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Overview
Drawing on interviews, submissions to the Senate Inquiry, and personal experience, this revealing documentation describes, for the first time, the experience of Forgotten Australians from the perspective of the survivors. In August 2004, Parliamentary senators wept as they presented the report from the Senate Inquiry into the treatment of children in care. Half a million children grew up in “care” in 20th-century Australia, and most often these children lived with daily brutal physical and emotional abuse in the sterile environment of an institution. Unraveling with tenderness, compassion, and intellect the seemingly explicable accounts as to how and why this occurred this study reveals the profound personal costs to the children involved—and the huge social and economic ramifications of past policies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781921696787 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fremantle Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Orphans of the Living
Growing Up in 'Care' in Twentieth-Century Australia
By Joanna Penglase, Sarah Shrubb
Fremantle Press
Copyright © 2005 Joanna PenglaseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-921696-78-7
CHAPTER 1
Speaking out at last
First of all I want to say that, after 40-odd years, at long last somebody is listening to us. At long last we can talk about these events that happened to us ... When I first came out of the Home, it was the sort of thing you could not talk about. At that time, who would listen to you? It has only been in the later years that people have been able to come forward and have their say because there are people listening at long last.
Brian Hart, who grew up in a Salvation Army Home, WA, in the 1950s
I have found it very difficult to write my own story, to relate those painful events and to expose so much of myself in such a personal way. But at some point I realised that however difficult it was, I had to describe what had really been going on for me over the years — mostly hidden, but more real than anything that was visible. I have spent my life hiding, but I don't want to do that any more.
In a more general sense, speaking out is very difficult for all of us, and the Senate Inquiry has done us an enormous service just by inviting us to do so. People who have grown up in 'care' are often afraid to speak up, and indeed unable to do so, because in the very roots of our being we feel, because our experience has taught us this, that we don't matter to anybody and so have no right to speak. So writing a thesis was a great struggle for me. I feared that a thesis written in my own voice and based on my own experience was not valid because I was not valid. I was sabotaged daily by the question, 'Who do you think you are?', a question I heard constantly throughout my childhood, addressed not only to me but to all the other children in the Home. The answer for us as children was: nobody, nothing.
So every day, while I was writing the thesis, I battled with the split in me between wanting to speak out and feeling absolutely prohibited from doing so, fearing I would be ridiculed and in some way punished. It felt dangerous to expose what I thought and felt, and the first time I gave a paper at a conference, in 1993, my voice shook so much I could barely get the words out. I had been trained quite ruthlessly in the Home to associate being 'myself' (rather than a self identical with my carer) with danger. In Self and Others, RD Laing says, 'The act I do is felt to be me, and I become "me" in and through such action ... [so] there is a sense in which a person keeps himself alive by his acts.' As a child, I had never learnt to keep myself alive by my acts. In fact I had been trained to do the opposite: it was only safe not to act on my own initiative.
In these fundamental ways, then, despite the fact that my own childhood experience is in many ways not a typical one, I identify with the histories I read and hear from other care leavers, which tell of the more usual type of institutional experience; I feel the same as they do. What resonates, of course, is the loss of parents — and of their love and their care — and the consequent feeling of being unwanted. There is also a feeling of extreme vulnerability to the behaviour of others when you grow up in a situation where you are dependent for your care on non-kin. The feeling that you are never safe in the world, that nothing seems to add up; you are always watching your back, always feeling frightened, always expecting something terrible to happen. Your memories are of uncertainty, fear and, often, the possibility of violence.
How this book came about
In my switched-off state, I had no idea what I was getting into when I began my PhD in 1990. I saw it as an attempt to understand how I had come to have the sort of childhood that I had, but I was really looking for the answer to a personal question: why did my parents not want me? Why did they give me away? I could not face that question at the time, though, so I set out to answer a more manageable 'academic' question: how could the Department charged with the welfare of children in New South Wales have licensed the Home I lived in? What sort of society, what sort of attitudes to children, could allow that? As Jilly Marsh, one of my interviewees, said to me: 'It was a terrible way to grow up. You think, how could that have happened?' These were the feelings I was wrestling with.
So I wrote the thesis, initially, as I had lived my childhood — with my feelings split off from my actions. It took a long time for me to put myself into my work. I could not do it until I had help with my feelings about my parents, about losing them, and about what had happened to me because of that. I was lucky that one of my supervisors encouraged me to defer further work on the thesis until I had found the help I needed to support me through it. That was when I found my analyst. Once I resumed the thesis, this supervisor also encouraged me to put myself into it as a personal narrator — even though this is not conventional academic practice.
This book is based on my thesis, but I have expanded the study to make it an account of the institutional experience right across Australia. I have therefore eliminated much of the detail of the original research, but kept the insights into policy and practice which my study of NSW child welfare gave me. I interviewed ninety 'Homies' and 'wardies' for the thesis; other voices in this book are from the hundreds of written submissions which have been made by care leavers to the Senate Inquiry, or from those who gave oral evidence at the hearings in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in late 2003 and early 2004. The terms of this Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care were designed to target the people whose histories had not been covered by the previous inquiries (into the Aboriginal stolen generations and the child migrants): the 'forgotten Australians' who had grown up in institutional care. 'Care leavers' is the term which is now commonly used to describe us — it includes people who grew up in Children's Homes and other institutions or in foster care, and covers both wards of the state and children who were never wards of the state, like me.
In their submissions to the Senate Inquiry, people from Homes all across Australia speak of their experiences, and their accounts both support and amplify what I had learnt through my own research, and also through running CLAN. In this book I have used the Inquiry submissions to expand the history beyond New South Wales, plus other material, including legislation and one representative annual report from the relevant Department of each state. I chose the year 1956 to provide a snapshot taken midcentury. I use pseudonyms for all my interviewees, but I use real names when quoting from written submissions, as people did when they made them, and because those submissions are now on the public record. I use a capital 'H' when speaking of 'Homes' because I think it is important to differentiate the word irrevocably from 'home'. Although the word 'orphanage' was generally replaced in the postwar period by the term 'Children's Home', little else changed. A Home, like an 'orphanage', was an institution characterised by the absence of all that life within a family home implies.
My focus in this book is on Homes for dependent children simply in need of care — children whose parents were unable to care for them and so put them in Homes, or who had been removed from their parents by the state. Child welfare was (and still is) a state responsibility, so legislation, policy and practice were specific to each state, and in all states there was a clear divide between the government and the non-government sectors. State governments took children into 'care' (usually making them state wards), sometimes ran Homes, and also fostered children, and the ultimate responsibility for 'child welfare' rested with them. However, it was the non-government sector — predominantly churches and charities — that did most of the actual 'care' in Australia in the 20th century, and most of that was institutional. Even in New South Wales, where the state avoided using the nongovernment sector to 'care' for state wards, and had a high rate of foster care, there were, as well, thousands of children in institutional care run by the charitable sector. I will expand on this in later chapters. The period I am talking about in this book is the decades of the 20th century up to the late 1970s, when to be 'put in a Home' was the commonest form of out-of-home care experienced by Australian children — as well as being one of the major 'solutions' to family breakdown. That is why there are so many of us: close to half a million in the 20th century alone, according to the estimates of the Senate Inquiry.
By the 1970s, looking after children in large institutions was well on the way to being phased out in favour of small family group Homes, cottage Homes, or foster care. There are no longer any orphanages or Children's Homes of the generic type that I describe in later chapters, at least in the West.
Many people who grew up in out-of-home care in this era had a mixture of related experiences, so in this book, as well as people like me, who grew up in a Home, there are others who spent time in Homes combined with time in foster placements, and people who 'graduated' from Homes (and/or fostering) to 'training schools'. 'Training schools' were correctional institutions run by state governments and some non-government organisations (see Chapter 5), where children who were considered potentially 'delinquent' or who had actually committed criminal offences — even if often very minor ones — were placed, usually (but not always) as a result of court determinations. The earlier name for such institutions was 'reform school' or 'reformatory'. I cannot do justice to this experience or its complex history, which needs its own account, but it is inevitably woven into this book — as it is into the report of the Senate Inquiry — because it was not uncommon for children to go from being 'in care' to being detained in 'training schools'.
One striking aspect of this history of institutional care is that the experience seems to be a very widespread one. Canadian, British and Irish narratives written by 20th-century care leavers, for example, tell the same story as Australian accounts. The similarities in these stories are quite explicit, regardless of where and when they occurred in the Western world. In other countries too, in very recent years people have begun to speak up and demand recognition and social justice, and governments and past providers have had to begin to face these issues.
Uncovering this history
In an article written in 1981, the American scholar Peter Lyman asks, 'How do we learn from the history that we live?' He answers his own question like this. We learn, he says, 'not from the formal chronicle of events, but from the subjective feelings and thoughts with which we experience the events of our everyday lives'. There is no other way to write the history that I relate in this book. The 'subjective feelings and thoughts' of people who grew up as inmates of Children's Homes are the only evidence we have to place beside the official histories of institutions — which are written in a way that renders the inmates of the Homes invisible: as narratives of 'rescue' by benevolent adults of 'unfortunate' children. The great achievement of Forgotten Australians is that it presents this history from the perspective of the people who lived it (although admittedly filtered through their adult selves). In this book, I too am writing from the perspective of the 'children', which means I am painting a very different picture from the 'official' one.
There is little systematic documentation of the central role that institutional care has played in the history of child welfare throughout much of the 20th century in Australia. This became apparent when I first set out to look for material on Children's Homes for my thesis. When I began this research, I assumed that in the NSW Department's archives there would be a file on every Children's Home but I could not have been more wrong. This was a highly bureaucratised department and there must once have been a file on all Homes licensed by it, but they have obviously been destroyed, since what remained was six small boxes. Where files had been kept, it seemed to be when a Home had come to the Department's attention because of a problem — for example, non-compliance by the Home with licence regulations about hygiene, diet and facilities. In these few remaining files there was almost no comment on children or staff. To say I was disappointed not to find a file on my own Home is an understatement; I remembered inspections by officers of 'the Welfare' and had been looking forward to reading their reports. I just could not believe there was no file, and I kept hoping I would find one. I had been relying on finding it and seeing something written there which would give me some clues as to why they had thought the Home suitable — clues to how 'the Welfare' 'thought'. My experience in the NSW archives was symptomatic, as we have subsequently discovered through CLAN, of an Australia-wide indifference to this history.
It is, indeed, only in the last seven years that any of the states of Australia have made an attempt to catalogue their delivery of institutional care in the past, whether statutory or charitable. To put it another way, it is only very recently that it has occurred to the Departments responsible for out-of-home care in the past that this kind of record-keeping might be an essential service that they should be providing as a matter of social justice to the thousands of Australians who grew up as their responsibility. The purpose behind such directories is that in their pages, former inmates of Homes can find the institutions they lived in, and use the contact information supplied to request their personal records (which may, however, no longer exist). To understand the significance of these records to care leavers, we must remember that they are sometimes the only information they will ever have about their childhood: there is often — perhaps even usually — nobody in their lives they can ask to fill them in about what happened to them as children.
The NSW Department of Community Services published the first directory, but only in 1998. Called Connecting Kin, it is described as 'a guide to help people separated from their families search for their records'. It lists all the NSW state institutions and all known Children's Homes run by charitable organisations or churches, with an indication, where known, of the location of their records. Not all Homes are there, as we have discovered through CLAN. Homes such as mine, a private business, are not recorded. Connecting Kin is almost the only proactive publication: all the ones that have followed have come about as the result of the recommendation of an inquiry, and without this prompt, they may not have been compiled at all. For example, as a result of the 1999 Forde Inquiry, Queensland in 2001 published Missing Pieces, a similar register to the NSW one, also listing both state and non-state institutions. Guides to records were produced by both the Catholic and the Anglican churches as a result of the 1997 inquiry into the stolen generations.
In 1999 the Catholic Church issued A Piece of the Story: A national directory of records of Catholic organisations caring for children separated from families, which lists 130 institutions across Australia operating over 160 years. In 2003 the Anglican Church published For the Record, noting that although its brief was to provide indigenous people with information about their records, ultimately it had to cover all Anglican agencies providing residential 'care' to children from 1830 to 1980. This was because, while doing the research, 'it quickly became evident that it would not be possible to reliably distinguish between those agencies which provided 'care' to indigenous children and those who did not'. So without haphazard record -keeping on the part of this 'care' provider, Australian care leavers who are not Aboriginal would still have no guide to their records of 'care' in Anglican Homes. As it happens, the Anglican Church has now anticipated one of the recommendations of Forgotten Australians (number 14), 'that any agency or state government that has not compiled a directory of records do so now'. Many care leavers might, however, feel excluded when they pick up this guide, since the cover features an Aboriginal painting and the guide is described as 'Background information on the work of the Anglican Church with Aboriginal Children' with, as the second part of this sentence, 'and Directory of Anglican Agencies providing residential care to children from 1830 to 1980'.
The latest publication of this type is the WA Department's Signposts, a very comprehensive guide to records from 1920; as yet there are no publications from other states. Signposts came about, as the co-ordinator of the project related at its launch in 2004, after she heard Leonie Sheedy, who founded CLAN with me, speak at the Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect in Perth in 1999. It was listening to Leonie's account of growing up as a Victorian state ward, she said, that helped trigger 'our thinking about how we could make improvements to our systems for children in care', and one area they identified was the need to improve access to information for care leavers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Orphans of the Living by Joanna Penglase, Sarah Shrubb. Copyright © 2005 Joanna Penglase. Excerpted by permission of Fremantle Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Title Page,
Copyright,
Acknowledgements,
Note to the reader,
My story,
Preface,
Speaking out at last,
Why Homes?,
'Complete and austere institutions',
A window on the Homes,
'The Welfare': what happened when the state got involved?,
'A terrible way to grow up ...',
The aftermath,
Numbers of children in 'care' in 20th-century Australia,
Picture credits,
Senate Inquiry submissions cited,
Notes,
Bibliography,