Goodna Girls

Front matter

Godha Girls

A HISTORY OF CHILDREN INA QUEENSLAND MENTAL ASYLUM

Aboriginal History Incorporated

Preface

The oral histories in this book include those of former female child patients who were sent to Goodna Asylum, later known as Wolston Park, an adult psychiatric facility in Queensland, Australia. This book grew out of a temporary touring exhibition that I curated, ‘Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions’, which opened at the National Museum of Australia in November 2011. At the opening of that exhibition, I observed both celebration and resolution among former residents of children’s institutions who, to this day, suffer the long-term effects of the abuse and neglect they experienced as children. However, there was little joy from the women who had been sent to Goodna. The exhibition did not assuage their feelings of resentment and lack of trust of those who inhabited professional positions. These women had unfinished business. At the launch of the exhibition, they turned to me and asked: ‘Are you going to help us get justice?’

Within the wider history of institutionalised ‘care’ in Australia, I knew that the history of children in Wolston Park was marginalised and deserving of further attention. The 1998 Commission of Inquiry into the Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions, known as the ‘Forde Inquiry’, had excluded adult psychiatric facilities from its terms of reference and so these former child inmates were ineligible for the subsequent financial redress scheme. On 24 March 2010, the Queensland Government had apologised to former children under state care who had been placed in adult mental hospitals, and had stated its intention to hold reconciliation talks with survivors. The framed apology document was subsequently lost and the government did not follow through with the reconciliation talks as promised. Even though my temporary position at the National Museum of Australia had concluded, I decided to do what I could—with my own personal resources, and within the bounds of my qualifications and area of professional expertise, as well as academic research ethics— to draw public attention to the experiences of this group of women xi xii survivors. These oral histories are a mere sample of a cohort of former Goodna child patients who had been waiting for recognition of their childhood experiences and a just resolution. The research for this book was thus part of a wider campaign to seek justice for former state wards of adult psychiatric facilities.

The women were well-organised and highly articulate, but those in power continually refused to pay meaningful attention and follow-up of their legitimate and well-founded pleas. I wanted the Queensland Government to know that others, apart from these courageous survivors, were watching, and that their reasonable pleas mattered. I knew that the need for mediation by someone occupying a professional job was a form of elitism. They should have been acknowledged in their own right by those in power, as should their experiences of their own living history. The need for professional mediation and/or the clout from a prestigious organisation was a failure of democracy, in my view. Nevertheless, having been asked to assist, I chose to find out how I could shove my proverbial foot in a parliamentary door, knowing full well that I would likely be injured, discredited and scapegoated. The alternative—doing nothing— was not an option: the prospect of the distress I knew I would feel if I turned my back on these women seemed far worse. Further, in addition to writing and talking about a topic, I discovered the imperative to do something with others.

I applied to become an honorary fellow at The Australian National University (ANU) so that I could have access to research and ethical resources. In supporting my application, and through its ongoing professional disinterested role, ANU has become part of the living history that informs this book—a keen reminder of the need for independent universities. In 2012, the university’ strategic communications team played a critical role in co-writing and distributing a media release about my research.’ Subsequently, Fairfax Press printed a series of newspaper articles, written by Amy Remeikis, about the plight of Wolston Park survivors.” On 6 March 2013, the Queensland Government repeated the apology it had made in 2010, but, yet again, it did not schedule reconciliation talks with survivors.

1 ‘Remembering Forgotten Australians’, 13 August 2012, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, accessed 5 October 2019, cass.anu.edu.au/news/remembering-forgotten-australians.

2 See, for example, Amy Remeikis, “Come Clean on Chambers of Horrors, Sufferers Plead’, 19 August 2012, The Sydney Morning Herald, accessed 5 October 2019, www.smh.com.au/national/ come-clean-on-chambers-of-horrors-sufferers-plead-20120818-24fqx.html.

PREFACE

In 2013, a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established by the Australian Government. I was asked to attend a private hearing on 24 April 2015 at which I spoke, tabled my research, and emphasised the importance of a public case study, as part of the commission, concerning the abuse of children in adult psychiatric facilities. The commission’s refusal to act on this prompted me to write, in consultation with survivors, an opinion piece that was published online in 2016.? Queensland’s acting mental health commissioner took notice, contacting me a few days later* and subsequently liaising with others within the Queensland Government. This seemed like a positive development, but there was no way to know whether the government would follow through with restorative justice. In February 2017, the Queensland Department of Health announced a formal reconciliation process for those who, ‘as children, were in the care of the State and inappropriately placed in Queensland adult mental health facilities’.°

This was definite progress. Yet, no details concerning when the process would commence and whether or not it would result in reparation for survivors was released. Some of the women and I had been talking to journalist Matthew Condon in the hope that he might write a newspaper article informed by the voices of survivors. Condon’s 5,000-word feature appeared in the Courier Mail on 11 March 2017.° The title captured the struggle: ‘House of Horrors—Survivors Fight for Justice after Enduring Unspeakable Abuse as Young Girls in a Brisbane Asylum’. Matthew Condon had joined the ranks of a small number of journalists—namely Ken Blanch, Steve Austin and Amy Remeikis—who understood the need to draw public attention to the women’s quest for much needed recompense. Five days after Condon’s article was published, Queensland’s Minister for Health Cameron Dick spoke on radio about his commitment to an authentic reconciliation process, which, he assured, would include financial reparation.’ In October 2017, each of the survivors who had participated in the reconciliation process received letters from the

Chynoweth, ‘Who Is Protected’.

Email to author, 27 March 2016.

Queensland Government, Fact Sheet 1, 1.

Matthew Condon, “House of Horrors—Survivors Fight for Justice after Enduring Unspeakable Abuse as Young Girls in a Brisbane Asylum’, The Courier Mail, 11 March 2017.

7 This occurred on ABC Radio, Brisbane, 16 March 2017. The reporter was Steve Austin.

DWM Aw xiii

Queensland Government that detailed a list of reparations, including ex gratia payments. It had been almost six years since the opening of the ‘Inside’ exhibition and the call for justice.

The research that informed our campaign is now made public in these pages. Through Goodna Girls, I hope for public acknowledgement of this living history so that it is never repeated. There are implications here for current child protection policies and for an inclusive public history. To those who hold power in the fields of law and government; who advise on policies; who analyse material culture; who keep, write and exhibit narratives; who are paid to care; who teach—I commend the narratives in this book as a baton for your steadfast hold and resolute journey along the path of justice.

Adele Chynoweth 20 August 2020

Acknowledgements

To the following members of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums who supported my conference presentation on this subject in 2017 at the Museo Internacional para la Democracia in Rosario, Argentina: David Fleming, Françoise McClafferty, Susana Meden, Jane Smith and Guillermo Whpei.

To those whose lives are recounted here, I extend my profound gratitude for your courage and trust and, indeed, for all that you have taught me, including the strength in camaraderie. My life has been forever changed. I will never forget.

XV

PART 1: HISTORICAL CONTEXT Marginalised Voices: The Quest for a Recognised History

Goodna Girls is a firsthand history of the consequences of a policy that resulted in children being incarcerated in an adult psychiatric hospital. What follows is a collection of oral histories of four former child inmates (Jean/Erin, Judy, Rose and Tammy) and three staff (the priest, the psychiatrist and the nurse) from Wolston Park Hospital, Queensland’s oldest and largest mental health facility. Wolston Park was founded in 1865 as Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum. It changed its name to Goodna Asylum (later Hospital) for the Insane in 1880 and is now known as The Park Centre for Mental Health. As Mark Finnane and Joanna Besley note, each name change reflected an ‘aspiration to escape the stigma associated with an institution for “the insane”’.' Before Woogaroo was established, male and female ‘lunatics’ had been lodged at the Brisbane Gaol. The name “Woogaroo’, which means ‘to step over a person lying down’, was derived from an Aboriginal name for the land on which the asylum was built.” Between 1867 and 1915, five parliamentary inquiries and royal commissions were held into the asylum’s management and accommodation.’ Over 50,000 patients were admitted there between 1865 and the mid-1980s.‘

Besley and Finnane, ‘Remembering Goodna, 117.

Finnane, “Wolston Park Hospital’, 39.

Finnane, “Wolston Park Hospital’, 43.

Finnane, “Wolston Park Hospital’, 52.

Bron

There is no certainty about the number of child patients admitted to Goodna. In March 2017, Queensland’s Minister for Health, Cameron Dick, stated that approximately 50-60 children had been sent to Goodna, but he did not provide any details about the years of their admission or the source of his figures.* The women interviewed for this book have letters, written at the time of their admission, from Queensland’s departments of Health and Children’s Services. However, these departments claim that they ‘do not have any data for ‘children under the age of 18 admitted to the Park Centre for Mental Health’. The Department of Health did not begin to collect patient data for psychiatric hospitals until the 1995/96 financial year.’ Finnane and Besley claim that Wolston Park has an archive of medical records that ‘are not open to the public and access by researchers is strictly vetted’.®

Child ‘Protection’

Goodna Girls is part of a wider history of institutionalised welfare policies and practices that emerged during the nineteenth century in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which saw masses of people relocate to areas that grew into large cities. The growth of a pauper class prompted the formation of charitable organisations’ and new practices of state monitoring and attempts to control individuals and communities through social welfare agencies.'° For vulnerable children, one of the outcomes of this conflation of scrutiny and social work was their institutionalisation—a practice referred to as ‘penal welfarism’. Kerry Carrington defines penal welfarism as ‘the punishment of children for non-criminal conduct under status or welfare offences, such as being uncontrollable or exposed to moral danger’."!

Penal welfarism in Australia dates back to the earliest times of European colonisation. Fifteen per cent of all convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868 were aged 18 or younger." During the nineteenth

5 This occurred on ABC Radio, Brisbane, 16 March 2017. The reporter was Steve Austin. 6 Child Safety After Hours, Brisbane Region, email to author, 3 May 2016. 7 Queensland Department of Health, email to author, 18 April 2016.

8 Besley and Finnane, ‘Remembering Goodna’, 120.

9 Ferguson, Protecting Children in Time, 27-29.

10 Ferguson, Protecting Children in Time, 17.

11 Carrington, Offending Youth, 9.

12 Kociumbas, Australian Childhood, 21.

century, industrial schools and reformatories, which were often run like prisons, were established around the country. In 1871, in Queensland, abandoned or criminal boys were housed on the Proserpine, a hulk anchored in the Brisbane River, near Lytton,'? echoing the British prison hulks of the late eighteenth century. Penal welfarism continued into the twentieth century, with over 900 orphanages, homes and other residential facilities for children operating in Australia.'4

For decades, child protection policies have been conflated with institutionalised punishment and treatments of mental illness. For example, alcohol abuse was linked with delinquency in Queensland’s Inebriates Institutions Act 1896, which permitted substance abusers, including young people, to be placed in psychiatric facilities.'” During the 1950s in Brisbane, girls from the industrial schools—Sisters of Mercy’s Holy Cross Home; Mt Maria Re-Education Centre, Mitchelton, run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd; and the Salvation Army’s Kalimna Vocational Centre—could be sent to psychiatric hospitals if they were deemed disruptive. Dedicated psychiatric facilities for children were established in Queensland in the 1960s. Karrala House, for girls, was opened in 1963 within the Ipswich Mental Hospital and was administered by Queensland’s State Children Department. Wilson Youth Hospital had been established for boys (up to the age of 14) in 1961, with a section for girls opening in 1971. What prompted this development?

Fear of ‘Delinquents’

The emergence of youth cultures after World War II (WWII) provoked moral panic around a perceived epidemic of juvenile delinquency.'® The Australian ‘bodgies and widgies’ of the 1950s were one of the targets of this dread, exemplified by A. E. Manning’s book The Bodgie: A Study in Psychological Abnormality (1959), which cast this cohort as juvenile delinquents in need of psychiatric treatment.” The Queensland police formed a ‘Bodgie Squad’ in the Brisbane Police District.'* At the same time, the medical response to young people from the working and poverty classes was formalised in government policy.

13 Stathis, An Historical Account’, 588.

14 Find & Connect, accessed 14 February 2020, www.findandconnect.gov.au/.

15 Stathis, An Historical Account’, 590.

16 Bessant, ‘Described, Measured and Labelled’, 8; Moore, ‘Bodgies, Widgies and Moral Panic’. 17 Stratton, ‘Bodgies and Widgies’, 11-12.

18 Queensland Government, Report of the Committee on Youth Problems, 18.

In 1957, Queensland Premier (Sir) Frank Nicklin constituted aCommittee on Youth Problems, chaired by Police Minister Alexander Tattenhall Dewar. Tasked with addressing youth problems, such as neglected children and criminal delinquents, the committee recommended the establishment of Child Guidance Clinics led by a psychiatrist. Referrals could be made by order of a judge or magistrate in a specific Juvenile Court Clinic that would be instituted for the purpose. The committee also recommended that police be ‘authorised to request the parents of children found to be committing anti-social acts to direct such children to the Children’s Court Clinic .??

In 1961, a Committee on Child Welfare Legislation was appointed by the Minister for Health and Home Affairs. Chaired by Minister Dewar, the committee, which comprised members of the departments of Justice, Health and Home Affairs and the director of the State Children Department, observed the lack of research linking delinquency and mental illness. Yet, although there were ‘no accurate figures available for the incidence of delinquency and its relationship to psychiatric abnormality’, the committee reported that ‘the Senior Medical Director of the Welfare and Guidance Service has formed the opinion that the incidence of personality disorder and psychiatric abnormality amongst delinquent youth in this State is high’.?!

This opinion informed the establishment of the Wilson Youth Hospital in 1961 for the ‘assessment, remand and treatment’ of teenage boys and also Karrala House in 1963 for ‘the older and more recalcitrant type of girl’.” The Committee on Child Welfare Legislation’s report discussed different categories of ‘care’ in accordance with Queensland’s State Children Act 1911 and Childrens Court Act 1907, and recommended that ‘voluntary admission to care’, then limited to the age of 14, be raised to 18.” However, according to the State Children Act, girls could legally be in the protective care of the state, even if not institutionalised, until they were 21.

19 Queensland Government, Report of the Committee on Youth Problems, 8-9.

20 Queensland Government, Report of the Committee on Youth Problems, 17.

21 Queensland Government, Report of the Committee on Child Welfare, 7 (emphasis added). 22 Queensland Government, Report of the Committee on Child Welfare, 22.

23 Queensland Government, Report of the Committee on Child Welfare, 3.

That this form of institutionalisation endured beyond the ‘bodgie and widgie’ era may be explained by the broader notion of the ‘deviant:

Those particularly susceptible to being labelled ‘deviant’ are those whose deviance is public and visible. This means that particular groups of people with high levels of public visibility, such as Indigenous people, young people in rural communities, homeless youth, visible ethnic minorities, young people who hang out in public spaces or shopping malls tend to become the locus of adverse public and police attention and labelled as deviant.”

The decisions of the Committee on Child Welfare Legislation in the 1960s were also set against a wider, international backdrop of social engineering informed by eugenics and euthenics. Prior to WWII, when it became associated with Nazi Germany, eugenics had been a popular movement in most Western countries, including Australia.” The theory of eugenics was first developed in England, during the Victorian era, by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that heredity had more influence on individual characteristics than environment. He advocated for the collection and publication of eugenics data and the discouragement of procreation among those considered unfit. In eugenic terms, he favoured the wealthy.” English eugenicist Caleb Saleeby supported positive and negative eugenics:

Negative eugenics relates to the problem of preventing the mental and physical defectives of society from perpetuating their defects through propagation. Positive eugenics relates to the problem of improving the mass of mankind by the selection of the superior in the process of reproduction.”

Even though discredited, eugenic philosophy informed discourses on the most vulnerable in society, including adolescents.’

24 Carrington, Offending Youth, 46.

25 Wilson, Prevention is Better than Cure, 1.

26 Semmel, ‘Karl Pearson: Socialist and Darwinist’, 118-19. 27 Ward, ‘Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics’, 738.

28 Wilson, Prevention is Better than Cure, 174.

By contrast, euthenics is the theory that environmental factors can temper hereditary predispositions.” Historian Stephen Garton maintains that, in Australia, social problems were perceived to be the result of both hereditary and environmental factors, which influenced the ‘mental hygiene’ movement. This interplay, Garton reasons, can be understood via the Foucauldian concept of ‘'bio-politics’, which:

United a broad cross section of professional middle-class opinion

. [and] eventually had a significant impact on those subjected to the new mental hygiene gaze, through the psychologists, teachers, social workers and psychiatrists who have come to be employed in many government departments and private welfare organisations since the 1930s.”

The preoccupation with ‘mental hygiene’ and social problems is reflected in a statement in 1956 by Robert Heffron, New South Wales Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, who surmised that neglected children were virulent: “Deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid.’*' American social theorist Erving Goffman coined the term ‘total institution’ to describe places of residence where people were isolated from wider society, such as orphanages, mental asylums and detention centres. These total institutions were designed, at least in part, to protect ‘the wider population from contamination’.” If neglected children were deemed contagious, then their institutionalisation was used as a form of social protection for the masses.

Lack of Education

The narratives within Goodna Girls demonstrate how the talents of marginalised children may be overlooked. Jean/Erin recalls how she was bored at school because she learned content very quickly. Tammy was diagnosed with savant syndrome, but neither girl’s talent was nurtured by formal education. This observation remains relevant for current education policy. A recent Victorian Government inquiry into the

29 Ward, ‘Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics’, 748; Cole, ‘Stolen Babies’, 148. 30 Garton, ‘Sound Minds’, 181.

31 Penglase, Orphans of the Living, 241.

32 Penglase, Orphans of the Living, 103-04.

education of gifted and talented students notes that gifted children come from all backgrounds and that some students are at risk of not having their gifts identified:

Students at particular risk of having their abilities overlooked are those from backgrounds of educational disadvantage such as low socioeconomic, Indigenous or culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, as well as students who live in rural and regional areas and students with disabilities.*

Tammy, who was also diagnosed as autistic, recounts the physical abuse she encountered in primary school. Reports of the abuse of children with disabilities in schools continue to be heard today, including the use of unsupervised restraints for children diagnosed with autism. In June 2017, One Nation senator Pauline Hanson suggested in parliament that children with autism should be educated in a ‘special classroom’. Although Hanson’s comments were not based on research, they still provoked debate, including responses from journalists such as Guy Rundle who argued that the range of behaviours of children in a postindustrial society need to be considered, and that a more modular process of teaching, beyond the ‘one-size-fits-all classroom, is called for.” Tammy's testimony contributes to such debates. In terms of democratic decisionmaking, it highlights the implications of excluding the voices of those to whom the benefits or disadvantages of government policies may flow.

Archival Records

The narratives in this book demonstrate the effects on survivors of the personal records that were kept by the state and by institutions. According to Jean/Erin, her incarceration at Boggo Road Gaol as an adult was enabled by a prosecuting lawyer who erroneously concluded that her

33 Education and Training Committee, Inquiry, xxiv.

34 Louise Milligan, ‘School Investigated after Claims Boy with Autism Locked in “Cage”, ABC News, 16 August 2016, accessed 20 September 2019, www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-16/school-investigatedafter-claims-boy-with-autism/7749726.

35 Jane Norman and Eliza Borrello, ‘Pauline Hanson under Fire for “Bigoted” Call to Remove Children with Disabilities from Mainstream Classrooms, 22 June 2017, ABC News, accessed 29 September 2019, www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-21/pauline-hanson-under-fire-repulsive-bigotedcomments-autism/8640328.

36 Guy Rundle, ‘Hanson's Autistic Kids Comments Reveal a Truth No One Wants to Talk About’, 23 June 2017, Crikey, accessed 29 September 2019, www. crikey.com.au/2017/06/23/hansons-autistickids-comments-reveal-a-truth-no-one-wants-to-talk-about/.

institutional files were evidence of a juvenile criminal record. Similarly, Tammy recounts how her personal files render her vulnerable to being misunderstood when accessed by health professionals today.

The records of those who were institutionalised as children have the ‘capacity to revive past suffering’ and ‘disrupt an individual’s sense of self.’ Not only did many institutionalised children endure violent abuse, but also their lives were the subject of relentless and excessive scrutiny by those in positions of power. Record keeping was, and remains, a central mechanism in this constant and invasive monitoring of children in out-of-home care. The potential for the content of these files to be deemed ‘objective’ by those who access them disavows the personal and moral judgements that inform their creation. Sometimes, survivors try to access these records to piece together their histories and provide evidence of their time in ‘care’. Jacqueline Z. Wilson and Frank Golding advocate for the reform of file-keeping methods to enable survivors to actively participate in the creation of their own files.*®

Livia Iacovino notes the way in which record keeping has enabled the surveillance of Indigenous communities. Human rights may be compromised when the records of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are held by non-Indigenous organisations. Iacovino proposes a ‘participant model’ of archival reform, which may include Indigenous communities having full ownership rights” and formal acknowledgement of ‘multiple record creators’. As former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda noted:

It is the role of government and others, including archivists and recordkeepers, to position themselves to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to move from passive and powerless subjects to active participatory agents. I hope my insights assist in pushing towards an archive and recordkeeping system that facilitates the active participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples.“

A participatory methodology has implications for historical archives as well as current and future record keeping. A recent Australian Research Council-funded project by researchers from Monash and Federation

37 Wilson and Golding, ‘Latent Scrutiny’, 93.

38 Wilson and Golding, ‘Latent Scrutiny’, 95, 97, 99, 107. 39 Jacovino, ‘Rethinking’, 362-63.

40 Iacovino, ‘Rethinking’, 367.

41 McKemmish et al., ‘Decolonizing Recordkeeping’.

universities, ‘Rights in Records by Design’, emphasises the views of those who have experienced out-of-home care. Another project, ‘Indigenous Archiving and Cultural Safety’, has been undertaken by Indigenous researcher Kirsten Thorpe and uses community-based participation approaches, including ‘yarning’, to deconstruct colonial power relationships and associated structural barriers.“ Iacovino stresses the need to acknowledge ‘oral memory’ as an important source of Indigenous knowledge.“ The memories shared in Goodna Girls exemplify the grievous consequences of colonising surveillance facilitated by discriminatory archival practices. Given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children comprised 36.9 per cent of children in out-of-home care on 30 June 2017,“ an ethical, participatory record-keeping policy and practice is a current imperative.

Staff Witnesses

This book includes the narratives of three former staff members at Goodna. These provide insight into the systemic barriers staff faced in attempting to support their patients. The priest, a former chaplain at Wilson Youth Hospital, told his story at a time when public criticism of the Catholic Church was rife. Alive to such criticism, he describes the struggle to realise a democratic church. He refers to the importance of Vatican II, established in 1959, which aimed to realise the direction of Pope John XXIII to ‘usher the church into modernity’. Among other changes, this resulted in the introduction of folk music and guitars in the Catholic mass.“° However, it would be naive to assume that the abuse of children within the church was perpetrated solely by autocratic clergy members with a pre-Vatican II sensibility: ‘guitar-playing’ priests have also been accused of sexual abuse.“

42 McKemmish et al., ‘Decolonizing Recordkeeping’.

43 lacovino, ‘Rethinking’, 356.

44 Australian Government, Australian Institute of Family Studies, ‘Children in Care’, September 2018, accessed 1 October 2019, aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/children-care#targetText=The%20 remaining%206.7%25%20o0f%20children, for%20between%201%E2%80%932%20years.

45 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Final Report.

46 Oppenheimer, ‘Folk Music in the Catholic Mass’, 103-04.

47 Padraig Collins, ‘Irish Priests Keep Working Despite Abuse Allegations’, 18 May 2010, The Irish Times, accessed 26 September 2019, www.irishtimes.com/news/irish-priests-kept-working-despiteabuse-allegations-1.666495.

The priest’s account draws attention toa significant international movement in the Catholic Church—the paradigm of liberation theology, attributed to the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez. Liberation theology has been simplistically labelled as a mixture of Christianity and Marxism. It is perhaps more apt to describe it as a way of positioning Christianity from the perspective of the poor.** The priest explains how his work with homeless youth was influenced by his study of liberation theology. This description illustrates the lack of targeted and relevant social services for youth at risk at a time when state government responses tended to be characterised by punitive welfarism. The priest, in his role at Wilson Youth Hospital, witnessed the transition of some child inmates to Wolston Park Hospital, prompting him to visit them after their relocation.

In addition to the priest’s account, Goodna Girls includes oral histories of a psychiatrist and a student nurse who worked at Wolston Park Hospital. Both witnessed violence against patients at the hands of other staff and encountered obstacles in seeking justice for these crimes. The psychiatrist reported witnessing a nurse using force to administer medicine to a teenage patient and later gave evidence in court. However, the nurse was not convicted. When the student nurse reported seeing a nurse raping a patient, the tyres on her car were slashed. In the interests of her safety, she was transferred from the ward. But was the perpetrator brought to justice? Transferring witnesses and offenders does not ensure the safety of vulnerable people.

In his narrative, the psychiatrist notes that mental health facilities may be used inappropriately to detain those who are deemed difficult to control. However, he states that ‘self-harm and aggression don’t always correlate with the person having a mental illness’. The psychiatrist also speaks to what he understands as his former, middle-class, judgemental approach to child protection. Such personal insight may be explained with reference to the theory of cultural relativism, in ‘that rights (and other social practices, values, and moral rules) are culturally determined’.” This understanding or position is not unique to the psychiatrist. As Clark observes:

48 Berryman, Liberation Theology, 4. 49 Donnelly, ‘Cultural Relativism’, 401.

Social workers are intensely sensitive to charges of being middle class and judgemental, and vigorously pursue approaches which are regarded as non-directive and non-judgmental, and avoid imposing any set of values—and particularly one’s own set—on the client.”

Beyond middle-class judgementalism, critical insights might come from querying the efficacy of child protection services.

‘Care-Criminalisation’*'

A unifying discursive thread runs through the oral histories in Goodna Girls: the children who were deemed to be ‘at risk’ in domestic settings, or in other settings such as school, were not better served in governmentsanctioned, out-of-home ‘care’ settings. This observation is still relevant today, yet it seems that the lessons have not been learned.

In 2016, the Victorian Government Department of Health and Human Services engaged global finance company KPMG and the Australian Childhood Foundation (ACF) to address the problem of children suffering from trauma in out-of-home care. The subsequent report recommended the development of a set of options for a ‘contained therapeutic and treatment care service (CTTCS) for vulnerable children in Victoria. Children as young as eight years old who had experienced trauma and had previously been subject to secure welfare services would be eligible for CT TCS via a court order. The KPMG and ACF report also proposed that the staffing of CT'TCS’s should include mental health specialists.” While the Victorian Government rejected the recommendations within the report, it is alarming that recognisable parallels with the historical proposals of the Queensland Government’s committees on Child Welfare Legislation (1963) and Youth Problems (1959) could be conceived by policymakers today.” Rather than place vulnerable children who suffer from trauma in psychiatric lock-up facilities, Lesley McAra and Susan McVie conclude that ‘justice for children and young people cannot