Lily Arthur

Lily Arthur is the CEO of Origins Australia and a vocal human rights activist and campaigner. She played a key role in preparing submissions that led to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s landmark National Apologies to Australia’s Indigenous Stolen Generations and The Forgotten Australians — young wards of the state who suffered institutional abuse.
Born in Bethnal Green, London, to an Irish returned soldier and an English Jewish mother, Lily and her seven siblings emigrated to Australia in the mid-1950s as part of the flood of post-war migrants seeking better lives.
At sixteen, Lily became a prisoner of the state of Queensland for the crime of being unmarried and pregnant. Her child was born during her incarceration and stolen under the Commonwealth Government’s Forced Adoption policies.
Later in life, Lily returned to university to study law and embarked on a crusade to find her son and uncover the truth behind her detention and his forced adoption.
She entered local politics, successfully lobbying for a Senate Inquiry into the Commonwealth Government’s historic forced adoption policies and practices, which saw 250,000 newborn babies, including her own, taken from vulnerable young unmarried mothers. Her tireless advocacy led to a 2013 National Apology from then Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Now the voice of over 150,000 Australian victims of forced adoption and thousands more across the Commonwealth whose babies were stolen under historic policies, Lily has addressed the Scottish Parliament on behalf of their victims and has been a keynote speaker on the issue both in Australia and internationally, including in New York.
She has appeared on Channel Ten with Kerrie-Anne Kennerley, in Australian Women’s Weekly, and on various TV shows and in magazines.
Lily lives with her husband Des and their spoiled rotten Pug, Puggy, on Queensland’s Gold Coast and is a grandmother of ten.
Her fight for compensation for victims of forced adoption is now before the Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.