An anguished foster child’s cry from the heart: ‘I just want my family back’

She came to them covered in boils, sores and with a history of malnourishment, but with love and support, Milly’s foster parents grew her strong. Why, then, was she removed from them so traumatically?

Foster child Milly records a video, begging to be kept with her white carers. “She’d run away from wherever they put her and come back to us and then we’d have to force her to leave,” her foster father Tom tells The Weekend Australian. “It was horrendous.”

The tears stream down her face as she looks at the camera. There is something this little girl wants to say and she will try to quieten a rising surge of emotion long enough to say it. “I feel like I’m never going to be a normal kid with a normal childhood. I just want my family, I just want my (foster parents) and my brother back together like things were,’’ she pleads.

“Can you please make this possible, please?”

This video was shot a year ago. She is begging to be returned to her foster parents, Tom and Marie, the white couple who have raised her since she was a toddler along with her brothers and sisters.

She came to them covered in boils and sores, with pus coming from both ears and a history of serious malnourishment requiring hospitalisation. With love and support they grew her strong and they were shocked when she was taken from them and bounced through multiple alternative care arrangements that she keep running away from.

As we talk in Tom and Marie’s Top End home, a welcoming place filled with photos and pets surrounded by neat tropical gardens, Milly comes back from school. She is shy when she sees me; strange women sitting at the kitchen table don’t bode well. This child, who suffered serious attachment issues from her earliest days, is still worried that someone will take her away again.

“She’d run away from wherever they put her and come back to us and then we’d have to force her to leave. It was horrendous,’’ Tom says. “But after about the 11th time we said we can’t do this anymore. I had to say, ‘I am not going to make you get in the car. I’m not going to send you away anymore.’’

Case workers and police attended the house but nobody else was going to force her, screaming and swearing, into the car either. They gave up. And so here is Milly, making herself popcorn, a flurry of pets at her feet.

Her birth mum can pop in anytime, as long as she’s sober, but she’s currently in prison. Milly’s grandparents and aunt visited this week because they want to give me the biological family’s perspective. It’s good that Milly is with Marie and Tom, they tell me, because they know where she is and they can visit her.

But the grandfather is worried about Milly’s younger brother Benny. “We don’t see him,’’ he says. “No one tells us where he is. I want to see his face, to talk face-to-face. He needs to know where we are.”

These grandparents have stories and cultural practices they want to pass on and if they can’t care for the children themselves it doesn’t mean they have nothing to offer. Cultural connection is meant to be one of the key tenets for Aboriginal children in care.

Tom and Marie have formed a close bond with the children’s birth family.

“We knew we couldn’t raise these kids without them,’’ Marie says. “We always said to them we would look after these kids as long as they needed us to.’’

They maintain these relationships in a non-judgmental way – there is no glossing over the difficult facts of the birth family’s lives, the alcohol, violence and trauma that led to the neglect of the children.

I look at this foster couple, a health worker and teacher who have lived and worked in remote Indigenous communities for years. People who know them, professionally and personally, speak of them in glowing terms. They went into fostering simply because they wanted to help children in need.

All these years later, they are a little bit broken by what they’ve witnessed and how they have been treated. I wonder why they haven’t walked away. “We said we would be there for these kids as long as they needed us,’’ Marie says simply. “We made a lifetime commitment.”

Read The Weekend Australian’s full investigation.

If you or anyone you know is struggling, call Lifeline 131114.