No laughter, no tears at home

Years of neglect left lasting scars, writes Caroline Overington 

CHILDREN need to laugh and to cry but both of those things were banned in the Victorian homes where Heather Templeman was raised.

"If you were crying, they would say 'Why are you crying?' " she says.

"They'd say 'I'll give you something to cry about', and whack you across the head. If you were laughing, it was 'I'll give you something to laugh about', and whack you around the head."

The experience of being abandoned and raised without love affected every aspect of Ms Templeman's life. She has found it difficult to form relationships, and difficult to trust anyone. It was with some trepidation that she accepted an invitation to be in Canberra yesterday to hear Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull apologise to children raised (and often abused) in Australia's notorious homes and institutions for orphaned and neglected kids, during the last century.

"When I left the home, I felt I was nothing," Ms Templeman said. She never married, but had one child, a son, from whom she is estranged. She also has two grandchildren she has not seen since they were two and four years old; both are now in their teens.

"That's the way it is for people. It has an effect on everything. It's why we need this apology, so people can see that what happened to us was real."

It may be difficult for today's young parents to understand but, in the Depression years and between the two world wars, it wasn't uncommon for Australian parents, including married couples, to drop one or all of their children in orphanages, while they sought work.

Ms Templeman went into her first home at the age of four. She left at 14.

"Dad was a drunk, and used to bash Mum up, very bad," she says. "He threatened to kill her. His brother, my uncle Wally, came and said to Mum, get the kids and go."

Ms Templeman remembers that her mother would visit her at different homes over the next decade "but not very often".

"She'd promise to come and we'd wait for her, and she wouldn't always come." She never saw her father again but, last year, the group known as CLAN, which is largely responsible for organising yesterday's apology, helped her track down his military record. With it came the first photograph of him she'd ever seen, and it means the world to her.