Allanville Home

Allanville Home was established at Wellington by the Department of Community Services as a receiving home for state wards. It was established in the mid-1970s and housed 15 children at a time. Allanville Home closed in 1995.

A submission to the Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care from 2004 mentions being placed at Allanville not long after it was established. Alison went to Allanville from the Bidura receiving home and was joined there by her brother, from whom she had been separated when their foster care placement broke down. She writes “My brother and I had been picked because other families had the opportunity to go there too, and it was where they were trying to re-establish family contacts with each other again …” (Submission no 386).

She described her first impressions of Allanville in her submission, and the freedom she felt coming from an institution like Bidura:

This home was different and had a feel of something good going for it so it incorporated families living together and being together sharing a family feeling and being able to be together as they would be in a real home, and I like this a lot the family that operated it also had a family (of three daughters a husband and wife) we had a room to myself which felt great to have personal space after so long sharing a dormitory in Glebe, this was luxury and the whole set up was inspiring in the country and I could even go to school down the road in an outside school and be normal again.

A court case in 2007 found that some residents of Allanville experienced sexual abuse from staff. David John Boddy, a former registered carer for the Department of Community Services who had supervised boys at the Allanville Home, was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years’ jail for sexually abusing 17 boys from 1977 onwards (ABC News, 11 April 2007).

A story in the Wellington Times from 2003 shared a story about a retired racehorse, Jack, who was at Allanville in the late 1970s. A former worker, Don Graham, said that there were 15 children at Allanville at that time, and that Jack “worked wonders with them, many learning to ride him. And he sure loved the cuddles he got from them”.

In 2014, Allanville is a private residence.