WARNING: This story contains distressing content
A place with a painful past, the Kinchela Boys Home saw an estimated 400 to 600 Aboriginal children exposed to routine acts of cultural genocide between 1924 to 1970.
On Wednesday, the significant site on Dunghutti Country in New South Wales, was recognised by the 2022 World Monuments Watch as one of 25 heritage sites worldwide whose preservation is urgent and vital to the communities surrounding them.
For the many who were taken and exposed to the "cruelty" that happened there, it is an experience that stays with them for the rest of their life, survivor James Michael "Widdy" Welsh told NITV News.
"Being children, we couldn't understand why we were being treated in the way that we were treated," said Mr Welsh.
"The only thing that they wanted us to do was make us work and shut up . . . They'd sometimes often say, 'shut up you little black bastards'.
"I do realise now as an adult, that, the whole idea was to re-program our brains so that we could be assimilated into their workforce for them as slaves... that's the only thing I could say."
Mr Welsh was eight-years-old when he and his six siblings were taken from their mother and placed in institutions.
He was placed at Kinchela, where children were stripped of their names and given numbers instead. His was 36.
"Our silence allowed a lot of evil pain to be given to us to pass onto our children," he said.
"That's as simple as you'll get, and as truthful as you'll get.
"I still hurt from it, and the only way that it will go away is for a museum and healing centre to be built on this site.
"I really think this will bring this community together."
It was at the home where Mr Welsh first met Roger Jarrett.
Mr Jarrett said he felt "sub-human" at Kinchela, where children were "flogged" all the time for the littlest of things.
"When I walked through that gate, they took me name away and I become number 12 for six-years in that place," Mr Jarrett told NITV News.
"They stripped me naked and shaved my head.
"For five months every night, not only me, but the boys, cried every night for their mothers and their family, wondering what the bloody hell were we doing there."
Mr Jarrett said he looked forward to the day that Kinchela Boys Home was handed back to survivors so they could complete that part of their healing journey.
Survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home pose for a photograph with the assigned numbers they were given when they were taken there. Source: FAIRFAX MEDIA/AAP
"My love in my heart, as a kid, is still in that bloody home. It's a fact," he said.
"And returning the ownership to KBH survivors is going to allow me to return the love that I lost in that place.
“Just the thought of going there makes you feel a little bit better than you were before - giving you a feeling that you achieved something - I achieved my last little bit of pain easing, you know?"
Now, Mr Jarrett and Mr Welsh both sit on the Board of the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation, which has a vision to restore the now vacant complex into a place where historic cruelty and abuse can be recognised, and where survivors can heal.
In 2012, the site was finally listed on the NSW State Heritage Register, and in 2013 it was listed as an Aboriginal Place under the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974.
Today, the remaining buildings and landscape of the former boys' home show evidence of a dark period in history that continues to affect generations of Aboriginal people.
