IT took Far North Queensland woman Lyn Northage decades to reveal terrifying secrets of extreme abuse and neglect while growing up in foster care in Tasmania.

And even though she spent Christmas with her sister Bev Smith of Melbourne and brothers Robert and David for the first time in more than 25 years, none of these horrors were whispered.

When Ms Northage was just two, her mother died of leukaemia in Victoria and her distraught father took the grieving family to Tasmania.

But within days, the children’s worlds turned into an unimaginable hell when they became wards of the state.

Ahead of a historic apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to 500,000 Forgotten Australians on Monday, Ms Northage shares her family’s incredible journey after breaking their silence to fight for justice.

Pictures: Forgotten Australians Lyn Northage and Bev Smith

Story of a Forgotten Australian

Our mother was kind, quiet, gentle and made us feel very special.

We remember not having a lot as a family, but we had each other and all our family shared.

The final months became too much and she passed away at 30 with leukemia.

The memory of her illness and the loss of our mum was a tragedy. We stayed with our Dad with the help of our grandparents, aunties and uncles for a year.

Within two days of arriving in Tasmania with Dad, we were put into Salvation Army care and fostered out to separate families.

So after losing mum, we lost our dad and finally each other.

After three months, the Tasmanian Government made us wards of the state and separated us into different foster homes – we were three, five, seven and nine.

We were kept separated throughout our time in foster care.

My foster family made it quite clear to the welfare department that under no circumstances should they allow us to mix together.

My foster mother went to extraordinary lengths to keep us separated, including dragging me out of a shop after running into Bev and her foster mother.

As children in state care we had no stability or continuity, we lost count of everyone.

Some of the houses were good, we would have liked to stay in those a little longer, but the threat was always over your head that you will be moved on.

Bev moved to 14 homes between the ages of five and 12.

All of our belongings were in two boxes.

One for clothes. The other for toys. Things would go missing every time we moved.

We were put into homes without sufficient checks.

We suffered physical, mental, verbal and sexual abuse by members of these foster families.

This abuse included Bev, as a nine-year-old girl, being forced to perform sexual acts with another foster child, 13, while the 18-year-old son of the foster parents watched.

Another occasion, this same teenager tried to kill my brother Robert and Bev by pushing them into a furnace at his father’s work.

When I was 12, six of my toes were amputated because my foster mother thought they were getting too big.

These were the people, according to the government, who were supposed to care for us better than our own families.

Bev, at age 12, felt safe for the first time since she was five when they placed her into Clarendon Children’s Home, an institution for girls.

When Bev reached 16, her desperate pleas to find our father came true.

He was living in a small boarding house in Launceston, all alone with his memories of his lost family.

When Bev visited him he showed her photos of us that he had kept all those years.

When I turned 18, Bev was able to find out my address from a previous foster mother.

Bev wrote to me, introduced herself and asked if I wanted to meet her in Melbourne.

Can you imagine what that was like – to wait 13 years to see your own family again?

All those memories that you would normally share growing up together were stolen from us, along with our heritage and culture.

We thought when we did get back together, that we would all be one big happy family like any normal family.

Instead we were four strangers trying to make up for lost time.

For many years we never spoke to each other about the abuse we had suffered while in care. At a very rare family reunion in 2004, we spoke about our time in care.

We were all unhappy about the treatment and we wanted to speak out about it.

But who would listen to us?

It was 2007 when Bev stumbled on an article on the internet about the Tasmanian Ombudsman who held a review in 2003-05 for those who were abused while in care.

Even though the department had all our contact details, we were not told about this important review. We immediately called and were told it had closed.

We then wrote to the then Tasmanian premier Paul Lennon in March 2007 about our family’s horrific abuse.

Mr Lennon wrote back and said that it was regrettable that you weren’t told about the review process when you requested to see your file.

"Thank you for writing to me and I wish you well in the future," the letter said.

In other words – he told us to go away.

We spoke to Slater and Gordon Solicitors and they said we needed to engage the services of a Tasmanian solicitor because each state had different laws.

The Tasmanian Law Society recommended a solicitor who wrote several letters to various organisations such as Victims of Crime and the Premier – but to no avail.

After trying for so long to be heard, we went to Tasmania in December 2007 to shame the government – through the media – into re-opening the review into child abuse of former wards of state.

The decision to approach the government and Tasmanian public to talk about our horrific abuse in care was terrifying.

To relive those memories of the abuse we suffered in care was very traumatic after trying to bury them for the past 40 years.

The same day we were to appear on ABC TV’s Stateline, Mr Lennon issued a statement to all media outlets that the review had been closed for two years and would not under any circumstances be reopened.

Not to be deterred we fought on engaging the help of the Opposition.

Further media exposure placed tremendous pressure on the government until Mr Lennon announced he would take a fresh look at our cases.

He finally caved and agreed to open a whole new review but it was only for a short time. And again this meant that more people would miss out.

This made us more determined than ever that this review would allow former wards of state who had suffered as children to be heard.

All our hard work and effort in getting this review opened in Tasmania in March 2008 finally paid off.

The new review was only opened for three months till the end of June 2008.

The government only placed one lot of ads in six capital city newspapers.

We tried to get them to commit to more interstate advertising in regional locations, but they would not.

I rang many newspapers trying to get print exposure about the review, newspapers like The Courier Mail, The Herald Sun, The Age and The Australian. We also contacted all the major TV shows like A Current Affair, Sunrise, Today Tonight, 60 Minutes but no bite. We spoke several times on Across Australia with Charles Woolley as advocate for abused former wards of state.

We were constantly talking to the media. No matter how many knockbacks we got we just kept going.

We still pushed along with other supporters like the Alliance for Forgotten Australians and Care Leavers to have the government make this review open ended.

When the review closed on July 31, 2008 – there were 1142 registrations and 981 formal applications with more than 200 from interstate to have their claims heard.

The government has since taken up the recommendation to set up an Abuse Trust Fund for those who have yet to come forward.

We have spoken about our abusive past on TV, radio, and newspapers to perfect strangers and to all the organisations we reached out too during this campaign as ordinary everyday people.

We live in hope that what we endured will never be repeated. We need our precious little ones monitored on a regular basis, where their welfare can be checked without warning to make sure that they are being cared for in the best possible way.

Children in care need advocates to make sure they are not being mistreated and that they are free to talk without fear of retribution.

We are now writing about our struggles and triumphant win against the government in an upcoming book.

My sister and I have been invited to attend the formal apology by the Prime Minister at Parliament House on Monday.

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