Australia Day honours: Pritchards are ‘safe people’ for the vulnerable

Gay and Gary Pritchard began calling their home a ‘safe place’ decades before the term entered the vernacular.

Gay and Gary Pritchard at home in Bunbury. Picture: Matthew Poon

Gay and Gary Pritchard began referring to their modest brick home as “safe place” decades before the term entered the vernacular.

They were newlyweds — she was 20 and he was 21 in 1977 — when they took their first tentative steps as foster parents, agreeing to look after two girls, aged three and five, whose mother was killed in a car crash.

Since this first informal arrangem­ent the Pritchards have cared for about 200 children, some for years and others for a few days while authorities vetted a child’s relatives.

“We just wanted the kids to understand we are safe people, you are safe here,” says Gay, 61.

Today the Pritchards are appoint­ed to the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to children as foster carers. Each gives the other credit for the patienc­e and love required to have been government-appointed carers for the past 27 years. They have done it while raising their own four children in the coastal city of Bunbury, 180km south of Perth.

Gay says the children they see now are different to the ones authorities brought in the beginning. More kids come now because of parental drug and alcohol abuse. Many are permanently brain damaged because their mothers drank while pregnant.

“When it’s severe enough, you can see it before you see the behaviour — the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is in the facial features,” Gay says. “And despite what a lot of people think it’s not just Aboriginal kids, it’s right across the community.”

But they agree theirs is a job with so many rewards.

“Seeing them smile, seeing them start to feel self-assured, it is the best,” Gary says.

Whenever a foster child leaves the Pritchards’ home for good, they take an album Gay has compiled for them; a deliberately optim­istic record of the child’s achievements and happy moments.

She may include a photograph of the child beaming at the beach with an ice-cream, any school certificates earned, at least one of their drawings and milestones such as a photograph of the day they started to crawl. The Pritchard­s mostly leave themselves out of the albums.

“It’s not about us, it’s for them to look back and reflect on some good things they did,” Gay says.