HEART of the MATTER
When the police came knocking on Helen Eason’s door, she picked up her baby and ran with him in her arms. “I jumped fences and I tried to hide – I didn’t want to hand him over,” she says, tearfully remembering that dark day. “And when I did come back, they told me that they were putting him in care. I begged, I pleaded, I screamed. I threatened to take my own life. But he was gone. How could I go on?’’
Eason knew the feeling of despair all too well. Over a 10-year period on three separate occasions, all four of her older children had been removed from her care. The 44-year-old Gomeroi and Biripi woman had struggled with drug abuse and spent time in jail on drug charges, but she devoted her life to trying to reunite her little family in a system seemingly hellbent on keeping them apart.
“It felt like I had been beaten,” says Eason. “When they take your babies, they take your existence. It seems a
