When Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul woman Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was ten-and-a-half years old, she was taken from her family.

Stolen.

Just as she was about to close her eyes, her father spoke to her in a "way that is all too familiar".

"Big girl … I am so sorry, pack some things, they are coming."

"You are just a kid. Your stomach immediately knows. You have no choice in this moment but to survive."

Over the next eight years, Ms Turnbull-Roberts was housed in numerous out-of-home care (OOHC) placements before finally fleeing the captive, colonial system that is "perfectly designed to be doing what it's doing today".

The human rights lawyer and the ACT's inaugural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Commissioner's debut memoir, Long Yarn Short: We are still here is a searing examination of a system that continues to remove First Nations children from their family and community at a shockingly disproportionate rate.

In a country which continues to wrangle with the implications of past massacres, genocide, and brutalisation of Indigenous people, Ms Turnbull-Roberts argues the current violence of family policing isn't much better.

"Being stolen changes your life forever," she says in the book. "This is not just history. This is right now."

Speaking to National Indigenous Times before her appearance at the Wheeler Centre in Naarm, Ms Turnbull-Roberts is open and warm, but with a fierce determination which underpins her work and flows through Long Yarn Short.

She says her memoir captures the narrative of the ongoing violence of family policing, with a conversation centring on "how are we assessing risk?"

"Why is it when it comes to Indigenous children and young people here in Australia, that if you are aboriginal, the risk is far higher?" she asks.

"What we often tend to see is when the department [Child Protection] has this idea, or this risk, or report…in the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people, often there is that more heightened form of surveillance, and there is that more heightened form of family regulation in the welfare system.

"When it comes to our children and young people, and I guess my own removal that took place, there was already that plan to forcibly remove me and placed me into a system that actually didn't know how to adequately provide to my needs as an Aboriginal young person in the system."

The realities of a system operating through privatisation are laid bare in the book.

Private agencies continue to receive funding for the number of children under their care, which in turn, creates a financial incentive to keep children in the system for longer.

One placement family "was completely money-driven," Ms Turnbull-Roberts says in the book, having international students in one room and herself in another; asking for money so she could "live her dreams" and visit Cambodia.

"My vulnerable body paid off their mortgage," she said.

In a review of Long Yarn Short, famed Bundjalung author Melissa Lucashenko said: "If you think the state can be a safe parent, read this book.".

It is a theme Ms Turnbull-Roberts highlights throughout Long Yarn Short.

"The system never loved me. The system never could."

"But my people could.

"My community does."

The memoir examines a system that too often removes children without Indigenous oversight or understanding, maintaining a colonial narrative that currently sees more than 1 in 10 First Nations children in Victoria taken from their families in a rate on par to that of the Stolen Generations.

"In my professional capacity, what I tend to see is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and children continue to be criminalised where there are issues of actually 'there could have been a need that could have been fulfilled, something could have been prevented, there could have been more support for this family'," Ms Turnbull-Roberts tells National Indigenous Times.

"Instead of actually supporting this family or this child with the needs that are right in front of our eyes, we're seeing the use of pathologizing and assumption…we're assuming it's just not going to get better."

However, the book is also one of hope and resilience—not just for Ms Turnbull-Roberts, but for the thousands of Indigenous families and children who have survived "family policing".

In a letter to her younger self, she says: "We have known what works and does not work since the first sunrise."

"And I promise you this: we will be here through every sunset and new day that begins.

"We will not stop. We are still here."

Asked what she wants the reader to take away from Long Yarn Short, Ms Turnbull-Roberts said she wants people to realise there is a "better solution to addressing the ongoing crisis that we're seeing around child removal here in Australia and family policing".

"I'd like people to learn that Australia's history and harm towards First Nations people hasn't stopped,' she says.

"I would like readers to walk away with understanding that 'Woah, this actually happens in Australia? This is our history; this is right now?

"And then think about, what can I do with that response? What can I do with that energy? What can I do with that reflection piece?"

Long Yarn Short: We are still here (240pp) is out now from University of Queensland Press.