Sue-Anne Hunter carries the stories of thousands of children with her but one in particular is motivating her to hold Australian governments to account for their treatment of First Nations people.<\/p>\n
She met the Aboriginal boy as his caseworker, after he was removed from his family through the child protection system, then tracked his name through youth detention, adult prison before he was finally added to the grim list of more than 600 Aboriginal men, women and children<\/a> who have died in custody since the landmark royal commission of the 1980s.<\/p>\n \u201cIt drives me \u2026 to keep his name alive and know that he did not die in vain,\u201d she says. \u201cIf we can get change that will be in his honour.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018We descended from the Wurundjeri,\u2019 Hunter says. \u2018There were only 13 of us left after colonisation, so we descend from one woman.\u2019 Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Hunter was appointed as the inaugural First Nations children\u2019s commissioner in August, and spoke to Guardian Australia in Canberra this month as legislation to establish the commission as an independent office passed parliament.<\/p>\n The Wurundjeri and Ngurai Illum Wurrung woman has a busy schedule, meeting some of the most vulnerable children in the country and using their input to push for legislative change.<\/p>\n Soaring rates of children in out-of-home care and the overrepresentation of young people in custody are her priorities. Indigenous children are as much as 12 times more likely to be in care than non-Indigenous counterparts, and more than 60% of children in custody are Indigenous \u2013 they are detained at 20 times the rate of non-Indigenous children.<\/p>\n She says she sees \u201ckids in youth detention, in out-of-home care, sitting with families when children are being removed, in jail cells, with young kids in our hospitals, and in prisons with parents visiting children.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t do that work and not be changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Hunter grew up in the outer Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows as one of six children. She dropped out of high school in year 10 \u2013 dyslexia meant she struggled to fit into the classroom environment.<\/p>\n She worked as a child protection caseworker, completing her undergrad studies at La Trobe University and master\u2019s at Harvard. Her mentors include the US trauma scholar and psychologist Bruce Perry and the longtime Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency chief executive, Aunty Muriel Bamblett.<\/p>\n