For decades, Maureen Ellis thought her husband, John, was merely restless.
He would start a new job, climb up the ranks, then abruptly quit. They’d move to the country, get their kids settled in a new school, then he’d suggest they head back to the city.
The cycle would repeat itself every couple of years.
“He was very, very unsettled,” she says. “When we first married it used to worry my parents terribly that we were always moving.”
Over three decades, the family moved 14 times and John worked more than 40 jobs.
“It wasn’t until recently that I realised why – he was searching for his place in the world,” she says.
John is one of an estimated 90,000 Victorians who experienced various forms of abuse and deprivation while under state care between 1928 and 1990.
On Thursday the premier, Jacinta Allan, will make a formal apology to those Victorians, known as care leavers or forgotten Australians.
John, now 84, is too unwell to travel to Melbourne for the premier’s apology but Maureen will be there in his place. He has given her permission to share his story.
“It’s a long time coming and we’ve lost a lot of people along the way, but I am glad I will get to be there to represent him,” she says.
A Senate inquiry into children in institutional care in 2004 found more than 500,000 Australians were placed in care during the past century. There were many reasons for this – including being orphaned, being born to a single mother, family poverty or other issues at home.
The inquiry found care leavers suffered a “a litany of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and often criminal physical and sexual assault” as well as “deliberate and callous cruelty, humiliation, abuse and deprivation of basic necessities of life”.
“The legacy of their childhood experiences for far too many has been low self-esteem, lack of confidence, depression, fear and distrust, anger, shame, guilt, obsessiveness, social anxieties, phobias and recurring nightmares,” the inquiry’s final report reads.
“Many care leavers have tried to block the pain of their past by resorting to substance abuse through lifelong alcohol and drug addictions.”
It recommended a federal redress scheme but this has not eventuated.
John was three years old when he was made a ward of the state. Separated from his brothers, John was shuffled between eight Catholic institutions until he turned 18.
He was deprived of necessities, including underwear, forced to suffer cruel punishments and put to work in laundries and factories from the age of 13, often for little or no pay.
“When I met him, I could love him so easily but he didn’t know how to love,” Maureen says. “He didn’t know what love was.
“Now we have eight children, 14 grandchildren – so it’s been forced on him – but it was very hard at first. I suppose he thought he was unloveable. But he wasn’t.”
John was 19 when he reunited with his mother, two weeks before she died in hospital. They barely spoke – though a form of closure would come several years later, via a knock on the door from two nuns.
“[They had] some papers from his time at St Anthony’s home in Kew, when he was a little boy and it said ‘mother and other relatives visited frequently’,” Maureen says.
“It was a settling feeling, knowing she wanted to see him, though he doesn’t remember it. She was obviously a very ill woman, that’s why they took the children away, but she wasn’t given the chance to try to get them back.”
It was a similar experience for Frank Golding, who lived from the age of two to 15 in a Ballarat orphanage, alongside his older brothers, Bob and Bill.
The brothers were never told why they couldn’t live with their parents, who were both alive and visited them.
“There were about 200 of us in the orphanage but I reckon only a handful were actual orphans,” he says.
“My parents would often visit and say, ‘We’re going to get you out of here’ and I stopped believing them. I thought they were lying.”
Decades later, Frank learned his parents had made several efforts to get the brothers out. They were unsuccessful, in part because they were unmarried.
He credits his reunion with his parents to “a sheer stoke of luck” – Frank was among a group of “orphans” released from the care of the state to travel to Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
“I got off the ship back in Melbourne in 1953 and they grudgingly let me go back to my parents,” Frank says.
He hopes Allan’s speech on Thursday will acknowledge parents deprived of their children, as well as mark the commencement of the redress scheme the government announced back in 2022.
The government is providing one-off $10,000 hardship payments to people who are terminally or critically ill, who are unlikely to benefit from the scheme before it begins some time in 2024.
“I’m not in that category, but I am 85,” Frank says. “My personal interest in getting it sorted is quite transparent.”
Leonie Sheedy, the chief executive of the Care Leavers of Australia Network, was a ward of the state for 15 years of her childhood and runs the Australian Orphanage museum in Geelong.
She expects about 200 care leavers and their loved ones to attend the apology, some travelling from as far as Western Australia, while others will watch via live stream.
While she welcomes the apology, she says she is saddened many care leavers have not lived to see it and is concerned some are being “re-traumatised” as they enter the aged care system.
“Some of these institutions actually have the same names for their aged care homes as the names of children’s homes – it is totally unacceptable,” Sheedy says.
