Aunty Margaret Yunupingu was four years old when government officials took her from her family in Arnhem Land in 1962. She was part of the Stolen Generations — Aboriginal children removed from their families and placed in institutions or foster care as a matter of government policy.
The Stolen Child
Margaret was placed in a mission dormitory in Darwin, where she was forbidden to speak her Yolngu language, punished for crying for her mother, and taught that her culture was inferior. She didn't see her family again for eighteen years.
The mission was run by Christians. For decades, Margaret associated Christianity with the people who stole her. The hymns they sang while Aboriginal children wept. The prayers they said before meals the children hadn't chosen. The cross that hung on the wall of the dormitory where she was hit for speaking her own language.
When she finally returned to Arnhem Land in 1980, her mother had died. Her siblings didn't recognise her. Her language came back slowly, painfully, like relearning how to breathe.
The Impossible Choice
In 2004, Margaret attended a community gathering in Yirrkala where a visiting pastor — himself Aboriginal, from the Pitjantjatjara people — spoke about forgiveness. Not cheap forgiveness that pretends nothing happened, but the costly kind that acknowledges every wound and still chooses to release it.
Margaret was furious. How dare anyone ask her to forgive? But the pastor wasn't asking. He was sharing his own story — his grandmother had been taken too. And he'd found, after years of rage, that the bitterness was destroying him faster than the policy ever had.
Margaret went home and wrestled with God for three weeks. She'd become a Christian quietly in her thirties — not through the mission's version of faith, but through an Aboriginal woman in Darwin who showed her a Jesus who wept with the oppressed, not one who stood with the oppressors.
The Testimony
At a community reconciliation gathering in 2005, Margaret stood up and spoke. She named what was done to her — the theft, the isolation, the cultural destruction. She held nothing back. And then she said: "I forgive the people who took me. I forgive the mission workers who didn't know what they were doing. I release this burden because Jesus carried it first."
The room — Aboriginal elders, white community members, government officials — went silent. Then people wept. An elderly white woman who had worked at the mission as a young nurse came forward and asked Margaret for forgiveness. Margaret embraced her.
That gathering led to a reconciliation programme that ran for three years in the community. Multiple families began healing processes that had been frozen for decades.
"Forgiveness didn't mean what they did was okay," Margaret says firmly. "It meant I wasn't going to let it own me anymore. God gave me back my language, my family, and my land. The last thing He gave me back was my heart."