago!   In living memory. In fact the Mona Mona Mission only closed in 1962 – that’s 74 years ago (in 2016).  Children born towards the end of the Mission Days at Mona Mona, before it was closed down and the community that had come together there we distributed back out around the region once again… perhaps scrambling to re-unite their own families and friends in the poverty forced onto them by the unsympathetic bureaucracy of the time… I don’t really know what happened.  How would anyone know if no-one is asking?