Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Georgina telling of her life as a ward of state and her daughter describing what a wonderful mother Georgina later became. It opens with Georgina revealing the effect of her mother’s refusal to sign adoption papers. While looking for the house where she worked as a young adult, Georgina tells of the work she did there as a domestic servant. Then she and her daughter are shown looking at photographs of herself as a young mother. The clip concludes with Georgina describing her father’s death and speculating on whether her mother is still alive.

Educational value points

• Georgina’s story highlights the longing for home and family that children removed from their families and made wards of state can experience. Such children often lack information about the circumstances of their removal or what became of their family. Many, like Georgina, have no photographs to record their childhood. The love, encouragement and support that she provides her own daughter compensate to some extent for what she did not receive herself.

• The clip does not explain why Georgina was removed from her family, but there were two main possibilities at that time – either the government welfare authorities had decided that there was the risk of significant harm to the child from within the family home or one of the parents had applied for the child to be made a ward of state. Wards of state were usually placed in government- or church-run orphanages and then sent out to work at the earliest possible age.

• Georgina’s story comes from a time when children in Australia were taken into state care in much larger numbers than today. Governments in the 1950s and 1960s were concerned to protect children from neglect and abuse and this could include being orphaned or poor, the family being disrupted by illness or desertion, physical or sexual abuse or a parent’s inability to cope. The authorities believed that orphanage care or live-in employment would be better for the child.

• The domestic service that Georgina was employed to perform from the age of 14 to 18 was a common experience of children in institutional care until the 1970s. After the age of 14 children who were state wards could be required to earn a living, girls as domestic servants in middle-class households and boys frequently as farm labourers.

• Although Georgina was later able to achieve a happy family life despite removal from her family in childhood, not all people made wards of state have been so fortunate. There has been evidence since the early 1970s that the cycle of institutionalisation can be self-perpetuating, that is, that some of the children of state wards ended up in care themselves.

• This touching story enforces its point through the visual style of the filmmaking and through Georgina telling the most terrible truths about her life – ‘no-one was going to have me’, ‘I was never going to have a home’ – quite matter-of-factly. The viewer goes on the journey with her as she seeks answers about her past. The love between Georgina and her daughter is obvious and photographs of Georgina as a young mother underline the loss of love in her own childhood.