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This page serves as an archive of sorts. Don’t rely on what you find here: chances are the news is stale and there are updates available.

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UPDATE: “Human Rights and Memory”

My colleague and co-author, Dr Jacqueline Wilson, was not able to attend but the presentation was based on our joint chapter to be published in the book mentioned below.

However, I can make available a longer paper I presented at a workshop on the day before the Conference. You can download and read the longer speech here.

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Overseas Conference: “Human Rights and Memory” 

I was part of a team of authors at the conference introducing their chapters of a book, In the Midst of Apology, to be published shortly by Palgrave Macmillan. Dr Jacqueline Wilson and I wrote a chapter about the importance of Care Leavers and historians challenging the official versions of Care Leaver history as found in Annual Reports, institutional histories and in the countless case notes and so-called personal records.

On the day before the main conference, I presented a paper at a workshop on the uses of history in relation to historical child abuse and neglect.  The workshop was a for a network of some 60 historians and related professionals from 14 nations. They share knowledge about inquiries, apologies, and redress processes in various countries around the world.

My paper asks: “What more can we do?”  I completed my paper at the wonderful British Library (near King’s Cross-Euston Station in London). What can we do?

For a start, we can work on better understanding of:

• why the recommendations of many previous inquiries were never implemented – and therefore why we continue to make the same old mistakes as if they were happening for the first time
• why, after such a long silence about child sexual abuse, has it now come to dominate royal commissions and media coverage?
• how to avoid the trap of reducing child abuse and neglect to sexual abuse alone at the expense of other damaging forms of abuse and neglect
• the importance of historians adopting a wider audience – in fact, seeing Care Leaver survivors as both audience and clients of their historical research
• and, one step beyond all that, having historians see Care Leavers as colleagues who bring important new perspectives to historical research.

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“ONCE MY MOTHER” FILM SCREENING & PANEL DISCUSSION

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) screened the film, Once My Mother, Sophia Turkiewicz and Rod Freedman’s multiple award-winning feature documentary, on Sunday 26 October 2014, at 10.20 pm – hardly prime time!

A screening followed by panel discussion and Q&A session with Sophia Turkiewicz was  presented by the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, on Thursday 16 October. The screening was a huge success – and the panel discussion afterwards rolled on well after the scheduled closing time (8.00 pm) . About a dozen people carried on to dinner and as I was leaving at 10.45, some were still hard at it.

It was good to hear the responses to the film by a range of people from various perspectives.

I was asked to respond from the point-of-view of a person who spent time in orphanages – as was the case of Sophia Turkiewicz, the Director and Scriptwriter. Sophia answered questions and received comments from the audience.

Here are my notes about seeing the film: 

Thank you for inviting me to experience again this astonishing, honest, and beautiful film. At first, I thought the story would be far removed, geographically and psychologically, from my own family story. Now I find a great deal in the film that connects.

First, the separation of the child from her mother – and all the baggage that goes with it: the utter depths of abandonment, the raging anger, the dried-up grief, the brooding about the betrayal of the person you thought you could most trust.

Sophia and I are among the half a million Australians who were separated from their families in the twentieth century surviving in orphanages and other children’s institutions, or in foster care. Only a minority were ever legally orphans. Most of us were ‘orphans of the living’. We were either taken from our families by welfare officers or the police, or we were placed in ‘care’ (always in ironic quote marks) by parents who were unable to keep us.

I was two years of age when I was first abandoned by my parents (with one of my two older brothers) and made a state ward. I was then released on probation to my mother for a year. Not long after, I found myself charged again with neglect; and so began ten very long and painful years in the Ballarat Orphanage, until I was 15. Not once in all that time did anyone explain why my parents were not able to have us. And I lived with the scars of that grievance for decades.

Like Sophia, I heard my mother say, ‘I’ll come back and get you one day’. And like Sophia, I sat and waited, and waited some more, watching for the tram that would bring her back. Eventually, like Sophia I lost faith in my mother – and in my father. I stopped believing. Unfulfilled hope hurts too much in the end.

When our reunion did eventually occur it was not easy to forgive. Maybe the elastic bands of kinship had stretched beyond snapping point. How could you know the persons who had given birth to you when they had so forsaken you? Is it possible to be a good son when you have so much forgive?

My mother’s consistent refusal to speak about her history, our history: was that her way of saying, ‘I’m ashamed of my failure to be a mother to you all the years of your childhood’? I wondered whether her relentless sadness was a silent plea for forgiveness that they had left us in that hellhole all those years while they…did what? Who knows?

‘I’m losing the woman who was once my mother,’ Sophia says. That moment in the film takes me back to my mother’s last years and her long sad days of shuffling daily from her bedroom to the kitchen – and back to the bedroom as soon as it got dark. Waiting for the end of her sad life.

I think of the bitter-sweet exchange between Helen and Sophia as their roles are reversed with the passing of the years:

• Sophia: ‘You put me in the orphanage…’
• Helen: ‘Then, when you grew up, you put me in an orphanage…’

We did our best to ease our frail mother’s dying pillow in her own home, honouring her wish not to be put in a home for the aged. Yet, when I became an orphan finally in 2003, at her graveside I spoke for ten minutes about her life; but knew I had nothing of real substance to say.

It was in that moment that I resolved to know the truth about my mother’s sadness. Unlike Sophia, mine was not an arduous geographical voyage, tracing strands of global history in foreign countries. But getting access to the files in Australia about my parents has been a rough and stormy journey.

I was gratified to find records of my parents pleading repeatedly with the authorities for the return of their three boys. My anger shifted to the petty bureaucrats and their contemptuous references to my parents’ ‘irregular domestic situation’ – they were not married – and the conclusion that they would therefore not provide ‘a sufficiently reasonable moral environment to justify’ a family reunion. Yet they turned a blind eye to the violence and sexual abuse that was common in our substitute ‘care’.

I had interpreted my mother’s reluctance to talk about her childhood as a way of shielding us – and herself – from our painful childhood in the Orphanage. I was only partly right. There was much more to it than that.

The archives are closed to prying eyes, even of kin, but I wanted them opened. I was warned by Justice Harper of the Supreme Court

the information may not be pleasing…save for such satisfaction that may come from having the relevant knowledge where before there was mere speculation. But it is for them [the descendants] to decide whether they wish to take the risk that what they may discover may disappoint.

This was the turning point in my search. Like Sophia’s search, I discovered a remarkable story. Like Sophia (without her gift for compelling narrative), I am reconstructing the story that explains the deep pain that ached in my mother’s childhood. It’s a story that stretches back to 1865 to Edward Sinnett, my mother’s father’s father, who at the age of 11, was abandoned by a mother intimidated by Edward’s brutal stepfather.

In turn, Edward’s son, half crazed by the brutality of the trenches at Gallipoli and the Western Front, wreaked havoc on his family, believing irrationally that his first-born, my mother, was his only true child. My mother met her father for the very first time after the ‘Great War’. He was – unlike Sophia’s delighted father – a tormented brute. He so humiliated his wife that she was forced to relinquish three babies in quick succession. Two of the babies, my mother’s sisters, were abandoned to the very same Ballarat Orphanage. One lost her life there. Not only did my mother suffer the sudden loss of three little sisters, she experienced the shock of finding that the father she so yearned for during the war made her, too, hang by the fingernails over a chasm of fear.

Had I known all this at the time I’m sure I would have had a more loving relationship with the woman who was once my mother.

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View the trailer and other information about the film here 

Other Panel Speakers: 

Dr Erminia Colucci is Research Fellow at the Global and Cultural Mental Health Unit, Centre for Mental Health, School of Population and Global Health (University of Melbourne), where she currently is the coordinator of the Melbourne Refugee Studies Program.

Alexandra Dellios recently submitted her PhD in History at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Julie Fedor is Lecturer in Modern European History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Malgorzata Klatt is Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, where she has been teaching postgraduate subjects in Master of Education Policy (International) and Master of Teaching.

Dr Cate O’Neill is an historian from the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre. She is the national editor and research coordinator of ‘Find & Connect’ (www.findandconnect.gov.au), a web resource about the history of children’s institutions in Australia.

Sophie Skarbek was born in Poland before the war and exiled to Kazakhstan with her mother, brother and aunt in April 1940. Her father was killed at Katyn. After ten years as a refugee, she arrived in Australia in 1950, where she later trained and worked as a psychologist.

Sophia Turkiewicz has worked as a freelance drama director in film and television for over thirty years. Her credits include the feature film Silver City, which was released internationally in 1984 and won 3 AFI awards.

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The History of Child Welfare in Australia in Three Easy Steps

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has just released three research papers by Prof Shurlee Swain of the Australian Catholic University:

• History of Child Protection Legislation in Australia
• History of Institutions Providing Out-of-home Care to Children
• History of of Australian Inquiries Reviewing Institutions Providing Care for Children

For those who are not familiar with the history of the Australian child welfare ‘system’, the three papers are an accessible gateway.

These excellent papers can be read and downloaded along with other commissioned research here

I will post some comments about each paper as soon as possible.

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UK Care Leaver – transition to adulthood statutory guidance and regulations updated May 2014.

This is aimed at agencies responsible  planning for the transition of  “looked-after children” from ten age of 16 or 17 as they move towards independent adulthood.

The requirements are based on the principle that: “Care leavers should expect the same level of care and support that others would expect from a reasonable parent.”  And so it carries through till the young person reaches 25 years of age.

In working out a transition to adulthood plan, the key questions the authorities should ask include:

Is this good enough for my own child?

How can I provide a second chance if things don’t go as expected

Is this plan tailored to their individual needs, particularly if they are more vulnerable than other young people?

This is a long way from the bad old days when, as soon as we were old enough to et a job,  we were given a change of clothes wrapped in a flimsy package and sent on our way.

Download the document here.

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British Home Children who died in the First World War

An initial listing has been compiled of 966 British Home Children raised in Canada and identified as having died in or as a result of the First World War.  (In Australia we call them Child Migrants.)

A plaque bearing the 966  names will be unveiled in Toronto on July 28th.  It is hoped to include service details and photos. The list is here.

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