A group of people were left broken by a system that took away the innocence of their childhoods. Years on, they are finding a courage and determination to have their voices heard. REBECCA RIDDLE reports.
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It was the first time Vicki cooked rice for her small siblings. She was nine years old.
She’d asked a neighbour how many cups of rice she’d need to feed her four brothers and sister who were then aged between two and seven.
“One cup per person should do it,” was the reply. But the young girl didn’t know that it meant a cup of cooked rice not raw, so she’d overflowed the stove and made a heck of a mess in the kitchen.
Within weeks all seven children were dropped at the Frankston Police Station by a mother who simply said: “Do something with them, I can’t have ’em anymore.”
Then she walked away without turning back.
Vicki lived with the guilt of cooking too much rice for years, believing that was the reason she and her siblings had been dumped into institutional care.
What followed were years of bouncing between out of home care, foster care and orphanages. She has had so many surnames, she prefers to be known as Vicki. For years she was abused, both sexually and mentally, and now carries a lifetime of scars after being subjected to countless court hearings and welfare programs.
Vicki is one of more than 500,000 people who are known as Forgotten Australians.
Some of them had parents who had died, were in prison, missing or otherwise unable to care for them. Others were placed in institutional care because the parents could not provide for them.
Many children were in homes simply for reasons of poverty, in an era of almost no community or government support for families in crisis or need.
Some children had fathers and mothers who returned too traumatised from war service to cope with raising children. Some children were placed in institutions simply because their parents had separated or divorced. Some were indigenous and some were child migrants.
One thing they all shared was a childhood of pain and feelings of neglect.
The Forgotten Australians were placed in institutional homes for their own ‘care and protection’ and yet for some the real danger was inside those walls.
For Vicki, a Warrnambool mother, the years of being moved between homes meant two decades of repeated rape and indescribable abuse.
“My life was horrific,” she said. “What annoys me the most is I used to walk around Ballarat Children’s Home with bruises from being tied up and no-one ever questioned the marks that were left on my wrist, or my face, or my arms – and I was just a child.”
Vicki lost her virginity through abuse. Now in her 50s she prefers to focus on the fact she survived.
“I had a friend in one of those homes who shared the same experience as me – in fact, they used to take turns with us. She’s not here anymore. She couldn’t live with it after telling her story to the Royal Commission… because it brought everything back, because she openly spoke.”
The only fond memory she has from her time in institutional care is something most children take for granted.
“A kind man would give us a packet of broken biscuits when he’d see us walking past the Sunshine Biscuits Factory in Ballarat back to the children’s home,” she said.
“He wouldn’t give them to the other kids that passed on their way home from school, they were broken biscuits for the broken kids.
“We were put there for care and protection yet they put us in there with paedophiles so they had no way of really caring for us. We were left to survive institutional rape.
“They were delicate about who they picked. We would be picked because we had no contact with our parents, so there was no-one to tell. We didn’t get to go out on weekend leave because nobody wanted us.
“It takes an animal to attack you.
“They take time to work out the most vulnerable and then hone in on you. They show you the love you are longing for and then one night, bang. They strike and the torture keeps on going and it doesn’t stop because there’s no-one there to stop them.”
Herein lies the true tragedy of the lost childhoods.
“We were only welfare children,” she said, “As a child, you believe adults, you trust them to do the right thing by you. We trust adults who say they love us, to show us what love is, but sex isn’t love and the number of times we found ourselves in sexual moments as a child was criminal.”
Vicki lost contact with her siblings after they were split up but after almost 30 years, fate reunited her and younger brother Ronald Collie.
Vicki and her partner bought a house at Digby, west of Hamilton, and by chance a neighbour from up the road dropped in to say hello. That person was her long-lost brother Ronald.
After decades of suffering it is only now that forgotten children have learnt to face the demons of their childhoods. It is only now they are learning to use their voices in search of justice.
Ronald, who remains angry about his childhood, started a support group for Forgotten Australians in the south-west last year. It now has a dozen members who meet monthly.
“We’re not victims anymore, now we refer to ourselves as survivors,” he said.
A federal parliament apology from then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition leader Brendan Nelson in November 2009 has done little to ease the pain of the past.
“The apology meant nothing to me,” Vicki said “I’ve accepted it as an apology to people but for me it was given more to the stolen generation and that’s why, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.”
Now they find strength and solace in a Loud Fence initiative aimed at ensuring systemic failures never happen again. The fence outside Warrnambool’s Uniting Church is decorated in a multitude of coloured ribbons representing their plight.
"Everyone was all for it because they related to it,” Vicki said. “We tend to feed off each other’s emotions and understandings and quite often the group actually helps you to live a better, healthier lifestyle because you can walk away from there feeling quite good about yourself.
“We’ve nearly all been through the Royal Commission and we can talk about our experiences and know what that person is talking about.
“We all see an end result for each other and we’re there to support each other. We know that if we are really down, we can get on the phone to one of those people and they’ll be a lifeline and that’s what it is more than anything else. A group of people that understand where you’re at.
“Only someone who’s been there can understand the pain. You want to forget because it hurts so much but you can’t forget there’s always a piece in the back of your head that will stay there.”