Mary Mackinnon, from Adelaide is Mrs Ah Wing's cousin through the paternal side; their fathers were brothers.

"My mother was a full-blooded Indigenous woman from the Alyawarre people, but my father, Jack Weir, was the white station owner of Derry Downs Station in the Northern Territory, where my mother worked," Mrs Ah Wing said.

"I don't think he acknowledged his Indigenous children."

Mrs Ah Wing's daughter, Sondra Ah Wing said in those times hundreds of Indigenous children were born to white station owners.

"They were not classed as white or Indigenous," she said.

Mrs Mackinnon's father, Norman Weir, had settled in Victoria and it was only several years ago that Mary learned she had cousins from NT.

Her husband gave her the trip to Mount Isa as a birthday present.

In spite of the two women having vastly different upbringings and experiences, they said they had spent days catching up.

"We've been talking about everything, and it's been a time of overwhelming happiness," Mrs Ah Wing said.

Mrs Mackinnon said she wished her father was still alive.

"I don't know whether he knew about his brother's family."

For Mrs Ah Wing it has been a time of revisiting her past, memories too painful to talk about previously.

She had lived out in the bush with her mother, Peggy, and her siblings, and was "taken" on December 11, 1949.

She remembers the date clearly.

"It was a week before my 10th birthday.

"I remember Bob Darken, the policeman, turning up to take me away.

"I was a frightened little girl."

There was no talking, no discussion, that she can remember.

"They just grabbed the kids and took them."

She cannot remember her mother being there, or her mother's response, but she said she never saw her mother again.

"She died when she was 33, and my uncle told me."

Mrs Ah Wing said she was taken to the police station at Mount Riddock where her cousin, Patsy, who had also been "taken", was waiting.

She remembers the policeman's two daughters, "with the blondest hair I'd ever seen".

The cousins were taken to the Overland Telegraph Station at Alice Springs for the night, a holding place for children from the "stolen generation".

Then they were delivered to St Mary's Half Caste Institution, a Church of England school and home, which was to be Mrs Ah Wing's home for the next seven years.

Mrs Ah Wing had no birth certificate, but was given a birth date, and another surname: Webb.

"They wanted to break the connection with the Weir family," explained Sondra Ah Wing.

"The name Webb was from the area around Mount Riddock."

It wasn't until she met her husband, now renowned for his mine surveying, William Ah Wing, at church in 1956, that she was freed from St Mary's and able to pursue her own life as Maisie Ah Wing.

Mrs Mackinnon said she was horrified and grieved at Mrs Ah Wing's story.

"How wicked to take children away from their mothers like that.

"Any mother would be devastated," she said.

For the two cousins, from different worlds, the past few days have been a time of tears and remembering, putting together pieces of the family jigsaw, surrounded by photos from both sides of the family.

For Mrs Ah Wing, it feels like a kind of closure.