On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

Very soon I began to realize that the most fortunate thing that can possibly happen to a child whose parents, or other guardians, persistently neglect or ill-treat it, is that it shall be thus summonsed; for then the State steps in in the place of its natural protector, and provides a decent home for it, food, clothing, and later on employment. In 1908 there were in Victoria 5,477 such wards of the State, and in all truth, however, the Government of Victoria may have been criticized for its management of other affairs, nothing—absolutely nothing—but good can be said of it in its position as foster-parent to this immense family. The 5477 children of whom I speak include 3,711 boarded out, 710 placed under supervision with friends, 748 maintaining themselves in service or apprenticeship, 306 in institutions or hospitals, and 2 visiting relations! By which it will be seen that a relation in Australia is no more overflowing with the milk of human kindness than in any other country. Among the newly-made wards of the State in 1908—numbering in all 1,240—the fathers were held to be blameable in 457 cases, and the mothers in 57; many of the heroic army of char-ladies being, I suspect, among the 457 who struggle bravely to support their offsprings unaided. There were 677 cases in which parents were held to be blameless; in some the family was too large for the father to adequately support all his children, while in others the father was dead, or an invalid, or in a lunatic asylum.

When the father is dead or an invalid, or has forsaken his wife, and the mother is known to be a hardworking, respectable woman, and yet unable to wholly maintain her family, then some—or all—of her children are made wards of the State, and boarded out to their own mother, who receives five shillings a week for their support; and in addition the help and advice of the State in all matters relating to their welfare: help that continues during the time that it is most particularly needed, which is when the youngsters have finished their schooling, and are ready to be put out into the world, with the need of a firmer hand than their mother over them.

If the children are committed to the care of private people, or institutions, these have to be approved of by the Governor in Council, five shillings a week being paid for each child boarded out to private people; unless it should be that they are voluntarily adopted, which is very often the case. I have not the faintest idea how many children are yearly adopted from hospitals and other institutions in Melbourne, but, judging by the number of cases I myself have come across, I should imagine it to be very large. In some ways people seem more humane, more primitive in Victoria than in England; certainly they are less easily reconciled to a childless home. They do not have large families, but if they have no child at all it is very common indeed for them to adopt one. Certainly I never personally knew anyone of wealth and good position in England to adopt a nameless child; but in Victoria I can bring to mind several cases in which this has been done, and the utmost care and love lavished upon it, while it never for one moment hears a single word that can cause it to doubt that the father and mother, of whose love it is so sure, are its own.

Over the little boarded-out baby the supervision is most especially strict. The whole administration of the Infant Life Protection Act, which was passed in 1890, and amended in 1907, has lately been taken out of the hands of the police, and put under the care of the Department for Neglected Children, to whom power is given to establish maternity homes and infant asylums. Any person who boards an infant must be registered; male or female inspectors must be permitted free access to the house, and allowed to examine the children, and give any necessary advice or directions, while no one is allowed to board out a child without first applying to the secretary of the Department, stating what amount he or she is prepared to pay weekly for its maintenance, no baby less than twelve months old being allowed to be boarded out under ten shillings a week, and all payments having to be made through the secretary. If these payments fall into arrears for four weeks the child becomes a ward of the State, while a penalty of £100, with or without imprisonment, is incurred for receiving or making payment for any infant contrary to the regulations of the Act, while it further provides that no illegitimate child—or boarded-out child—under the age of five years, who has died in such registered home, may be buried without a certificate from a coroner, justice, or member of the police-force.

That the need for such reform was pressing is shown by the vital statistics of the State for 1908; the number of illegitimate births being 1,790, and the deaths of these children under one year of age 354, the proportion of deaths among illegitimate children being between two and three times as great as that among children born in wedlock.

There are several foundling hospitals and rescue homes for women in Melbourne, but of these I am intimate with the working of but one—which for sheer humanity and complete realization of the claims of motherhood, apart from any other consideration, beats everything of the sort that I ever came across—and this is the Infant Asylum in Berry Street.

A girl who has got into trouble may apply at this asylum six or seven months before her hour of trial has come. She is taken in, fed and clothed, and—most merciful of all—given work to do, nobody, excepting the committee and matron, ever knowing her surname. When her time comes she goes to the Women’s Hospital for her confinement; and after that is over returns to the Home, to help in the general work, and to nurse and care for her own child. The value of this is scarcely to be estimated. The poor little mite is unfortunate enough as it is in possessing but one palpable parent, and being born under the stigma that—even in so free a country as Australia—is still attached to the completely innocent. If it is then taken from its mother and put straight into a foundling hospital, that mother’s whole memory of it will be so mingled with a nightmare of horror, and pain, and shame, that all she wishes for is to be able to forget its very existence; and so the poor mite is doubly orphaned. But I defy any mother—however reluctant—if she has but a spark of good in her, to suckle her child for a year or more, and not only feel bound to it by both love and duty, but capable of starting life again none the worse, and in many cases much the better—because more completely a woman—on account of its existence.

When the mother leaves the asylum, where she may stay for as long as two years, she is found a situation, and expected to contribute a percentage of her wages to the support of the baby who remains in the Home; unless, as is very often the case, she is allowed to have it with her; many people being quite willing—particularly in up-country districts where servants are scarce—to take a woman with a child, who as often as not becomes the pet of the entire household.

I have often seen mothers on Sundays at the Victoria Infant Asylum, who have called on their day out to see and have a romp with their children, who are all the dearer to them from the fact of the many small self-denials which they must practise to contribute to their support. To use the adjective “lost” or “fallen” to these women would be sheer nonsense. Personally I think they are infinitely and incomparably more moral than wives who sell their birthright by deliberately refusing the responsibilities of motherhood; while between them and the men whose name the children would have borne—had they entered the world with all honour and circumstance—there is no possible comparison, while it is due to the asylum where, in their blind terror, they first took refuge that these mothers have gained courage to stand upright, and face life as self-respecting women once more.

I feel I cannot write too strongly about this; I feel very strongly about it, and for the women on whom all the burden alone presses. Mr. Foster Fraser speaks of the number of illegitimate children in Australia. He says nothing at all of all the splendid measures that are being taken to combat this great source of misery, nor the facilities which are afforded, if marriage takes place later than it should do, for legitimizing children. Nor, though he compares the dairy output of Denmark and Australia, to the great disadvantage of the latter, does he extend the same comparison to a more vital matter, to wit, the percentage of illegitimate births—at which he is apparently so horrified—which is in Victoria 5.8, and in the Commonwealth 6.2, against 10.1 in Denmark; while in Sweden, another Northern country, it rises to 12.3. Even in Puritanical Scotland this percentage is 6.5, while it seems to me that for a country where for many months of the year the smaller houses and cottages have by evening become almost stifling; where the only possible relief for young people, who have no gardens of their own, is to be found either in the streets or public gardens, or on the easily reached sea-beaches, that the percentage is wonderfully moderate, that of Portugal, where the climatic conditions are much the same—though the young women are allowed far less of the liberty which I have heard so condemned in speaking of Australian life—being 11.4.