Anthony’s hell in state care
“WE had no childhood”.
That’s the sad reality for Anthony Wright who is a survivor of the institutional care system, which was the standard form of out-of-home care in Australia for most of the last century.
The Southport resident, like many, was left with a litany of trauma, neglect and maltreatment.
The 50-year-old is one of an estimated 500,000 “Forgotten Australians” who spent their childhood in the hundreds of institutions across the country.
Now a new study wants to hear from them.
“My family was dysfunctional and alcoholics,” he explained.
“As a prepubescent child, I was displaying behaviours which were a result from a mother who was drunk all the time.
“The department of children services, in their wisdom, decided that I was most likely suffering from emotional psychological abuse from an alcoholic family.
“Their plan was to take me from the only environment I had ever known and lock me up with 150 of the most dysfunctional, violent and criminally minded kids in the state of Queensland.”
Mr Wright spent two years at the Wilson Youth Hospital at Windsor which was a State government-run institution that accommodated “troublemakers”.
“It was just hell,” he told the Bulletin.
“It stripped you of any sense of self that you managed to get together at that age.
“It’s a jail ... they called it a hospital because it would have been uncomfortable to think they were putting kids in jail.
“That’s just how it was back then.”
Mr Wright was then trans- ferred to another institution but he was “never treated as a person”.
Sadly, his story is not an isolated case.
At that time there were few services to support families who hit hard times, were poor or undergoing crisis. Children were brought before courts not only for crimes and misdemeanours but also charged with being neglected, of no fixed home, likely to lapse into a life of crime.
They were then made “state wards” and placed into institutions until they turned 18 or 21.
Being institutionalised as a child shaped lives in many different ways and the stories are starting to emerge.
“I looked at my file and the first thing I found was a letter from my father begging the children’s services to send me to him,” he said.
“The whole time they were telling me he didn’t want me, this whole time. “I can’t make sense of it.” Now the Long-term Outcomes of Forgotten Australians Study (LOFA) wants to hear from other survivors of Australian childhood institutions or Out of Home Care, who were in care during the period 1930-89.
This is the first national research study to examine the range of experiences – both good and bad – that children had while “in care” in that time period.
Information provided by participants will inform current service provision to Forgotten Australians, helping to refine systems and models of care and policy.