Long Yarn Short

We Are Still Here

A blockbuster memoir from one of Australia's most powerful voices, Long Yarn Short is the incredible story of a young woman's journey - from being stolen from her family as a child to becoming a top advocate for First Nations young people.

At just ten years old, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was forcibly removed - stolen - from her family, community and kinship systems. After eight years in various out-of-home care placements, Vanessa fled the system, reconnected with kin and returned to country for the very first time. Only then did she begin to heal.

In this book, Vanessa embarks on an extraordinary work of truth-telling, exposing the ongoing violence visited on Black children, their families and their communities by the systems that claim to protect them. As a survivor of out-of-home care, a practising lawyer fighting for the freedom of others and now also a mother herself, she takes an unflinching look at the heartache and trauma caused by racist family policing, the shameful rates of child removals and the steady pipeline of First Nations children into the criminal justice system.

Long Yarn Short is a story of struggle, grief and love; a call to action from one of the most powerful voices of her generation. As a leading expert in children's and young people's rights, Vanessa invites readers to imagine solutions for a better world - a world of support and empowerment, not punishment - and demands that they listen when she says, 'We are still here.'