Both there to perform unpaid labour, she now reflects, at 71, how wrong this practice was but says she benefited from growing up around other cultures.

As a little girl Mrs Batinich said she only saw the kindly protecting figure the Aboriginal girl, Rita Drecher, provided to her and her siblings. 

“I never forgot about her and would worry about her and wonder what happened to her,” she said.

Mrs Batinich said if her or her brother, Bart, were smacked, they would run to Rita for protection. 

However, she said she felt “great sadness” at discovering years later authorities had taken Rita from her parents and put her to work.

“We just accepted that she was there,” she said.

Mrs Batinich’s family had organised for Rita to come work for them through the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, where between 1911 and 1968 hundreds of girls were placed after being forcibly removed from their families as part of the Commonwealth’s assimilation policy.

The girls were told that their families didn’t want to see them again and were sent out to the homes of white people to work as domestic help for around 6 months to a year at a time, where they often suffered abuse.

Although Mrs Batinich will never know how Rita coped with this situation, she said she felt it was a happy time for her in their home and she was treated like one of the family. 

She said she doesn’t know whether her parents knew of how Rita came to be at the home. 

Unlike Rita, the Italian, Fraceso Pissemetti, whom Mr Batinich thinks would have only been around 20, was not a protective figure but rather would cart the children up the their parents for a smack when they were naughty.

Consequently, the children didn’t have the same fondness for the Italian, but today she looks back on the time as a unique part of her history, calling it an “incredible experience”. 

Reflecting, she said it must have been a very lonely time for the young man.

Mrs Batinich said farmers in Italy were made to fight in the Second World War and that Fraceso was merely a pawn, rather than a willing participant.

He was camped in Cowra until the army sent him out to work on the Batinich’s farm, supplying him with cigarettes and chocolate. 

Fraceso ended up returning as a paid worker for the family after the war was over and was given the opportunity for them to help him set up a life in Australia.

However, the Italian didn’t end up taking up the offer as he had a small child in Italy whom he feared would not survive the boat trip all the way to Australia.

Mrs Batinich said her father’s decision to take in Fraceso in was unpopular with the neighbours.

“But my father didn’t look at things like that – he knew they weren’t going to hurt anyone,” she said.

Her father and Fraceso were even once chased out of a pub in Boorowa.

But her family were more accepting of other cultures, she said.

Fraceso taught the family bits and pieces of Italian and Mrs Batinich’s mother how to cook pizza and other Italian foods. 

“She enjoyed very much using olive oil,” she said.