St Joseph’s Girls’ Orphanage was established in Subiaco on the site of the old boys’ orphanage on the 21st November 1901. It was run by the Sisters of Mercy for girls aged up to 16 years who were wards of the state, or privately admitted. In 1914, St Vincent’s Foundling home was established on the same site, and St Margaret’s Hostel for Unmarried Mothers and Their Babies from 1918 as an extension of St Vincent’s Foundling Home.
From 1947, child migrants from Britain and Malta were also sent to St Joseph’s. In 1971, the three homes closed, replaced by the Catherine McAuley Centre on the same site.
The homes were the subject of submissions and testimony to the 2004 Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (the Forgotten Australians Inquiry), and the 2025 Inquiry into Past Forced Adoption in Western Australia.
Child Welfare reports show there were 129 girls resident in 1920, with 114 girls in 1921. Between then and World War II, the number of girls at St Joseph’s ranged from 91 (in 1922) to 37 (in 1943).
From 1957, private admissions (girls who were placed at St Joseph’s by families or others) exceeded the number of girls placed by child welfare authorities. It is possible that girls admittedly privately were not counted in Welfare Department reports in previous years, so published numbers may not be accurate.
Girls who were of working-age were placed with employers (under a formal agreement), or who worked within the institution (known as being “at service”), including caring for children in the Foundling Home, and in the laundry:
I was actually taken out of school for good at the age of 13 to work in the laundry and the nursery and from then on my days were hell…The laundry was hard work having to use the big mangles and presses. A lot of us have osteo-arthritis today because of this work. (St Joseph’s Subiaco Sub 172).
Welfare Department reports show that there were ‘abscondings’ from the home, and testimony to the Forgotten Australians Inquiry shows that girls for punished for running away:
When they were caught they were publicly flogged. Us girls used to have tears in our eyes watching this, but we couldn’t do anything. (St Joseph’s Subiaco Sub 172)
Despite donations of toys and money for the children, evidence to the Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care explained that children: ‘were never allowed to keep the presents as the nuns used to take them off us when we got back to the orphanage and would sell them at their fetes’ (Forgotten Australians 2004, p.88).
In 2024, ABC News told the story of a group of women who call themselves the Joey Girls, child migrants who had to care for babies who had been removed from their mothers during the forced adoptions era.
They ended up in St Joseph’s Orphanage in the Perth suburb of Subiaco, where they were given numbers and learnt how to work and pray, alongside wards of the state, under the guidance of the Sisters of Mercy.
But what has not been revealed until now is that, for some of them, the work they did around the orphanage also included caring for newborn babies and becoming their godmothers.
They were involuntarily and unwittingly dragged into what’s now referred to as the “forced adoption era” when thousands of babies were removed from their mainly unwed mothers from the 1940s to the early 1980s.
The young migrants were instructed not to mix with the expectant mothers who, they say, were kept separate in a nearby foundling home and sat in the back row of the chapel during mass.
These young women, not much older than the migrants themselves, had been sent there from all around the country after becoming pregnant out of wedlock.
“The nuns called them sinners,” says Teresa Phillips, a Joey Girl who came out on the first ship carrying child migrants from the UK in 1947.
“We weren’t allowed near them. (ABC News, 21 August 2024)”
From
1901
To
1971
Alternative Names
St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Girls' Orphanage Industrial School, Subiaco
Orphanage Industrial School for Roman Catholic Girls
1901 - 1971
St Joseph's Girls' Orphanage was located on a site that had originally been used for the Benedictine monastery on Barrett Street, Subiaco, Western Australia (Building Demolished)
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