18-05-2025
Healing from inherited trauma as a Stolen Generations descendant
An unexpected personal loss was the catalyst for Laura Jones to explore how her grief could be connected to traumatic events that happened before she was even born.
The 23-year-old does not like to speak about the troubled time, but said with the support of her nan, her great-grandmother's younger sister Aunty Lorraine Peeters, she began to understand her pain could be connected to deeper generational wounds.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images of people who have died.
"I'm a descendant of the Stolen Generations," Ms Jones said.
"I'm going to assume most people can relate to the wound of abandonment.
"But when actual abandonment goes back generations, that can still affect you now.
"And unfortunately [that wound] will come up for you time and time again until you really face it."
Inherited trauma is a phenomenon that's only gained acceptance in Western circles relatively recently through epigenetics, the study of what influences a person's gene expression.
Everyone is born with DNA, a fixed set of genes derived from their biological parents.
But now scientists are discovering factors like environment and experiences can influence how particular genes are switched on and off — and some of these patterns are passed on to offspring.
However, for Gamilaroi Wailwan women such as Aunty Lorraine and Ms Jones, science is just catching up to something talked about among their families for decades.
Aunty Lorraine was four years old when she and her five sisters were stolen from their parents to live at the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls.
At 15, she was sent to work as a servant for a white rural family.
Now 86, her program Marumali, set up to support Stolen Generations' survivors and their families, helped Ms Jones navigate the mentally "dark space" she encountered in her grief at 19 years old.
Part of her recovery involved reflecting on both her grandmother and great-grandmother being removed from all family and cultural connections and raised in institutions where they survived extreme abuse.
"That was when I realised there was some stuff to work on here so that I don't carry it on to the next generation," Ms Jones said.
Before the 1990s, Western science viewed intergenerational trauma through psychological and social lenses, attributing it to experiences such as exposure to a mother's stress in utero or learnt behaviour from traumatised caregivers.
"Initially, it was thought that we were born with a clean slate," said geneticist and University of Queensland School of Biomedical Science professor Divya Mehta.
"So as an embryo, at birth, all the epigenetic marks [of the parents] are erased and a child develops its own epigenetic marks."
But advances in the last 30 years have provided evidence that some genetic expressions or "marks" on certain genes may be inherited.
The most compelling research has been done on animals where it's easier to control the environment and interpret the data.
One 2013 study conditioned male mice to fear a specific odour by receiving an electric shock when the smell was released.
Their offspring showed sensitivity to the same odour despite never experiencing the shock themselves, and the effect persisted into a second generation.
However, in humans, it's still a hotly debated topic.
"It's very tricky to dissect environmental influence from genetic inherited traits," Professor Mehta said.
"We still do not understand which [epigenetic] marks are passed on, and why these marks and not others."
And it's not necessarily all bad news. On the flipside is potentially inherited resilience.
"Is there a benefit in some marks being passed on?" Professor Mehta said.
"For example, you'd hope the genes that make you respond better to stress would be passed on so the next generation can cope better."
A positive environment, exercise and supportive social connections are all influences that have so far been measured as effective in returning epigenetic marks on stress genes to their baseline levels.
"We see that people who are more isolated have higher rates of depression in general, whereas people with strong supports around them do much better," Professor Mehta said.
"These are things we know at a psychological level or a symptomatic level, but now we're seeing the same thing on a biological level."
Indigenous understanding of intergenerational trauma having a biological link predates Western science.
Concepts like "trauma load" being passed through the mother to a foetus are shared through storytelling and oral tradition.
"Most Aboriginal people just know it," Aunty Lorraine said.
"If I don't heal in my generation, it's automatically transferred on to my children.
"They also understand the mental health system doesn't fit trauma. It only diagnoses the behaviours of trauma, not the real core."
A cornerstone of her own journey and what she urges in others as "the ultimate in healing" is to return to country, the geographical land of one's ancestors.
"It's where all our spirits lie. We want to be able to come back to country whenever the need is there," Aunty Lorraine said.
Now living in Queensland, Aunty Lorraine recently travelled 900 kilometres to the Beemunnel Reserve near Warren in western New South Wales where she and her sisters were born.
Scores of relatives from across Australia joined her for the second family reunion in 10 years.
After a morning of celebrations, the afternoon was spent remembering those who had died, with a ceremony that "laid their spirits to rest" in the Beemunnel.
"I'm only the vehicle of the spirit I've been given. So the vehicle can be buried anywhere, but you must take my spirit home," Aunty Lorraine said, standing beneath the tree under which she was born.
Tears rolled down Tammy Wright's face as she called out names of relatives who had "passed into the Dreamtime" while shovelling soil onto a kurrajong tree planted in their honour.
"It's very hard to describe [connection to country] as an Aboriginal person," she said.
"My church is Mother Earth — you're standing on it."
The 56-year-old Gamilaroi Wailwan woman is Aunty Lorraine's niece.
She made an eight-hour trip to the reunion from Kempsey on the NSW Mid North Coast with her grandkids, aged 8 and 5.
"They notice a huge difference in the land. The ground's red, the trees are different.
"And just for them to see it … it's very emotional for me."
Ms Wright has worked for decades with people to address intergenerational trauma, including running cultural camps with Indigenous prisoners in the early 2000s.
"Eight out of 10 [of those inmates] were impacted from the Stolen Generations," she said.
These days Ms Wright works with more children and has seen how identity and culture can help support them better with triggers they might be experiencing.
For Ms Jones, who travelled from Sydney, the reunion was "bittersweet" because it "highlighted the immense loss of connection, culture, and kin we once had".
"While many believe that this was hundreds of years ago, for our family, the Beemunnel was our home only two and three generations ago."
Western research on intergenerational trauma has tended to focus on cohorts of people with high stress exposure, such as combat veterans and paramedics.
Now, for the first time, the Australian government is backing a study led by UNSW Sydney scientia professor Jill Bennett into its significance among First Nations people with a $2.8 million grant.
Professor Mehta is heading up the epigenetics component of the Transforming Trauma project with the aim of helping to develop tools to alleviate trauma's impact.
"I think the key thing here with epigenetics is that it is dynamic in nature. The DNA code is fixed — you can't do anything about it. But the activity part of it, the epigenetic expression is changeable," she said.
"It shows us why our DNA is not our destiny.
"You talk to families who have gone through huge amounts of trauma.
"To think, 'Oh, it doesn't end with me,' that's very tricky.
"So I keep bringing it back to the dynamic nature of what we're looking at and why we're looking at the environment and lifestyle factors that can change epigenetics."
When asked about such research, Aunty Lorraine was circumspect about it helping First Nations people, but hoped it would lead to more recognition.
"Intergenerational trauma is not something you can see. It's a legacy First Nations people are carrying," she said.
"And it's not only the Stolen Generations — it's day one of settlement, being moved off country, having language and culture taken, and the grief of it all — that's all part of the trauma load.
"But non-First Nations people don't acknowledge it. People acknowledge there's a gap, but they don't understand what that gap is."
Support for Indigenous Australians is available by contacting the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support line 13YARN on 13 92 76.
