They number more than half a million, yet the ongoing trauma from their time in orphanages and institutions remains poorly known
When Judy Leonard entered the orphanage, she was given a bed with a number. That was how the staff would refer to her. Not by her name, or even by one of the cruel nicknames the other children gave her, but by her allocated space in the dormitory: C2.
“I would like the readers to close their eyes,” Judy says now, “and imagine that it was them at age nine.”
Judy’s early childhood, along with those of her brothers and sisters, was spent playing in the streets and beaches in Melbourne’s west. Then the police arrived.
“We were classed as neglected,” Judy says. “Dirty, unwashed, uneducated.” She was bundled into a car with two siblings. “I remember looking back out of the car and seeing my mum and dad cry. And I’d never seen my father cry.”
For six months, the three siblings were locked away at Turana, an overcrowded accommodation (or “reception”) centre in Parkville for children in the welfare system. It doubled as a remand facility for “problem” children. Police were said to refer to it as “the rat bins”.
A judge later ordered the three children to an orphanage.