The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia: Just Like a Family?

322 Pages·2018·3.562 MB·English

by  Nell Musgrove, Deidre Michell

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY
OF CHILDHOOD
THE SLOW EVOLUTION OF
FOSTER CARE IN AUSTRALIA
Just Like A Family?
NELL MUSGROVE AND DEIDRE MICHELL
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood
Series Editors
George Rousseau
University of Oxford, UK
Laurence Brockliss
University of Oxford, UK
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to
historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no histor-
ical series on children/childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within
Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing
works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the
identity and attraction of the new discipline.
More information about this series at
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Nell Musgrove · Deidre Michell
The Slow Evolution
of Foster Care
in Australia
Just Like a Family?
Nell Musgrove Deidre Michell
Australian Catholic University University of Adelaide
Fitzroy, VIC, Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood
ISBN 978-3-319-93899-8 ISBN 978-3-319-93900-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93900-1
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P
reface
This book attempts the enormous task of placing a robust critical exam-
ination of foster care in a deep historical context, and communicating
that to as wide a readership as possible. Writing a book with multiple
audiences in mind is never an easy task, yet we saw no other option when
we began our discussions about how to capture the years of research
we had completed into the complex history of foster care in Australia.
From the first time we spoke about researching this topic together we
shared an understanding that there was important information to record
and understand for the benefit of scholars, care leavers, policy makers,
social workers, foster carers, other people directly touched by foster
care—and the wider Australian public. As our work progressed we real-
ised how much our findings resonated with people from across the globe
too. In recognition of these multiple audiences, throughout the text we
have referenced lightly, being careful to show where our ideas and evi-
dence have come from, but emphasising readability and accessibility over
rigid adherence to academic stylistic conventions. Similarly, we decided
that detailed theoretical and methodological discussions were largely not
suited to this work—for those interested, our engagement with these can
be accessed in the other scholarly publications from the project.
From the beginning we also thought broadly about who has been
touched by foster care. This is not just a book for those who have been
foster children, or foster carers, but also for people who have worked
within foster care systems, people who have grown up with foster siblings
in their families, families who have been separated through foster care,
v
vi PREFACE
and anyone who has gained or lost loved ones linked with foster care. We
have been more successful in capturing some of these experiences than
others. In particular, the voices of parents who have lost children to fos-
ter care are not as present as we had initially hoped—yet they have always
been in our minds. We also acknowledge that the work is often critical of
the people responsible for administering foster care—yet we also found
people who had devoted their professional lives to making foster care as
strong as possible, and we want to praise their good will and good work.
But the truth as we found it was that systems have failed many families,
many times, over many years, and we need to confront that.
Although this work was conceptualised as part of the post-inquiry
and post-apology responses to historical child welfare policies and prac-
tices, a conversation which has been heavily shaped by considerations of
the failures of past welfare systems, we have also tried to keep an eye on
where foster care has succeeded. There are some stories of survival, resil-
ience, flourishing and love, but they are almost always tempered by suf-
fering and sadness. There have been decent and devoted people involved
in foster care, and there has often been good will, but we could—and
should—do things so much better than we have in the past. Therefore,
with this book we have interrogated what we see as the most important
questions: Why have we as a community largely forgotten or not noticed
foster care? What has worked? What has failed? Why have we returned to
using foster care when problems with the system recycle with alarming
regularity?
At its heart, this book is a social history. People’s voices are central,
and for the period within living memory we approach this through a
combination of original oral history interviews and engagement with
other survivor testimony and autobiography. For the period beyond liv-
ing memory we use a range of techniques to write people’s experiences
into the history we reconstruct through archival records. One of our key
strategies has been to construct microhistories of the people we found
in the archives, and we also want to acknowledge the extent to which
our reading of those sources has been informed by the questions that
more recent care leavers have asked about how they found themselves
constructed in their own child welfare records.
Completing this research has stretched over more years than we had
originally planned, and taken us across much of the Australian conti-
nent. We have so many people to thank for their contributions to that
PREFACE vii
research. First and foremost, we thank all of the people without whose
stories we could not have written this book. Some of you know you have
shared your stories, because you were part of our national oral history
project; some have shared your stories publicly through other oral his-
tory collections, media articles, submissions to inquiries, or autobio-
graphical works. Others are stories of people from earlier generations we
found in archival records. We have valued and respected all of your con-
tributions, and thought deeply about how to proceed when the voices
we heard were in tension with one another. We hope that what we have
to say is meaningful to you, although we know it can never hope to cap-
ture your entire truth.
In practical terms, this research was able to take on the scope it did
because of funding received through an Australian Research Council
Discovery Project (DP130104578) for which we are deeply thankful.
The work would also not have been possible without the help of many
colleagues and supporters whose intellectual insight and generosity of
spirit and time have been incredibly valuable. We are profoundly grate-
ful for the support and advice of a number of people within key organ-
isations including Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN), Alliance
for Forgotten Australians (AFA), OzChild, Relationships Australia, and
the South Australian Government, as well as numerous care leaver sup-
port services and foster carer associations across the nation. We have also
been fortunate to have the support of a number of talented researchers
who have contributed to the project in a range of ways: Sari Braithwaite,
Kerrie Fisher, Amanda Peters, Caroline Evans, Suzanne Mitchell, Pam
Petrilli, Nathan Kauschke and Jemma Tonkin. At various points during
this project numerous colleagues in the Faculty of Arts at the University
of Adelaide have provided administrative and intellectual support, and
almost all of the historians at Australian Catholic University (ACU) have
shared their insight and advice with us. To all, we want to express our
warm appreciation of their contributions. Naomi Wolfe, historian and
Aboriginal Academic in the ACU School of Arts, has been a tireless
supporter of the project in general, and provided cultural advice, as did
other Elders including Aunty Janet Turpie-Johnstone, Aunty Doseena
Fergie, and Aunty Delsie Lillyst. Shurlee Swain—thank you—this book
would not exist as it is without you. Finally, we also want to thank our
friends and families—without you such a long and emotionally demand-
ing project would never have been possible.
viii PREFACE
We began this project with the lofty goal of wanting to make a differ-
ence—to give voice to those previously not heard, to provide an histori-
cal context for informing future policy and practice of out of home care
in Australia, and to write the first national history of foster care in this
country. We have achieved our final aim, and hope that this book will
encourage more Australians to talk about foster care so that past prob-
lems are not repeated.
Fitzroy, Australia Nell Musgrove
Adelaide, Australia Deidre Michell
c
ontents
1 Introduction: There Is No Typical Story of Foster Care 1
The Image of the Child 1
The History of Foster Care in Australia 4
Talking About Foster Care in the Aftermath of Inquiries
and Apologies 13
About This Book 18
References 22
Part I Looking for the ‘Care’ in Foster Care
2 Did Anybody Care? The Death of John Wood Pledger 27
John Wood Pledger’s Early Life 28
John Becomes a Foster Child 32
Shocking Discoveries of Abuse 35
Explaining Physical Abuse 39
Ignoring Sexual Abuse 41
What Can We Learn from the Death of John Wood Pledger? 43
Luke Anthony Borusiewicz 46
References 49
3 Making and Breaking Families 51
The Thomas Family 52
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