History repeats

One Sunday night Dennis just didn’t go back to the orphanage. Shirl would sing out ‘Dennis’ when the Welfare came looking for him and he’d run and hide at his neighbour’s house across the road:

Stella, she had a three bedroom house that was one bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, and she used to hide me upstairs and then her backyard used to look over on to our place, and Stella used to look out the window and she’d wait,

‘cause she could see when the Welfare would walk out of our place, she could see because, very rarely did you see cars coming up and down the street in our area, because no one could aford it, and people are dressed up in suits and things like that, that just wasn’t on. And she’d give us the nod, and Shirl would get the nod and send me back over. He marveled at Shirl’s knack of knowing when the Welfare was coming. Once she got her family back, there was no way she was handing anyone back to them again. Eventually she convinced the authorities to let him stay despite their objection to the overcrowding. Dennis was in his early teens. Tis was the beginning of his days running amok in Newtown. History repeats

Dennis guessed this was around the late 1950s, by which time Dadda lived with a new young family in Redfern. Dennis would often visit his younger siblings there. Dennis liked to tell a beloved family story of little Tom – no older than two – streaking in the back lane. Dennis would laugh as Tom jokingly groaned, ‘you had to tell it didn’t you?’

My sister’s got a favourite story she always tells. Because Skin used to go over and babysit at Dadda’s a lot. Tom had a bad habit – he’d take all his clothes of. He’d run out the back, he’d see that gate open, and I don’t know why before he run out he’d take all his clothes of. He’d scoot out that gate and he’d be runnin’ up the road and Skin would sing out, You mongrel bloody coot, get back here! Skin said she’d be chasing him up the lane and he’d be of. Oh it was funny!

Skin was Sandra’s nickname, given because she was so skinny. Dennis’s memories of visiting little Tom, John, Jimmy and Michael always ended abruptly with them vanishing: ‘But as I said, one day when I went over there, everyone was gone! I wondered what happened to them’. He thought they might have gone to live somewhere else, but he never imagined that they had been taken by the Welfare just like he had. Tom was only two when the Welfare took him so he couldn’t remember being taken or the life he lost. ‘Tat’s the saddest part about the whole story’, he told me, ‘it’s that I don’t have no memory of them’. Tom had been back to the house they were evicted from in Redfern Street, willing memories to come back: ‘I’ve stood there and I’ve stared at the place and I’ve tried to remember myself there with Den … but nothing ever comes back to me’. What Tom knew of that time he had pieced together from what his siblings had told him and the ward file he had accessed from the ofcial records. According to that information, Dadda and his new family had been evicted at the end of January 1960 for not paying the rent. Tey moved to Mimmy’s small flat on the same street, but the landlady threatened to evict everybody, including Mimmy, if the family didn’t leave. Within the month the children had been taken from their parents and put in the care of the Department of Child Welfare. A letter from the Department of Family and Community Services relaying this information to Tom in the late 1980s simply says that the four boys were brought before the Children’s Court on ‘a complaint of neglect, in that you had no fixed place of abode’. Tom was in a state home for only six weeks before being placed with a foster family. Looking back he thought perhaps he was somehow lucky to avoid the state homes, but foster care was a comparable kind of hell: my adopted father he was a brutal, brutal man, and I was copping the same treatment that they were all copping in the homes, only I was copping it of my father and you know, he used to fight me, as a five-year old, like he was in a bar room

brawl, and my dad, he was a big man, he was over six foot, he was a wharfy and he was just solid muscle … he just continually belted me, punched me. Like Dennis in the orphanage, Tom was denied the chance to ‘do the things that a normal kid would do’. He wasn’t allowed to ride his bike, go out and play, or go to birthday parties: ‘I never had friends. It was me, me, and me. I didn’t play with me younger brother because we’d just end up in an argument. So I used to sit in my bedroom and just read’. He described himself as a prisoner in his own backyard.

School was where Tom got to muck around and be a kid. He’d go there to hang out with his mates, clown around, kick the football about, play cricket, get into a few little scufes. ‘I couldn’t do that at home ‘cause it was just the back yard. So I went to school to enjoy meself’. Not that he did much learning there. School meant nothing to him except as a place to fool around and have some fun.

So I liked to go to school but I didn’t like to learn what they had to teach me and the curriculum. All bar

English – English was the only class that I paid any attention in, and even then I was still the class clown.

Dennis and Tom return to Longdown Street, Newtown, April 2019. Photo by Emma Mitchell

By the time he reached fourth form the Deputy Principal told him outright there was no point sitting the test for the School Certificate:

And I said, No its fine. I’ll sit ‘em, and he said, You’re only gonna embarrass yourself. I said, Oh well if I embarrass meself I embarrass meself. I sat the test and I got a B+ in English and I got

C and D. But I passed by about half a dozen marks. But the way I seen it, it was a pass. And I got me School Certificate. Tom was clearly proud of refusing to give in and defying his teacher’s low expectations of him, but he also regretted the opportunities he’d lost by not taking school seriously: ‘I often think to meself if I had of actually concentrated I probably could have been reasonably smart and might have ended up going on a diferent course. But that’s life as they say’. It’s little wonder Tom found it hard to concentrate at school given the darkness in his life. He put up with his adoptive father’s abuse

Fitzroy Gardens in King Cross, 1970. Tom lived on the streets of Kings Cross afer running away at 13. Photo courtesy of City of Sydney Archives

for years until he turned thirteen and cracked. Tom’s voice shook as he told the story:

I crept into the bedroom one night with a knife and I was gonna stab him, but my mother woke up just as I was about to do it.

For the grace of god she did cause god knows where I would’ve ended up… because I was gonna kill him there was no two ways about it cause I just put up with so much I couldn’t cop it anymore. Feeling out of options, he tried to take his own life. Tom broke into tears as he choked out the words: ‘about a month later… I attempted to hang meself … and again but for the grace of god the rope snapped and here I am now’. Dennis punctuated this sentence with the words, ‘Tank Christ it did’. Tom was barely a teenager bearing the weight of these traumatic experiences. He decided there was only one thing for it and ran away. He didn’t know the family he was taken from, but he knew he didn’t belong to the one he was in. For a couple of months he survived on the streets of Kings Cross by pick-pocketing until he was nabbed by the police and sent home. Bolstered by a new determination to finish school and get out of there, he put up with it another three years. ‘I made it to sixteen, got me School Certificate and then I said, Tat’s it I’m leaving. And I walked out of the house and I never went back’. Out on his own and out on the streets, Tom was yet again heading down the same track as the older brother he still didn’t know existed.

Tom aged 7, 1965. Photo taken at North Ryde. Photo courtesy of Tom Moffatt