“I’ve been waiting for you women to get here all my life”
~ Bessie Guthrie
Today’s post is inspired by the event which is to take place at 11am at Parliament House in Canberra, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will deliver a formal apology to the Forgotten Australians.
If you don’t know who the Forgotten Australians are well that’s because they have been, in fact, forgotten, which is kind of the whole point of the apology.
They are people who experienced child abuse whilst in state care; they include Indigenous children, child migrants and children charged with ‘neglect’ or being ‘uncontrollable’ or ‘in moral danger’ under The Child Welfare Act 1939.
Unsurprisingly, girls and young women were particularly vulnerable to being deemed ‘at moral risk’ which quite often simply meant being sexually active or living life the way they chose. Many of them were gender role deviants, demonstrating reckless disregard for societal ideals of ‘femininity’. Many of them were runaways, escaping domestic violence and/or abuse at home.
In any case, they were incarcerated and punished for non-criminal behaviour, on the grounds that they were in need of state protection. People my age and older who grew up here in NSW will no doubt have heard of ‘Minda’. I recall being in highschool with girls who had been in Minda, not that it was openly talked about but there were whispered rumours and I myself was threatened with ‘boarding school’ a few times. Given my ‘uncontrollable’ behaviour at that time which was considered serious enough for me to need ‘child guidance counselling’ I understand that I was lucky never to have seen the inside of one of these places. Had I been born a few years earlier, no doubt I would have.
This terrorist campaign that the state waged over girls and young women was all part of patriarchy’s broader plan for total control over women in general, and of women’s sexuality in particular. I have on my desk here a copy of “A Report on the Girl’s Industrial School Parramatta, N.S.W“, 1945, Melbourne University Press. This contains the data of a survey conducted between December 1941 and November 1942 of the 175 girls and young women who were at the time incarcerated there.
On page 3 under reasons for admission it states that,
“Girls were admitted on charges of being neglected, uncontrollable or absconding in 153 (out of the 175) cases”
“98 were committed [to the institution] on the first appearance in court. This proportion seems high and may be partly accounted for by the policy of committing girls with venereal disease…”
“On medical examination it was found that 131 had had frequent sex experience, 33 infrequent or possible and 11 had none”
Are we getting the picture here? In case you missed it earlier, this was punishment for non-criminal behaviour. Radfems will recognise this as state-mandated slut-shaming. This probably stemmed from the “Damned Whore” stereotype, a handy tag used by the male pigs who colonised this continent specifically to aid their control over women (see Anne Summers’ “Damned Whores and God’s Police”).
Parra Girls estimates that around 40 000 girls and young women were processed through these places over several decades. The Parramatta Industrial School, which was originally The Female Factory for convict women and children, then The Parramatta Women’s Asylum before it morphed into the Girls Industrial School, Parramatta Girls Training School, then later Kamballa, was still operating into the 1980s. After the 1961 riots over the appalling conditions, the state created The Hay Institution as a high security prison to send girls and young women who back-answered the scum who presided over the gross violations of human rights at Parramatta.
Stories of the lived experiences of these women will move you to tears. The physical, sexual and psychological abuse, the dehumanising, misogynistic regulations and policies, like compulsory head-shaving, being forced to march everywhere, not being permitted to speak to each other, compulsory virginity and pregnancy checks…but these are not my lived experiences to talk about.
It was Feminist activists of the Second Wave who forced the closure of both Parramatta and Hay. This campaign was led by awesome sister, Bessie Guthrie, who knew how to use the media and somehow managed to persuade a journalist to fly a helicopter over the Hay gaol, publicising the injustice and brutality that went on behind the brick walls.
Organisations such as CLAN and AFA have long been asking for reparations for the people who survived abuse while in state care, and a formal apology is just the first step in the process and hopefully recognising the ongoing intergenerational effects will be a part of that.
As we know, KRudd is pretty keen to formally apologise to victims of human rights violations – not so keen on doing much else for them, though.
It makes me so fucking angry, sisters. Why is there no national holiday to acknowledge these injustices and the awesome women who fought against them? Why is the state so keen to have us remember human rights violations that occur in the services of the state, but not those which occurred at the hands of the state against it’s own citizens?
It probably comes down to the fact that in a patriarchy, human rights violations against women don’t really count, because in a patriarchy women don’t count as human.



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