Another sorry story

YESTERDAY'S apology meant a lot to thousands of Australians, but children are still being maltreated.

THEY call themselves the forgotten Australians, and they mean forgotten by everybody. Forgotten by parents who left them in orphanages, who sometimes promised to come back for them but never returned; forgotten by siblings from whom they were separated and whom they often never saw again.

Forgotten, too, by the state, which first sent them, or else took them, into institutions and then released them into the community, bewildered, unsupported and alone, expecting them to somehow cope.

By some estimates, there are, or were, more than 500,000 of them: state wards, orphans, child migrants and other children reared in state and church-run institutions throughout the 20th century.

About 900 of them gathered yesterday in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra, to sit and listen, to cheer and applaud as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull offered them an apology for their suffering.

Anyone who doubted that their suffering was real needed only to look at their faces: the damage was there, etched on their skin and visible in their red-rimmed, watery eyes. Only a few let the tears fall; they grew up believing that crying wasn't allowed.

Some context is necessary.

The homes and orphanages of yore, most of which closed in the late 1970s, operated when corporal punishment was common, including in public schools.

A parsimonious upbringing - one iron bed, one wooden chair, one pair of school shoes, one Bible - was considered good for the character and the soul.

The punishments in Australian homes and institutions were particularly cruel, and there was sexual abuse, too.

The plight of former wards was first given national prominence in 2004 when the Senate compiled a report that it called Forgotten Australians: A Report on Australians Who Experienced Institutional or Out-of-home Care as Children. It estimated that about 500,000 people had experienced institutional or other out-of-home care as a child.

That number is at best a guess and probably an inflated one, skewed by double or triple counting of children who stayed in care for many years.

(The report acknowledges difficulties with the numbers, saying data is "not comprehensive" and has "gaps and inconsistencies".)

Yet the numbers were significant, as was the damage. So the Senate's first recommendation was that various groups apologise.

The Catholic Church went first, apologising in 2004 "for any mistreatment which occurred in Catholic run institutions". (It restated that apology yesterday.)

The Anglican general synod, or whole church, also apologised in 2004 to "children whose experiences in institutional and out-of-home care provided by the Anglican Church caused them hurt, distress, and harm".

A national apology wasn't an easy thing to organise. Behind the scenes yesterday, disputes flared between different groups of forgotten Australians who felt excluded from the process.

Bonnie Djuric, for example, is a founding member of a group called Parragirls that represents young women reared in the Parramatta Training School and the Parramatta Female Factory in Sydney's west.

It was one of the largest state institutions for girls "in moral danger" or who were otherwise uncontrollable, and it was a harsh and unpleasant place.

The Parragirls group has 158 members, yet at first felt they excluded from the apology because none of them got one of the 200 so-called gold passes to yesterday's event, which would have allowed them to fly to Canberra with other former wards to attend the official dinner, and be put up in a hotel and so forth.

Instead, they had to go in a bus driven by the husband of their local member. uBt then the Prime Minister singled out Djuric in his speech, and she was over the moon.

"It was wonderful," she says. "I was sitting there, all the Parragirls know that we're not going to be acknowledged because we weren't part of the official process, and then he said my name. And, to be honest, I didn't need my name to be said, I would have preferred (it if) he'd said the Parragirls, but it was overwhelming."

Many former wards were grateful to have the Prime Minister speak not only to them but also for them, and to their children and their families, to perhaps explain "why some of us might not have been good parents, or why we might have found it difficult to trust", Djuric says.

Caroline Carroll, chairwoman of the Alliance for Forgotten Australians, which helped organise the guest list for yesterday's event, says Rudd said "the appropriate things that people wanted to hear. He used the word sorry and he acknowledged the hurt, and I do believe people were happy with what they heard."

It is important to remember that yesterday's apology was specifically aimed at children reared in a network of state and church-run homes most of which had closed by the late 70s.

It wasn't addressed to the 35,000 children still in state care, about half of whom live in private homes. It's a system that used to be known as boarding out and then foster care, and is now known as out-of-home care: it essentially involves adults in the community taking children into their homes.

There are no national standards for the care of these children. The level and quality of care varies from one home to the next.

We can't always know what motivates the carers.

The hope is that their primary motivation is benevolence. However, we need to accept that sometimes it's financial.

Foster carers in NSW, to cite but but one example, are paid up to $800 a week for each child, tax free, for the most damaged foster children (those with disabilities or extremely challenging behavioural problems, including smashing furniture and, sometimes, abusing their carers).

In itself, it's not a bad thing to pay foster carers. A fair argument can be mounted for substantial reimbursement, given the importance of what they do.

But the system operates without checks and balances to ensure that money given to carers is spent on things that guarantee the child a better life: a room of their own, a place in the local school, nutritious meals, care and protection.

State-based inquiries into care have shown that many foster children spend their adolescence sedated to control their behaviours. Some are entirely isolated from other children; others grow up in five or more foster homes, sharing space with up to 50 other children during their childhood.

The Create Foundation was formed in 1993 specifically to ensure that children who were in foster care were heard when decisions about their lives were being made.

The group held a summit in February, inviting children who were in state care or just out of care (because they had reached the age of 16 or 18).

They talked about the problems with the system: overworked staff and a "lack of commitment by staff to individual children" (which is hardly surprising, given staff turnover is high.)

The main issue raised was "too many kids in one placement", plus children felt they were being "pushed around" by carers, or "moved around too often", which meant their personal items, precious things, got lost or left behind.

There was "neglect of basic needs" and they felt they were treated differently from biological children in the family.

They also felt they might be being lied to: "not knowing the truth about their situation" was high on the list of problems.

They thought their case plans, which means the official state plan for their childhood, were frequently rushed or else "not child friendly". Too little thought was given to the ways in which they might join the real world.

Sadly, when asked about their hopes and dreams, more than one child said: "for there not to be any more children and young people in care".

It was with these people in mind that the Liberal Party's Tony Abbott cautioned parliament to pause yesterday and consider that "future generations could judge today's leaders just as harshly as they were judging those from the past".

"We can't be confident, for all our good intentions and for all our deeper understanding, that future generations, with their insights, won't be as critical of us as we are of our forebears," Abbott said.

Nonetheless, the importance of yesterday's apology for those to whom it was offered should not be underestimated.

For some, all that was needed was a sense of being acknowledged, heard, believed and understood.

Any doubts about how much it meant to this group must have disappeared when Turnbull talked about a visit he had made to the National Orphanage Museum in Sydney, where a faded identification sticker on an open suitcase caught his eye.

The suitcase once belonged to a young Peter Hicks, who used to pile all his worldly possessions into it as he was shuffled annually from the orphanage where he was reared to the home of a kindly couple who took him in for summer holidays.

He didn't know his parents or his siblings, and as a young boy he once wrote away, seeking answers, but "received a brief and abrupt response from the police saying they didn't do that sort ofthing".

Then, when he was already a middle-aged man, he received a call "out of the blue" asking him to visit a woman who was in hospital. It was his mother and she was dying of cancer. He knew her for six weeks.

"Peter is with us here today," the Opposition Leader said, and then, to everyone's surprise, Hicks, now 56, got up from his chair in the audience and charged towards the stage.

He took Turnbull in a bear hug and the Opposition Leader hugged him right back.

There was barely a dry eye in the house.