Single mothers (also referred to as unmarried mothers) historically often struggled to support their babies and to deal with the social stigma attached to their situation. These women (and their children who were born ‘out of wedlock’) were the targets of various charitable endeavours in Australia from the earliest days of white settlement. Until perhaps…
The Domestic Service Assistance Scheme, managed by the Department of Social Services and its successors, was established by the Domestic Service Assistance Act 1947. It provided a housekeeper or temporary accommodation for children during a family emergency which left no one able to look after them. The Scheme ended in about 1989. The Domestic Service…
Family Homes were a type of ‘care’ in South Australia and the Northern Territory. In South Australia, Family Homes were established by the government after the passing of the South Australian Community Welfare Act in 1972. They provided smaller group care for up to ten children under the supervision of house parents. They were generally…
The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP) was developed in the early 1980s and was incorporated into adoption and child protection legislation from 1983 onwards. In 2009 it was renamed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle. The Principle is intended to guide child protection services to strengthen Aboriginal children’s connections with their family,…
Eugenics was an influential doctrine popular from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Eugenics refers to the philosophy and practice of selective breeding of humans with desirable (or “superior”) hereditary traits. While not discounting the role of environmental factors, it placed considerable emphasis on heredity in shaping an individual’s characteristics. The ideas within eugenics…
Closed adoption refers to the practice of sealing an adopted child’s original birth certificate and issuing a new birth certificate when the child was adopted. This new certificate included the name of the child and their adoptive parents. The identity of the adopted child’s original parents was hidden. This practice meant that many people didn’t…
Homefinders were people who worked to find places for children who needed foster parents or apprenticeships. The term was used in New South Wales, and was borrowed from American charities. George Ardill of the Sydney Rescue Work Society used the term in his publication The Rescue, and it was used by other Sydney charities. The…
Schools for Specific Purposes were public schools for children with special needs that were set up by the New South Wales Department of Education. Sometimes they are referred to as Schools for Special Purposes. They operated within a number of state child welfare institutions. Their naming and classification has changed over time, but such schools…
Affiliation is a word used to describe the process of identifying the father of a child born to a single mother. Single mothers were obliged to name the father of their child if they wished to access government payments. They were also forced to ask the father for maintenance or child support. If her request…
City Mission refers to the missions run by various Christian denominations in urban and suburban settings. Many of the city missions established in nineteenth-century Australia continue to operate community services organisations in the 2010s. The London City Mission was founded in 1835, with a mandate to ‘extend the knowledge of the Gospel among the inhabitants…
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