They number more than half a million yet the ongoing trauma from their time in orphanages and institutions remains poorly known
Christopher Hopkins and Stephanie Convery
When Judy Leonard entered the orphanage, she was given a bed with a number. That was how the staff would refer to her. Not by her name or even by one of the cruel nicknames the other children gave her, but by her allocated space in the dormitory: C2.
“I would like the readers to close their eyes,” Judy says now, “and imagine that it was them at age nine.”
Judy’s early childhood, along with those of her brothers and sisters, was spent playing in the streets and beaches of Melbourne’s west. Then the police arrived. “We were classed as neglected,” Judy says. “Dirty, unwashed, uneducated.” She was bundled into a car with two siblings. “I remember looking back out of the car and seeing my mum and dad cry. And I’d never seen my father cry.”
For six months, the three siblings were locked away at Turana, an overcrowded accommodation (or “reception”) centre in Parkville for children in the welfare system. It doubled as a remand facility for “problem” children. Police were said to refer to it as “the rat bins”.
A judge later ordered that the three children be sent to an orphanage. They could come out again, he said, when their parents’ circumstances improved.
It would be years before Judy went home. In some ways, she never did.
Judy, now 79, is among the “forgotten Australians”: more than half a million people who were placed in orphanages, institutions and other forms of out-of-home “care” before 1990. Many were subjected to physical, emotional or sexual abuse and neglect. Depression and thoughts of suicide are among the wounds many of them carry.
Despite multiple government inquiries and a 2009 apology from then-prime minister Kevin Rudd, Forgotten Australians’ trauma and the ongoing effects of it remain little-known and poorly understood. For those facing the prospect of aged care, the horrors of their institutionalised childhood can rear up again, only to be met with incomprehension by those around them….
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Australia is still in denial, its history of forgetting a festering wrong
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