Morialta Children's Homes Incorporated

Morialta Children’s Homes Incorporated was the new name given to the Morialta Protestant Children’s Home from 1972. The name referred to both the Children’s Home for younger children at Norton Summit and the Toorak Gardens Boys’ Hostel for older boys who were studying or working. Both were run by the same independent Board of Management. The Children’s Home closed in 1974 and the Toorak Gardens Boys’ Hostel closed shortly afterwards.

Morialta Children’s Homes Incorporated was the new name given to the Morialta Protestant Children’s Home in 1972. The new name acknowledged that the same independent Board of Management was in fact running two Homes – the Home at Norton Summit for younger children and a Hostel at Toorak Gardens for boys who had left the Children’s Home and were studying or working.

During the early 1970s non-government Homes for children came under the supervision of the Department for Community Welfare. As part of a general change in the philosophy of child care, the department encouraged non-government care providers to move away from larger congregate care institutions to smaller group care. During this same era, the Children’s Home was facing financial difficulties and in 1974 it was closed. The hostel at Toorak Gardens closed shortly afterwards. The properties at Norton Summit and Toorak Gardens were sold in 1975. Morialta Children’s Homes Incorporated became the Morialta Trust in 1976, a benevolent organisation providing financial and other assistance to children and others in need.

In 1976, the mansion at Morialta became the base for Camp Sunshine, run by the Children’s Foundation of South Australia, which took a 14-month lease of the property at Norton Summit in 1974. The organisation ran holiday camps for children with disabilities and aged between 4 and 12 , every second weekend. The Foundation . The executive director of the Children’s Foundation of SA was Laurence (Laurie) John O’Shea, who established the organisation despite previously having been in prison for child sex offences. He was jailed in the 1970s for his offending against children at Camp Sunshine. In 2011 he was jailed for more offences committed at Camp Sunshine.

National Redress Scheme for people who have experienced institutional child sexual abuse

The South Australian government has agreed to be a funder of last resort for this institution. This means that although the institution is now defunct, it is participating in the National Redress Scheme, and the government has agreed to pay the institution’s share of costs of providing redress to a person (as long as the government is found to be equally responsible for the abuse a person experienced).