A thematic heritage study on australia’s benevolent and other care institutions thematic Study

1940–1972 Post-World War II and the role of the state in social security

Australia was at war between 1939 and 1945. War in the Pacific brought the conflict much closer to home than had been the case during World War I. Women were pressed into service to ensure that production of food, munitions and other essential items was maintained. Food and clothing were rationed. Travel within Australia was restricted and in some urban areas there were housing shortages. The war provided a context within which the Commonwealth Government was able to introduce a range of social security benefits, introducing a ‘welfare state’ in Australia. But the war also stimulated the growth of voluntary organisations, including 8000 patriotic funds.¹⁶² In the immediate postwar years there were extreme housing shortages in some Australian cities. There had been little home-building during the 1930s depression and the war. Many families lived for years after the war in makeshift or shared accommodation.

IMAGE: Image shows a girl in a dormitory room making a bed. This photo illustrates the living conditions within the Home of a Good Shepherd girl’s home in 1963. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla. pic-an24494479, J.A. Mulligan.

Australia’s vulnerability during the war convinced the Labor Government that the country’s population and industrial strength must be increased and, even before the war was over, it began to plan for a massive immigration program. The result was that between 1947 and the 1970s two million European, British and Irish migrants arrived in Australia.¹⁶³ The Labor Party remained in power at the Commonwealth level until 1949, when the Liberal-Country Party won office. It was to remain in power until 1972.

The 25 years following the war have been described as a ‘long boom’, a time of ‘uninterrupted growth and unprecedented prosperity’ and very low unemployment levels.¹⁶⁴ This was a time when the average school leaving age rose and a Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme introduced by the Menzies Government in 1951 encouraged greater access to tertiary education.

Ideas, attitudes and beliefs

During the Second World War the Commonwealth Government put into place a number of social security measures to provide a ‘safety net’ for Australians. The Menzies Government began with the passing of child endowment in 1941, allowing for the payment to mothers of five shillings weekly for any child under the age of sixteen (other than her first) born in Australia. A Joint Parliamentary Committee, sitting in 1941 to inquire and report on social security, argued for a break from the old assumption that poverty was the fault of the individual. ‘More modern opinion,’ it said, ‘is that poverty is mostly not the fault of the individual but of the environment in which he lives’.¹⁶⁵ When Labor’s John Curtin became Prime Minister he sought, and achieved, the power for the Commonwealth Government to collect income tax, to the exclusion of the states. Although the main purpose of this was to enable the development of a war economy, it enabled Curtin to begin to implement a range of social security measures.¹⁶⁶ Within a few years a number of major social security supports had been introduced. The first of these was the introduction of pensions for widows and deserted wives. The pension was means-tested and subject to a ‘good character test’. The maternity allowance, first introduced in 1912, was increased. In 1944 unemployment and sickness benefits were introduced. This legislation also allowed for ‘special benefits’ to be paid at the discretion of the Director-General to anyone who ‘by reason of age, physical or mental disability or domestic circumstances’ was unable to earn a living.¹⁶⁷ Further attempts by the Labor Government to extend social security via the health system in the 1940s were not so successful because they faced opposition to the concept of government intervention into what was seen as a private realm.¹⁶⁸ A Bill introducing pharmaceutical benefits on certain prescription drugs, such as the newly developed penicillin, was passed in 1944 and again 1946. Doctors across Australia, in an organised manner, refused to write prescriptions using the regulation forms devised under the scheme.¹⁶⁹ In 1945 in the Hospital Benefits Act, the Commonwealth Government agreed to subsidise the state hospitals at a rate of not more than £500,000 per state per annum, for free treatment of public patients in public hospitals.¹⁷⁰ This and a further Hospital Benefits Act in 1948 were repealed by the Menzies Liberal-Country Party Government in 1951. Menzies’ new legislation introduced a Commonwealth Government subsidy for private health insurance.¹⁷¹

Major trends and influences of the period

In the postwar period ideas began to change about the appropriate ways in which some groups should be treated and accommodated. Sometimes there were gaps between the expression of these ideas and the realisation of them in reality. In the 1950s, for instance, the results of British doctor John Bowlby’s research into the impact of separation from families on young children began to circulate. In 1951 Bowlby had concluded that a child should experience a ‘warm, intimate and continuous relationship’ with a mother or mother-substitute in order to be able to develop as a healthy human being. Bowlby’s findings threw into question the practise of separating children from their families and the use of large, congregate care institutions for children in out of home care. It indicated that cottage-style homes, or family group homes, scattered amongst the community in which children could form close relationships with others might be more appropriate methods of caring for children. These forms of care for children care now began to be recommended. Similarly, in the field of psychiatric care, new ideas about the treatment of the mentally ill introduced from Britain espoused breaking down the size and isolation of asylums, educating the public about the causes of mental illness and ensuring there were adequate trained staff to effectively treat patients.¹⁷²

Recipients of welfare

Aboriginal Australians

Ideas about appropriate methods of care and entitlements to social supports did not filter through to the experience of Aboriginal Australians at this time. The self-sufficiency and independence offered by social security benefits was largely unavailable to Aboriginal people, who were explicitly excluded in all the social security legislation passed during World War II. Child endowment was payable only to those Aboriginal mothers who weren’t ‘nomadic’ or had children ‘wholly or mainly dependent’ on Commonwealth or state support.’ Unemployment and sickness benefits and widows pensions were payable only to Aboriginal people who were exempt from the control of the relevant state authority – meaning those Aboriginal people in South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales who were not living on missions or reserves. However, the Director-General of the Commonwealth Department of Social Welfare was only authorised to pay the benefits to those Aboriginal people he thought were of sufficiently ‘good character’, standard of intelligence and social development.¹⁷³ It was not until 1959 that these disqualifications were removed from social security legislation, though benefits were still not payable to those considered ‘nomadic’ or ‘primitive’. Furthermore, the work test attached to unemployment benefits, requiring applicants to prove their genuine need by taking whatever work was offered, meant that Aboriginal people living on reserves or missions were required to leave their communities in order to access the benefit.¹⁷⁴ Given that many rural Aboriginal people were employed as itinerant workers, it was difficult to prove that they were not nomadic. Nor did all Aboriginal workers have access to the minimum wages guaranteed through the industrial award system. In Queensland, until the 1970s, the Government controlled the wages of all Aboriginal people covered by Protection Acts. When Aboriginal workers were finally included in the pastoral workers award in 1966, many who had lived and worked on pastoral stations were forced off these stations.¹⁷⁵

Throughout this period Aboriginal people in some states and the Northern Territory remained under the tight control of Native Protection or Aboriginal Protection departments. A major way in which this control was expressed was in the removal of Aboriginal children from their families to be placed in institutional care. In Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, legislation gave Chief Protectors or Directors of Aboriginal Affairs enormous powers over the Aboriginal populations of these states and territories, including the guardianship of all Aboriginal children, whether their parents were living or not. In practice this meant that children, particularly those who were ‘half-caste’ were removed from their parents and placed in institutions or, increasingly in the 1960s, with foster or adoptive parents in the hope of eventually assimilating Aboriginal people into the non-Indigenous population.¹⁷⁶

Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales, from the 1940s, dealt with Aboriginal children under child welfare laws and could use the increasingly wide definitions of ‘neglect’ to justify removing Aboriginal children from their parents’ care.¹⁷⁷ In Western Australia (until 1954), the Northern Territory (until 1964) and Queensland (until 1965) the Minister in the relevant Aboriginal Affairs Department and the Chief Protector of the Department had the power to remove or order to be moved Aboriginal children from their parents.¹⁷⁸ In practice this meant that up until the 1970s thousands of Aboriginal children were taken from their homes and communities and placed in institutions of varying quality. Aboriginal children received inadequate education in these institutions and were placed out as servants or apprenticed workers at an early age. By 1972, when the Western Australian Department of Native Welfare was abolished, one in ten of the state’s Aboriginal people was living in an institution.¹⁷⁹ In 1973 the Commonwealth Government assumed responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. The Commonwealth Human Rights Commission of Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their families in 1997 documented the long-term consequences of the practice of removing Indigenous children from their families over several generations across several states and discussed the implications of the denial of human rights that these government-sanctioned actions implied.

IMAGE: Image shows the path and front entrance to the St Vincent de Paul's Orphanage, Adelaide. Creator: Sweet, Samuel White, 1825-1886. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia PIC 3176/17 LOC Album 951/nla.obj- 144218224

Children and young people

The Second World War placed some pressures on the child welfare system in various states in Australia as some children were placed in temporary care for the duration of the war. The war also saw the provision of a greater number of day care or kindergarten facilities, some funded by the Commonwealth Government, to provide care for children whose mothers were involved in paid war work.

The postwar baby boom dramatically increased the proportion of children and young people within the Australian population in the twenty years after World War II and, despite the apparent economic boom, the number of children – non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous – living in out of home care appeared to have risen in the period from World War II¹⁸⁰ to the 1970s. In Victoria, for instance, there were 4388 wards of the state in 1945. This number fell in the late 1940s, but by 1965, there were 6415 wards of the state in Victoria.¹⁸¹ Similarly in New South Wales, there were 2665 wards under the supervision of the department in 1948 and 5926 in 1964.¹⁸² This does not include those children ‘privately placed’ in the voluntary or charity children’s homes or babies’ homes. In South Australia too, the increasing numbers of children in state care in the 1950s and 1960s led to overcrowding in children’s institutions.¹⁸³ The number of institutions for children appears also to have also risen, as churches and other groups opened additional homes for children and some state departments, such as those in Victoria and South Australia, increased the number of their own establishments for the reception and care of state wards.¹⁸⁴

In some states the availability of foster carers willing and able to care for boarded out children had declined during the Depression and World War II and this contributed to the increase in the number of institutionalised children in the decades after the war. In Queensland, for instance, while only 10% of children in state care were in institutions in 1930 by 1965 this figure had increased to 18% with a peak of 22% in 1951.¹⁸⁵ Thirteen church-run children’s institutions, built with government subsidy, were established in Queensland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In New South Wales, the vast majority of wards of the state continued to be boarded out in the 1960s, but there was an increasing number of homes, both independent and state-run, catering to a wide variety of categories of children. The number of premises licensed to care for children under the age of seven (not state wards) rose to 345 in 1964.¹⁸⁶ These were essentially the small, privately run homes in which mothers could leave their children, paying the home for the child’s upkeep. They were not under the control of the State Children’s Relief board, though they were liable to inspection by the Board and could have their licenses revoked. In Western Australia the Child Welfare Department began to place greater emphasis on foster care in the 1950s.¹⁸⁷

Reasons for the rise in the numbers of children coming into the care of the state at this time are unclear. They may have just reflected the sharp rise in the birth rate in Australia in the years between 1946 and 1965. Only in Victoria were the grounds on which children could be charged as needing ‘care and protection’ broadened by legislation during this period. ‘No settled place of abode’ was one cause for committing a child as a ward and it is possible that the children of families living in makeshift accommodation in the postwar housing crisis fell into this category. It has been suggested that family breakdown might have been increased in the postwar years by the post-traumatic stress (undiagnosed) suffered by ex-servicemen and that this led to an increase in children coming into care. Surveying state wards in Victoria in the early 1960s, however, social worker Leonard Tierney found that wards of the state in the main came from economically disadvantaged families.¹⁸⁸

Awareness of the theories of maternal deprivation propounded by John Bowlby and the effects of institutional life on children’s development led some providers to begin to move to alternative ways of caring for children to the dormitory-style institutionalised buildings that were the dominant form of out of home care for children. One alternative to the large institutional model was the cottage home. The cottage home model, often grouped on a campus, attempted to replicate the family home, accommodating small groups of children of around the same age (though they could number up to 40) with preferably a couple to supervise and care for the children. Cottage homes had been advocated by some child welfare experts since the nineteenth century and indeed there were some cottage home campuses established by church-affiliated child welfare organisations in the early twentieth century. The Methodist Homes for Children had operated as a cottage-style campus at Cheltenham in Victoria since 1891. In 1952 the home moved to a new modern version of the cottage-style campus at Burwood. Burnside Homes in Parramatta, a Presbyterian home for children, had operated on the cottage model from its inception in 1911.¹⁸⁹ The South Australian Children’s Welfare and State Relief Board (known as the Department of Social Welfare after 1966) built six cottage homes in South Australia between 1961 and 1968.¹⁹⁰ Some church-run institutions also moved to replace their large congregate care-style institutions with cottage homes, usually grouped on a campus, in the postwar years as well.

A similar alternative to congregate care that was promoted from the late 1940s was the family group home. Again this model aimed to replicate the size and structure of a family home, but rather than being based on a campus, family group homes would be scattered amongst the community. The Victorian Children’s Welfare Department began building family group homes across Victoria in 1956. Up to eight children were accommodated in each home, cared for by a cottage mother (and sometimes father).¹⁹¹ Other state welfare departments were slower to adopt this form of out of home care.

Government and church agencies also moved in the postwar years to offer hostel-style accommodation for young people who had left the care of the state and gone into employment or apprenticeships, but still required somewhere to live. This reflected a move away from the tradition that had endured from the nineteenth century of apprenticing young female wards as domestic servants, who lived in at their workplace, and young male wards as farm workers. There were moves also, in the postwar period, to extend the level of education offered to children in state care beyond the basic standard of education that had been previously funded.

Although there were attempts by some state government welfare agencies and non-government agencies to adapt their methods of offering out of home care in the 1950s and 1960s, the institutional model of care remained for many children until the 1970s and beyond. This was partly because of a lack of financial resources within the child welfare field, particularly in the non-government sector.¹⁹²

Not placing a high priority on child welfare issues until the 1960s and 1970s has been attributed to Australian governments.¹⁹³

In the 1950s the numbers of Australian children in institutions was also increased by child migrants from the British Isles and Malta. Between 7000 and 10 000 child migrants were brought to Australia between the late 1940s and 1967.¹⁹⁴ They followed groups of child migrants who had been brought out to Australia in the 1920s by such organisations as the Fairbridge Scheme (in Western Australia and New South Wales) and the Lady Northcote Farm School in Victoria. The post-World War II child migrants came from orphanages in the United Kingdom and were enticed to Australia by promises of a better life. The Commonwealth and state governments paid subsidies to the private organisations and churches that ran the institutions in which the child migrants were placed in Australia. Although the Commonwealth Government, in agreeing to the child migrant scheme, was motivated by humanitarian concerns as well as the desire to build Australia’s postwar population,¹⁹⁵ evidence in recent years, particularly that offered to the Senate Inquiry into child migration – Lost Innocents: Righting the Record – Report on child migration (2001), indicates that for many child migrants in the postwar period the experience of migration to Australia and care in Australian institutions was miserable.

The homeless

Long years of depression and then war created a serious shortage of housing in Australia. In 1943 the Commonwealth Housing Commission estimated there was a shortage of 300 000 homes across the nation.¹⁹⁶ At World War II’s end, and for several years afterward, many Australian families shared makeshift, substandard accommodation, sometimes in former army camps or public parks, such as Camp Pell in Royal Park, Melbourne. At the end of the war the Commonwealth Government entered into agreements with each of the states to provide loans with which state housing authorities could provide housing for low income earners. Some states had pre-existing housing trusts or commissions. For instance, the Housing Commission of Victoria had been established before the war to tackle slum clearance. The South Australian Housing Trust had been established by Premier Thomas Playford in 1936, primarily to provide housing at low enough rates to keep workers’ costs of living down and attract industry to South Australia.¹⁹⁷ Many of the new houses built by the state housing commissions in the next ten years were in outer urban estates. In Western Australia, the Commission was responsible for 41% of all new houses built during that time. However, housing standards for many in the population remained inadequate. The slum reclamation aims, for which the Housing Commission of Victoria had been established, were delayed until the 1960s.

Postwar migrants

Many postwar migrants also faced hardship in their early years in Australia. Many assisted European migrants found themselves transported to Bonegilla Migrant Camp in a former army camp in north-eastern Victoria on arrival in the country. From here, many of the men were placed into work ‘as directed’ for two years as part of the agreement for their assisted passage to Australia. This sometimes meant that migrant families were split up as men were sent to work on such projects as the Snowy River Scheme. Bonegilla served as a migrant camp until 1971, by which time 300 000 migrants had passed through its gates.¹⁹⁸

Although the Commonwealth Government moved to establish hostels for migrants close to industry and rural employment, it took some time to achieve this aim. Many of the earliest migrant hostels were established in former army camps or barracks. Some attracted the criticism of their residents for the poor conditions they had to endure and many people remained in hostels for years at a time. At the same time, at a time of housing shortages in Australia, there were criticisms of the government for building migrant hostels when houses for Australians were needed.

In 1951 the Commonwealth Government established Commonwealth Hostels Limited to build and manage further hostels for migrants. Some of the temporary hostels were eventually rebuilt as more modern, comfortable hostels. An example of this is the Midway Migrant Hostel at Maribyrnong, Victoria, which later served as a home for Indo-Chinese refugees arriving in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the federal Liberal-Country Party’s moves to break down the long-established White Australia Policy.

Services provided to help postwar migrants settle in Australia were limited, however. Many began to form self-help groups, often based on ethnicity and regions, to support each other in areas such as child care, caring for the aged and general social support, furnished through the establishment of clubrooms and church-based societies.

People with a mental illness

There were strong changes in ways of caring for mental health patients from the 1940s and 1950s in particular. This is exemplified in the work of John Cade, who in 1952 was appointed Psychiatrist Superintendent and Dean of the clinical school at Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in Victoria. Two years later, at the request of the Victorian Mental Hygiene Authority, which was planning to remodel Royal Park, he visited Britain for six months to inspect psychiatric institutions. On his return, he introduced modern facilities and replaced the rather authoritarian approach to patient care with a more personal and informal style that included group therapy. Also exemplary is the work of Dr Eric Cunningham Dax, who introduced community-based psychiatric care rather than asylum-based care, improved treatment regimens and rehabilitation projects, and increased the number of psychiatric superintendents in Victoria’s hospitals from nine in 1951 to 17 in 1960, as well as improving local training for both psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses. One of Dax’s greatest legacies was his art therapy programs. The Cunningham Dax Collection of ‘psychiatric art’ is a tribute to this work.

The aged

Some of the aged care homes for the poor that had been established as the first destitute or benevolent asylums in the nineteenth century were still in existence and occupying near original buildings in the years after World War II. In those years the attention of church-based groups, municipal and state councils and self-help and advocacy groups began to turn towards providing adequate accommodation for the elderly, particularly for the less privileged. Many aged people were ending their days in mental health hospitals for want of more appropriate accommodation.¹⁹⁹ Associations such as the War Widows’ Guild, formed during World War II, and the RSL advocated for better housing for their aged members, as did service clubs such as Apex and Lions Clubs. Charitable societies such as the Smith Family and the Brotherhood of St Lawrence also focussed attention on building aged care ‘villages’ and facilities. In recognition of the need to provide for the aged, the Commonwealth Government passed the Aged Persons Homes Act 1954, and offered pound for pound subsidies to providers of these homes. A range of organisations began to invest in providing aged care facilities and independent homes for the elderly.

Providers of welfare

The social welfare legislation achieved during the wartime years represented a shift in terms of the idea of entitlement to welfare in Australia, and a transfer of much responsibility for welfare to the Commonwealth Government, though this entitlement did not extend to most Aboriginal people, nor to recently arrived migrants who had to have been resident in Australia for minimum periods to qualify for benefits. State governments continued to be responsible for the provision of a number of welfare services – for poor, neglected or delinquent children, Aboriginal people, the mentally ill and most of the sick.

A desire for social justice in service delivery was expressed through the community-controlled services established by Aboriginal activists, particularly in urban areas, in the 1960s and 1970s. Legal and medical services, child care services and Aboriginal community welfare organisations, along with land rights activism, were expressions of Indigenous peoples’ determination to take back control of their own health and community welfare. The Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service established in a shopfront in Sydney in 1971 was the first community medical service in Australia, a precursor to a number of community-based services providing health and welfare.

Period summary 1940–1972

The social impacts of the Second World War had a shaping influence on the Australian Government and its role in providing care and support for Australians in need. The Australian Government increasingly took control and responsibility for the provision of welfare payments, with state governments responsible for the provision of welfare services.
Within the period between 1941 and 1945 for example the Australian Government introduced a number of benefits including the payment of child endowment, pensions for widows and deserted wives, and unemployment and sickness benefits.
Despite an extended period of economic growth the number of children living in out- of- home care increased. Boarding out or fostering of children continued but there was an increasing number of homes, both state and charity run, catering to a variety of children's needs. A growing awareness of the effects of institutional care on children also led to the development of cottage homes or other group style homes for children in this era.

By the 1970s many thousand of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children over many generations, had been removed from their families.

Post-war migrants required extensive assistance on their arrival in Australia. European Migrants were sent to Bonegilla Migrant Camp in Victoria on their arrival. Men were required to work ‘as directed’ for two years as part of their assisted migration. The Australian Government established the Commonwealth Hostels Limited to build and manage hostels.

Some of the aged care homes established in the 1800s for the poor were still being used as aged care facilities at the end of the Second World War. Charitable societies began to focus attention on building aged care ‘villages’. The Australian Government introduced subsidies to providers of these homes.