AUSTRALIA
ABC – Four Corners
[video]
[transcript]
Four Corners explores how the childhood experience of “the homies” continues to intensely affect their lives.
QUENTIN McDERMOTT, REPORTER: Scattered around Australia are crumbling structures that once housed the children society didn’t want. These were children’s homes, run by the most respectable bodies in the land – States, charities, churches, the Salvation Army. But for many older Australians, the memories are intensely painful.
TRISH PASCOE: The bitter, lonely years.
QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Why do you call it that?
TRISH PASCOE: Because they were bitter and lonely. That’s the only thing I can use to describe it.
QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Some homes were well-run. In others, abuse turned children into angry, sometimes criminal, adults.
MAN IN SHADOW: To be truthful, I cannot look at a 13- or 14-year-old and not think, “I wouldn’t mind that”.
BEVERLEY FITZGERALD, PRESIDENT, QLD CHILDREN SERVICES TRIBUNAL: Its repercussions are enormous and they ripple out to every facet of a person’s life, and we have to start looking at that.
JOHN DALZIEL, THE SALVATION ARMY: That trust has been betrayed and to the Australian public now, I apologise.
QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Tonight on Four Corners, the secret history of the extraordinary cruelty inflicted on children in care.
NEWSREEL: The Salvation Army is a strong supporter of the Scouting movement as a means of building healthy bodies and minds – ideals that are carried through to their schools for children from broken homes. For these youngsters, school is home.
QUENTIN McDERMOTT: In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of boys and girls from broken homes were dispatched to institutions around Australia.
(PHOTOGRAPH LABELLED ‘INDOOROOPILLY’)
QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The damage some homes caused is still there in the lives of middle-aged Australians like Lewis Blayse.
LEWIS BLAYSE: It was out in the middle of nowhere, which is where most of these places were – out in the middle of nowhere.
QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Lewis Blayse went into care in 1950 when he was five months old. His parents simply couldn’t cope.
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