Foster care, stigma and the sturdy, unkillable children of the very poor

Abstract

Foster care has been provided for thousands of vulnerable Australian children from the early nineteenth century. Despite the prevalence of this system of care as the preferred means of providing out-of-home care across the country from the late nineteenth century, very few people who lived in foster care as children have written about their experiences, a total of 23 in all. Although a small sample, these few stories tell a larger one of the complexities of lived experience of foster care: for some it was entirely positive, for others it was wholly negative and for most it was somewhere between those two extremes. What I show in this paper is that what many of the stories have in common, no matter where they sit on that continuum, is the painful acquaintance with social stigma at an early age.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Nathan Kauschke for assistance with formatting, and to the reviewer for helpful feedback. This paper forms part of a larger project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), A Long History of Foster Care in Australia: Hidden Stories of Growing Up in Foster Care in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. My colleague on the project is Dr Nell Musgrove from Australian Catholic University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

The title of this paper has been inspired by a line in an Ezra Pound poem, ‘The Garden’, which had great meaning for Shelton Lea, an Australian poet and one time ward of the (NSW) State (Georgeff, 2007, 123–124).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dee Michell

Dee Michell currently teaches into the Bachelor of Social Science degree program at the University of Adelaide. With Nell Musgrove (Australian Catholic University) she is currently undertaking an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project examining the history of foster care in Australia. She also conducts research around the transition to, and success at, university of those from low socio-economic status backgrounds.