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Dear Miss Spence: An Open Letter to Catherine Helen Spence (1825–1910)

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Abstract

Inspired by Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, in this reflection on the beginnings of foster care in Australia I talk back to a dead white woman, Catherine Helen Spence, and argue that she should no longer be honoured for her role in the nascent system because of the classism at the heart of it.
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Draft version of “Dear Miss Spence: An Open Letter to Catherine Helen
Spence (1825-1910)”
Published In Life Writing, Published Online 18 December
2015, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14484528.2015.1124358#.VnTSjBV96
Uk
All Australian states treated state wards in much the same way as South Australia. So this book, while
centred on the experience of state wards in South Australia, applies in many ways to the thousands of
ordinary working lives that shaped the Australia of the past (Barbalet xi)
Survivors remember. Survivors speak up. Survivors speak out. Survivors tell stories (De Salvo 168)
Dear Miss Spence:
You’ve been much on my mind recently. As one of the initial proponents and instigators of the
boarding out or foster care system in Australia you’ve had, inadvertently and indirectly, a pivotal
place in my life since I’m one of many largely invisible survivors of that system. I’m not writing
to thank you, however, I’m writing to complain about the class politics at the heart of the
boarding out system, and to set out why I believe you should no longer be honoured for anything
to do with the contemporary Child Protection System. Others like Kay Daniels and Margaret
Barbalet have already questioned your actions in this regard but I believe I’m the first former
foster child to do so, and it would seem timely for another challenge given the stream of Child
Protection stories in the press at present.
In 2012 I attended a Catherine Helen Spence Commemorative Oration which in part focused on
the beginnings of the foster care system here in Adelaide and, of course, you were held in high
esteem for your role in it. While the racist origins of the system were appropriately admitted
through the acknowledgement of the Stolen Generations, the class politics underpinning the
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scheme were ignored. This silence around what I call ‘classism’ bothered me greatly, as the
whole point of boarding out was to separate non-Aboriginal children from their ‘pauper’ parents,
and to keep them separated. A refusal to say this, a denial of the dis-honouring of the ‘pauper
class’ as the entire purpose of foster care is to invalidate the experience of those of us separated
from our ‘pauper’ parents ever since, and especially those of us permanently disconnected from
our origins.
What a difference in our lives, Miss Spence, you one of the originators of foster care and me a
former foster child, or State child as you would have called me, yet ironically, we both came
from families which had disgraced themselves financially and socially. There were very different
consequences for my working class family, however. Like your upper middle class father, David
Spence, my father was a gambler, but the outcome for him failing to provide for his family was
imprisonment, upon which his six children became State wards. When your father brought
financial and social shame upon his household in your home town of Melrose in Scotland
through disastrous speculative investments, your maternal grandmother was able to help out
with funds to purchase land in the new colony of South Australia (Cooper 3).
When you arrived here on your fourteenth birthday in 1849, Miss Spence, Adelaide was only
three years old but the small town of 10,000 people provided a fresh start for your family,
including your father who was the first Town Clerk (Magarey 5). More disgrace followed,
however, as your father was sacked from his job, but by then you’d decided to stay in Adelaide
as there were better opportunities here than existed back in Britain for you as an
ambitious woman as other middle class migrant women of the same period found. Blessed
with (the right) family connections, you were able as a young woman to indulge your desire to
become a writer by initially having small pieces published in the local paper. From here you
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went on to create for yourself the circumstances whereby you could write for a living, fortunate
you had household help which facilitated this. Although not wealthy, you were able to carve out
a (meagre) living for yourself and your mother through journalism and publishing novels, but I
note with some envy you were fortunate enough to later become financially secure through an
aunt’s bequest and were often assisted by generous and wealthy friends (Magarey 40).
Many young and impoverished Irishwomen had a very different migration experience to
Adelaide. You know, of course, about the mass migration from Ireland during the ‘great
famine’ of 1846. By the time you migrated from Scotland in 1849 thousands of Irish people had
already fled likely starvation and arrived in the newest outpost of the British Empire. In Britain
the class ranking system positioned both the Irish and Scottish at the bottom because of their
race, or so says my friend academic Jacquie Wilson—also a former State child—because Celtic
people were seen as barbaric and repulsive by the English. But in the new colony of Australia
class trumped race, although it didn’t hurt that you teamed up with an Englishwoman when it
came to making decisions for the children of the poorest migrants, young orphan Irish girls, the
lowest of the low.
During the gold rush of the 1850s large numbers of men fled economically depressed South
Australia to search for gold in Victoria, and this is, of course, the setting for your novel Clara
Morison. The lack of men in the colony prompted authorities to encourage poor Irish girls—
especially orphan girls between 14 and 18 ironically—to migrate and replace the men as male
farm labourers. It was cheaper for the Irish government to assist their passage than support poor
people in the workhouses, and the inchoate South Australian government needed workers. A
cosy arrangement for those in charge, except that many more girls arrived than would allow the
State to prosper without poverty. When the girls arrived in Port Adelaide and realised the low
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wages awaiting them for hard physical labour, or on hearing accounts of women who’d been
exploited and physically broken by the burden, many refused to take up the country work
(Geyer 23). Good on them I say, I admire their spunk. With little government support, a number
of these Irish migrants resorted to sex work from which came the ‘pauper’ children.
It was to the experience of these ‘pauper’ children that you and your good friend, Caroline
Emily Clark, directed your prodigious energy. You and Miss Clark first met in 1854 when,
being a fan of the author of the newly published Clara Morison, Miss Clark sought you out at a
society ball. Miss Clark, the same age as you, 29, and like you a recent migrant to South
Australia but from England, had become an enthusiast for boarding out through her reformist
cousins, Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill, whom you met during 1865-66 when you
were in England.
Emily Clark (1825-1911), acting in her capacity as a moral entrepreneur was able to play into a
number of prejudicial beliefs of the time when she began her lobbying for boarding out. I want to
accuse you and Miss Clark of classism, Miss Spence, even though I know that word wouldn’t
make sense. It’s a new idea even for contemporary Australians (Bletsas and Michell 2014). What
it means is that you believed that where people sat in the social structure was where they
naturally belonged because of breeding or inherent qualities or surfeit/lack of intelligence.
How comfortable you were in the middle class! Because there was no nobility in Australia, the
middle class ran the show and employed the ‘respectable’ working class as servants in your
homes and as workers in your businesses. At the bottom of the social heap were those who
couldn’t work. As I said, during the 1850s many men fled to Victoria hoping to make their
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fortunes in the goldmines, but this meant that women and children were deserted. The lack of
jobs, or illness, or the responsibility girls and women had for caring for young children on their
own resulted in poverty and created a ‘pauper class’. Getting rid of the ‘pauper class’ the
burdensome class because they showed up the shortcomings of capitalism and the failure of the
high ideals set for the new colony by breeding them out, by removing their children became
Emily Clark’s raison d’être.
You would have read Miss Clark’s 1866 exhortation to the South Australian Government via
her letter to The Register. You were on that trip to England at the time, otherwise I’m sure
you’d have reviewed it before she sent it off, or maybe even helped compose it. No doubt you
would have used your connections, such as your friendship with John Taylor, if they’d been
needed to get the letter published, but Miss Clark had her own didn’t she? Her brother owned
shares in the The Register and she persuaded him to publish it. Miss Clark was rightly
concerned about the children locked away in the State’s Destitute Asylum, an eerily similar
situation to current calls to remove children from immigration detention, and even more
unnerving since our Migration Museum is now located on that same site in Kintore Avenue.
In 1866 the Destitute Asylum housed those who had been extruded from the budding
community. I love that word ‘extruded’ as it neatly sums up exactly what was happening—the
poorest arrivals in the new colony were forced out of it—incarcerated, kept hidden from the
populace who wanted to believe that South Australia was different to England, that there wasn’t
an unfair class system here. It seems that you and Miss Clark subscribed to the popular belief
that being poor was a contagious disease and to avoid the spread, the destitute had to be
imprisoned. Sympathetic to the plight of the children also locked up at least you didn’t think
poverty was genetic which was quite progressive of you I must admit—the plan was to leave the
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parents interned and stop the spread of the disease of destitution to the next generation by
removing the children. Impoverished people were held in such low social esteem, seen as so
different from your class, as not quite human, as so immoral that it was deemed preferable for
their children to be separated from them. These classist beliefs at personal, social and cultural
levels allowed for Emily Clark – supported by you - to successfully campaign the Government to
stop expanding the Destitute Asylum and instead divert funds into a boarding out program. Do
you remember what she wrote?
It is painful to think that pauperism should be on the increase among us, but the
necessity for again enlarging the Destitute Asylum appears to be too sure proof
that this is the case…Would it not be possible to employ this money in a better
way? It would surely be a less expensive as well as a more health-ful plan to
bring up the children in the country rather than in town. It is well known that to
collect together large numbers of people suffering from the same disease is to
concentrate that disease and render it more virulent; and if pauperism is
hereditary, surely it is the greatest mistake to bring up young children in the
midst of it. They should be removed as far as possible from its associations, and
those infected by the taint should be resolutely kept apart…Do not, then, let us
increase the blot upon our city. If we cannot scatter and lose these unfortunate
children among our healthy and industrious population instead of fostering them
in the hot bed of their own moral disease, let us at least take them out of the
town. In the country they would be removed from sight and sound of evil among
their elders. Where land is less valuable they might cultivate a garden, and
agricultural occupations be substituted for some of their school work. It is not
training of the mind half so much as training of the habits that is wanted; and the
habits are far more easily trained during manual labour than in the schoolroom.
Scatter and lose the children is exactly what did happen. In 1887, the State Children’s Council
proudly show in their first annual report that the 666 children boarded out were scattered across
200 city, suburban and country districts, which means there was only an average of 3.3 children
in each location. And in your history of foster care you proudly write on page 43:
In Australia the children of the State are scattered over the length and breadth of
the settled districts of our island continent, the only restriction being that they
must be within reach of a school.
The dispersal of children across the state, and later across the country as other states caught the
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boarding out bug, reminds me of the ancient Hebrew practice of scapegoating. You’d know that
story, Miss Spence, in Leviticus Chapter 16 where Moses is commanded by YHWH to enact a
ritual of purification, part of which required that a goat be banished into the wilderness to cleanse
the community of their collective ‘sins.’ Although entirely innocent, it’s as if the ‘pauper’
children were banished to cleanse the colonial community of their shame of failure to provide for
all.
Since 1944 we have used the word genocide to name the killing of people because of their race,
their politics, their culture. Today we rightly use that word to name the barbarous practice of
removing Aboriginal children from their families, but I think it applies to the removal of non-
Indigenous ‘pauper’ children from their families too. You wanted to sever all connections
between birth parents and child, but you didn’t want better for them than their ‘respectable’
working class counterparts, oh no, you wanted them reintegrated into existing class structures.
Something in it for everyone it seems—except the ‘pauper’ parents and their children—a s those
‘respectable’ working class families benefited either from a government subsidy for maintaining
and socialising the children, or from the labour of the children should they be apprenticed or
‘adopted’ out without fiscal recompense.
Clark’s proposal eventually became institutionalized classism—policy and practice—because
separating children from birth families and providing them with limited education were features
of boarding out you boasted of in 1907. State children were supposed to attend school but were
only provided for until the mandatory age of thirteen and sometimes it was permissible for even
that minimal level of education to be skipped. Miss Clark says she was less concerned “to train
their minds but their habits” and these habits were better trained in manual labour. State children,
therefore, were to be extruded from their families and assimilated or reformed liked plastic
products into docile workers so they could be sent out to work at age thirteen—unbelievable to
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think of in the 21st century—either as domestic servants if they were girls and labourers if they
were boys. There was no consideration for the precarity of that work, and no concern for
providing the children with opportunities to improve their lot in life. This idea of ‘proper
occupation’ very much fits American academic Barbara Jensen’s definition of classism (and I’d
recommend her work to you, but I got this snippet from Rennie Christopher’s book, which I’d
also recommend):
Class says ‘you will do the work that is deadening or dangerous; classism says
‘you will do it because it is all you deserve; other people deserve more freedom
and dignity than you do’ (emphasis in original, xviii).
Children of your (middle) class had a lot more leisure time, if not freedom, didn’t they, Miss
Spence? As a thirteen year old you had been highly ambitious, no doubt encouraged by a family
and cultural heritage of strong women. You say you “wanted to be a teacher first, and a great
writer afterwards” but even though your father had promised Edinburgh and a fabulous
‘advanced’ school for girls, he couldn’t manage it. He was, as you write, “a ruined man” (Spence
29). If you could remember the disappointment of not being able to continue your education at 14
because your family had to escape social disgrace by migrating, imagine what it must have been
like to be a State girl faced with a lifetime of servitude, of drudgery. You could not have wanted
that life for State girls in particular, given your later championing of the rights of women, Miss
Spence, unless you held the classist belief that this was the only work State girls were entitled to
do. And non-State working class girls too for that matter; it seems you didn’t extend equal rights
to the working classes despite your zeal for State intervention in welfare matters.
Here’s how I see the situation. You and Emily Clark didn’t want to change things too much, as
the hierarchical system worked well for you. By creating a nice pool of servants from amongst
the children of those wretched ‘paupers’, you (and your class mates) could continue in your
lifestyle—swanning interstate and overseas because your friends were generous in paying both
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passage and spending money; reading novels and writing them; making a name for yourself in
political circles; and hob-nobbing with the rich and famous. “She’s a name dropper” a friend of
mine said about your autobiography, and he’s right: John Stuart Mill, George Elliot, Helen
Keller, Vida Goldstein! Don’t get me wrong, I admire your spunk too, but imagine an alternative
life without the well-heeled friends and financial legacies, and without the time, time not spent in
the daily drudge from sun-up to sun-down, hard physical yacca making a leisurely and more
‘important’ life possible for your ‘superiors.’ What a self-serving system was boarding out! It
didn’t improve the class status of the children, or at least not by much. Instead it was intended to
raise good working class children who would then become servants to you and your class mates
on the State Children’s Council which, as yo u wo u l d re m emb e r , presided over the foster
care system. Su c h au d a c iou s hy p o c ris y !
As State children were able to ‘rise’ a little by becoming domestic servants for your class, Miss
Spence, so some foster mothers benefited from a slight ‘rise’ in status too. For a number of
‘respectable’ working class women across the country, becoming foster mothers and taking in
State children meant they no longer needed to work as domestic servants in other women’s
homes, the principal occupation of working class women at the time. ‘Mum Keen’ (1861-1932),
as eminent art historian, Bernard Smith (1916-2011) fondly called his foster mother, was a
loving and pragmatic woman who contributed to her family’s low income by providing both
informal foster care and, from 1903, foster care of State wards, making sufficient money through
this, as well as by taking in boarders and washing, to enter the property market (Smith 108). In
Tasmania, feminist academic and journalist Germaine Greer’s adoptive grandmother, Emma
Wise Greeney (1867-1940), also a domestic servant, began fostering children in 1903 too and
went on to take in more than 25 over the years. Emma had come from a large family but had no
children of her own. Fostering children (and adopting Greer’s father) satisfied her need for
family as well as an income.
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I imagine you would have loved including Bernard Smith and Germaine Greer in your
repertoire of acclaimed associates, yet you lacked the foresight to provide opportunities for such
advancement for ‘pauper’ children. Have a read of their books, Miss Spence, and you’ll get
some idea of the intergenerational pain caused by ‘scattering and losing’ children to the
stigmatized foster care system in the case of Germaine Greer, and of the benefits of keeping
birth family connections in the case of Bernard Smith. I love Tottie Keen, at least she seemed to
care about young Bennie’s birth mother. You didn’t. No one amongst the instigators of the
boarding out or foster care system seems to have cared about the birth parents, and sadly that
largely continues today.
Despite the impecunious circumstances of much of your own life and your hatred of poverty’s
restrictions, particularly after your father lost his job and died five years later, you didn’t
identify with the poorest members of the community. Instead you were too busy being, and
exalting in, your respectability. It must have been this lack of identification with the poor and
‘disreputable’ which enabled you to follow through with, along with Clark and others, the
genocidal separation of poor parents and their children, whereby the clear intention was for
foster children to not only lose their families of origin but identification with them too.
No wonder I was angry when I found all this out. But not as outraged as I was at the Catherine
Helen Spence Oration where none of this was mentioned. What was also ignored is your
tendency to ‘put a positive spin’ on the system, the politician in you I suppose. But this meant
you skipped over the Way Royal Commission. Do you remember that? It ran from 1883-1885.
How embarrassing it must have been for you and Miss Clark that the Commission found
children were adopted out to save the state money, and then used as slave labour, just as
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opponents to boarding out who’d read Oliver Twist suspected might happen. The Commission
also found that the inspection process you gloated about was inadequate. Not that improved
inspection turned up an improved system. Instead one of the later inspectors, or inspectress to
use the lingo of your time, Miss Evelyn Penny, found a number of problems which you
conveniently ignored in your history and autobiography. In 1906 Miss Penny wrote, after twelve
months of inspections, that problems included children being treated as inferior in their homes:
On the whole I feel that children who are placed in homes where the foster-
parents have no children of their own are happier and are treated with
greater affection than those who are placed amongst other children.
In support of this opinion I may mention that a lady visitor told me that she
had known of one instance where the children of the house and their
parents sat at one end of the table and the State Children at the other end
‘below the salt’, where they partook of different food and were in other
ways made to feel that they were outcasts from the family.1
Two years later Evelyn Penny recorded a conversation she’d had with a girl who’d been
working as a servant since she was thirteen:
I made a point of asking her whether she had really been happy at Mt
Gambier. She told me that she had disliked her place very much, that Mrs.
Kelly had a violent temper and had once thrown a tin dish at her head and
had often shaken her and pinched her. I asked her why she had never
complained to me and she said she was far too frightened to tell me.
Miss Penny’s account reminds me of stories I’ve read recently which suggest that similar
problems have plagued the system for more than one hundred years. Denise T hompson was
born in 1962 and placed in foster care in country South Australia as a five year old
where she worked ‘as slave labour’ for long hours on the farm (Owen 65). In 2008
forty-three year old Ki Meekins, who as a child had desperately wanted to be cared for in a
1 I have taken this and the following quotation from Margaret Barbalet’s 1983 book (p. 208) as,
curiously, the original cannot be located in the State Records Office, Adelaide. The closest the
researcher was able to come to locating the source was to find a series of reports by the lying-in
homes inspectress for the period 1900-1910.
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foster home rather than in a residential facility, told the story of how in his first foster home he
was given inferior food, and belted when he wasn’t grateful for it (Meekins 29). Tamsin Dancer,
a youth worker, has also written something similar, but the young people she was talking of
were born long after Ki Meekins.
I remember one young person telling me how one of her foster homes had two lots of all food
items, along with two pantry’s, and one of them was locked – the cheap stuff was for the
foster kids, the food locked away was for everyone else (Dancer 164).
Unbelievably, there was no mention of ongoing problems like these in the State Child Protection
System during the 2012 Catherine Helen Spence Oration, nor even of the sexual abuse many
children suffered and suffered in silence because they were too scared to tell, or not believed
when they did. And yet, only four years earlier the then Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann,
apologised to former State children, including former foster children, for those very problems in
the wake of what is now known as the Mullighan Inquiry, that is, a Commission of Inquiry into
the sexual abuse of children in State Care which ran from 2004 to 2008. Moreover, former Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd also offered an apology on behalf of the nation for abuse in care, again
including foster care, on 16 November 2009.
Your carefully constructed and glowing picture of the boarding out system served you well, Miss
Spence. It’s you who’s revered whereas State children have long suffered from the stigma of
having been State children. Bernard Smith wrote of consciously developing a tough persona at
school in order to protect himself from being bullied and taunted because he was a State kid
(Smith 132), as more than fifty years later Michael Talbot did similarly (Owen 30). Recent ly a
support group for children and young people in care, CREATE Foundation, has made a
deliberate effort to offset this stigma by producing a photo exhibition of some of us
who’ve been in care and made good. Actually, you might be interested t o know that
CREATE was founded in 1993 to reverse the scatter and lose’ mentality that you and
Miss Clark initiated; through CREATE the scattered and lost can come together and
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subvert the system by talking back to it, by reporting on the poor outcomes and sad
experiences of children and young people in care.
What’d I’d really like is an apology from you and Miss C lark, but that’s never going to
happen. What was going on with you two that you couldn’t see children were treated
like second class citizens? Was it because according to your classed philosophy they
were? Or was it because you’d both made names for yourselves in this venture and
didn’t want your reputations sullied by being proven wrong?
What were you all afraid of? Were you afraid that if the children could congregate and discuss
what had happened they might understand they were being extruded from their families in order
to be shaped into docile servants for your class? That they might gang up on you, that there
might be riots? Were you afraid that you’d be accused of stealing children, as the English
government had stolen the land from Aboriginal people? Were you afraid that the children would
go back to their parents at the first opportunity? They do you know, it’s one of the most poignant
findings of contemporary research, that separated children go looking for their parents as soon as
they can. But if you were afraid of this you must have known that bonds between children and
parents in poor families aren’t that much different from those in middle class families, in which
case I wonder how you could sleep at night knowing the grief you caused. Especially when you
were so close to your own mother with whom you lived for 62 years. Is that why you stopped
writing your autobiography after you recorded the death of your mother? Given at age 84 you
were suddenly uncomfortable with the low wages servants in your childhood home were paid,
which as you say “made the comfort” of that home, did you have a sudden realisation of the pain
you had caused by not earlier making connections between low wages and poverty? That
perhaps the thousands of pounds which had gone into administering the boarding-out scheme
might have been better given to those who needed the money most, the ‘pauper class’?
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Although the 1985 Federal Government Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare makes
no mention of abuse in foster care in its report, less than twenty years later a second national
inquiry received a number of submissions which reported various forms of violence in foster
care sexual abuse by foster fathers where foster mothers were complicit; children literally
treated like animals and slaves; physical and emotional abuse in homes “where from the outside
everything seemed to be stable, often in very good ‘Christian’ homes” (Senate Committee 97).
According to this second national inquiry, and ironically given Emily Clark’s 1866 appeal to the
State Government to embrace boarding out because it was superior to raising children in English
style workhouses, outcomes for children in foster care – the dominant form of out-of-home care
in Australia during the 20th century - are no better than those for children raised in orphanages
and other residential care facilities during the 20th century.
Like Emily Clark, I too first ‘met’ you Miss Spence through Clara Morison. When I initially
read the novel in 1996 I was a 40 year old mature age university student juggling primary care
responsibilities for three children one only 12 months old - and paid work to supplement the
Austudy payments my husband (also a mature age university student) and I received. Yes, we
were ‘paupers’ but there’s less shame in being a student ‘pauper’. For me, doing an English
course on ‘Women’s Writing: The Nineteenth Century’ was more an excuse to read stories, an
activity that has sustained me since early childhood than it was to engage with literary
criticism. The irony of a former foster kid reading the novel of a woman who not only
advocated for foster care but who was—and still is!—revered by the State Children’s
Department for more than twenty years after her death for her role in the State foster care
system, was completely lost on me. Instead I enjoyed reading about Adelaide, my beloved
home city wrought strange by the colonial setting. I did not attend to the classist cast of the story
then, which has middle class Clara become a heroic figure because, being destitute, she worked
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temporally as a domestic servant, a recognisably distasteful occupation since she would be “at
everybody’s beck and call, for [her] whole life” (Spence 86). I did notice, though, but didn’t feel
indignant when the ‘cashed up bogans’ of the time were mocked by you either.
At the time I read Clara Morison, I had just begun writing about my experiences as a foster
kid. What you did, Miss Spence, in helping to break the silence of women’s voices in
literature, and what Tillie Olsen later did with Silences by encouraging the reading and
publication of long buried women’s writings, Women’s Studies at the University of Adelaide
did for me—it unbridled my tongue by challenging the internalized self-loathing and self-
protective ‘passing’ or acting as if I was middle class and not a former foster kid. I began to
write about my particularly ‘despised’ identity while trying to untangle the “knot upon knot”
(that’s from Barbara Jensen again, you really should read her work, see page 203 for this bit)
in my ‘pauper’ psyche and to process the immense grief caused by separation from my birth
family which left me a person without a history, the legacy for me of your – and Emily Clark’s
of course - Boarding Out Society. In wanting “to cut off at the root the evil, the parasitic
growth of pauperism and crime” (Spence 72), the foster care system effectively and
distressingly severed me from my roots, causing me many an identity crisis over the years.
After your death in 1910 and that of Emily Clark’s a year later, foster care authorities in
Australia unabashedly continued the practice of separating and alienating children from their
parents until the 1940s when a shift toward emphasizing keeping children within their own
families occurred because of evidence demonstrating the deleterious effect on children of the
previous practice. However, reunification and maintaining contact with birth families did not
become a feature of the Australian system until well into the final third of the 20th century.
My standpoint on the foster care system as a former foster child has been very different to your
refulgent account of the system, Miss Spence. In my stories I wrote of my foster mother’s rigid
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control over my life including down to the last mouthful of food I ate; the social isolation I
endured because, until I was in my final years of High School, I was never allowed to have
friends at home nor visit friends in their homes; the criticisms of my birth parents which felt
like a personal attack of me; and the emotional and verbal abuse I suffered on an almost daily
basis which left me with little self-confidence.
Initially the sorrow I felt while writing I thought was “a very personal, private experience
that is, that it was produced somehow by forces within myself” (yes, Rennie Christopher is
another favourite; even if you don’t read the rest of her book at least read the introduction
including xvii). Reading Margaret Barbalet’s now classic 1983 history of the State Care
system was the ‘accidental encounter’ (Hil 63) I needed to realise I was writing about
structural forces, viz, the State Care system, and the personal pain resulting from the external,
public, structural injuries of a classed society (Sennett 192).
What I thought of as abuse by my foster mother I now see as abusive foster care practices
endorsed by you and other members of the State Children’s Council, practices which continued
for at least forty years after your death in 1910. I always thought my foster mother was
particularly cruel in threatening to send me back to ‘the Welfare’ when I was disobedient. One
day she even packed my bags and left me sitting on the front wall waiting for a social worker to
collect me. On another occasion she organised her daughter, my foster sister, to drive me past a
reform home, threatening this as punishment for misbehavior too. While my foster mother
never carried out the threats, the impact was traumatic as I didn’t feel safe at home. What I
experienced as an oppressive practice, however, was an endorsed legitimated one as, according
to you, threatening children with removal from a foster home, “in disgrace for being naughty”
(Spence 40) was a way of inculcating obedience to a new regime in a different home. In reading
your book I suddenly understood why my foster mother was happy to use me as a “little
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servant” during the fifteen years I lived with her. She would have thought this appropriate
training for my future life, given the foster care system intended State children to be sent out “as
little servants to help others” (Barbalet 195).
I was subject to abuse over a fifteen year period, but others saw my foster mother as a heroic
figure. I was regularly reminded by social workers from the Department of Welfare and others
that my foster mother was “such a wonderful woman,” an observation often accompanied by
exhortations I should be grateful for all she had done for me. But then you are seen as a
“wonderful woman” too, the ‘Grand Old Woman of Australia’ (Magarey v) and yet you, as
one of the originators of the foster care system in Australia, have caused considerable anguish
and promoted the very practices I experienced as abusive.
Obviously there have been changes made to the foster care system during its 140 year history
here in Australia. I have already spoken of the more recent attempts to keep children in contact
with their birth families. State children are no longer sent out to ‘service’ either. Indeed by
1935 many State girls were working in factories and a few fortunate ones were assisted so they
could learn a trade and advance themselves further. However, these days many former State
children are unemployed and traumatized because of their experience in ‘care’.
Miss Spence, I understand and respect that the boarding out system is only one reason for the
high esteem in which you are held in Adelaide. Benefiting from the smaller pond that was
Adelaide, you certainly achieved a number of noteworthy ‘firsts’ for women. You became the
first woman to serve on a public Board when you joined the Advanced School for Girls’ Board
of Advice in 1877, and you were the first woman to serve on a Commission of Enquiry (into
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the Adelaide Hospital in 1895). You were also the first woman to stand for political office as,
at the grand age of 72, and for which I admire you enormously, you stood (albeit
unsuccessfully) for the Australasian Federal Convention.
But I hate that you are honoured for your part in the contemporary Child Protection System.
I’m thoroughly persuaded by your books that you cared deeply for State children, wanting
them to be provided for and treated kindly, but strictly within the limits of their class. Helping
that one girl to get an extra two years of education was great, but it doesn’t change the social
structure. I realise you weren’t the problem, per se, it is the social class system at fault here,
but you did play an active role in reproducing that system and it blinded you to the hurt
caused. In separating children from their birth families you would have caused much harm,
since “being cut off from one’s history means that one is cut off from oneself as well as from
one’s people” (Barbara Jensen again! 213). As you were blind to the racism in your thinking
for so much of your life, but eventually felt “…a little ashamed of being so narrow in [your]
views of the coloured question,’ (Magarey 142), no doubt after meeting Harriet Tubman and
William Lloyd Garrison (!), I feel hopeful that had you lived longer you would have become
aware, too, of the classist beliefs you held and how they impacted on the design of the foster care
system, a system in which children from poor backgrounds continue to be unquestioningly over
represented.
We can’t change the past, I know that. But the past does linger on into the present and infects
the future, to use the medical metaphor you and Miss Clark were so fond of, Miss Spence. I
disagree with my colleagues at the Australian Centre for Child Protection. They claim that the
multi-million dollar modern Child Protection System is based in the 1960s and on Henry
Kempe’s work on child abuse, what he called the ‘battered-child syndrome’. I agree that the
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reasons for children coming under the scrutiny of the current system have expanded—they
now include physical abuse, and from the 1980s sexual abuse, and more recently experience
domestic violence. However, many of the attitudes and practices have their roots in the system
you and Miss Clark designed, especially the many placements in foster care that some
children endure, the community attitude that these children are ‘damaged’ or not fit for much
other than becoming criminals, low education levels compared to their peers, alienation from
birth parents via criticism and limited contact with them, and birth parents continue to be
invisible or talked about as ‘monsters.’ There is much to be done to transform the current
Child Protection System as it lurches from crisis to crisis. Refusing to honour you for your
part in a detrimental classist system would be a good place to start on this transformation.
References
Barbalet, Margaret. Far From A Low Gutter Girl. The forgotten world of state wards: South
Australia 1887-1940. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Bletsas, Angelique and Dee Michell. ‘Classism on campus? Exploring and extending understandings
of social class in the contemporary higher education debate.’ Universities in Transition . Eds.
Heather Brook, Deane Fergie, Michael Maeorg and Dee Michell. Adelaide: University of
Adelaide Press, 2014.
Cooper, Janet. Catherine Spence. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Christopher, Rennie. A Carpenter's Daughter. A Working-Class Woman in Higher Education.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009.
Clark, Caroline Emily. ‘The Destitute Asylum. To The Editor.’ South Australian Register, Wednesday
14 March 1866.
Community Affairs References Committee. Protecting vulnerable children: A national challenge.
Second report on the inquiry into children in institutional or out-of-home care (Canberaa:
Government of Australia, 2005.
Dancer, Tamsin. ‘From the outside.’ Recipes for Survival. Stories of Hope and Healing by Survivors
of the State 'Care' System in South Australia. Eds. D. Michell & P. Taylor. Elizabeth, South
Australia: People's Voice Publishing, 2011.
DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
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Geyer, Mary. Behind the Wall. The Women of the Destitute Asylum Adelaide, 1852-1918. Adelaide,
South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2008.
Hil, Richard Hil and Gregory Smith (2010) ‘Storytelling, Healing and the Forgotten Australians.’
Surviving care: Achieving justice and healing for the Forgotten Australians. Eds. Richard Hil &
Elizabeth Branigan. Robina, Queensland: Bond University Press, 2010.
Jensen, Barbara Jensen. ‘The Silent Psychology: A presentation at the 1995 Youngstown working-
class studies conference’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Spring (1998): 202-214
Magarey, Susan. Unbridling the Tongues of Women. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2010.
Meekins, Ki. Red Tape Rape. The Story of Ki Meekins. Adelaide: Self-published, 2008.
Owen, Jan. Every Childhood Lasts A Lifetime. Personal stories from the frontline of family
breakdown. Brisbane: Australian Association of Young People in Care, 1996.
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Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: WW Norton, 1993.
Smith, Bernard. The boy Adeodatus. The portrait of a lucky young bastard. Ringwood, Victoria:
Penguin, 1984.
Spence, Catherine. Clara Morison. A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever. Adelaide, South
Australia: Wakefield Press, 1854, 1994 edition.
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Adelaide: Vardon & Sons, 1907.
Spence, Catherine. Every yours, C. H. Spence. Susan Magarey (Ed). Catherine Helen Spence’s An
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Full-text available
Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. In challenging the custom and convention that confined middle-class women to the domestic sphere, she was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women.