Moving on

grog joint. ‘In his younger days he was a hard man’, Dennis told me and Tom. ‘You could hate him one minute; you’d love him the next. He had that sort of charisma about him’.

Dennis wanted to remember the good times with ‘old Dadda’ but the anger and hurt about his childhood weighed on him. One day, not long before our first interview, he’d been overcome by it while driving his truck. ‘I felt this building up inside of me and Dadda come and I had to stop’. He’d pulled over and slammed his palms against the steering wheel.

And I said to myself, You bastard! What you done to us, to us kids and just walked away (voice breaking). Never once did you inquire how we were and then not only that but to do it again!

You’d think after the first you wouldn’t let it happen again. I thought, you bastard, you bastard I hate you for it! Te next minute Dennis flipped, saying ‘I’m sorry, Dadda, I’m sorry’. As suddenly as the anger had taken hold it subsided; Dennis started the truck and went on his way. Dennis said his resentment surfaced a lot these days, while he was lying in bed or washing the dishes. He never raised it with Dadda

The photos of Kathleen, Dadda, and Jimmy that sit on Tom’s sideboard

even though he’d wanted to and so he was left wondering. ‘I don’t know, only he knows what happened; why he didn’t come to see us, why he didn’t come to get us. Only he knows’. Hurt also tainted Dennis’s memories of Mimmy. He told me the words she had greeted him with when he escaped from the orphanage – welcome home in her language. I asked him to repeat the words but he stumbled over the pronunciation, unsure of his memory. His reunion with Mimmy stung even more because she had not tried to find him. Tere was a pained pitch to his voice as he insisted, ‘In Aboriginal culture family is everything. You cling to them’ – as if pleading to Mimmy herself. Having dealt with the Welfare for over a decade to track down his family, Tom was more sympathetic about how hard it would have been for Dadda. He said that for years he had the hate inside him like Dennis.

But then I sat and thought about their situation. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what was going on. But I do know it would have been a hard fight to try and get us, and make contact with us. Tom and most of his siblings had been fostered out with the view to adoption. According to his ward file, his mother could not be located to request consent for adoption, and his father’s consent was not needed because they were unmarried. In 1964 the Department had sought approval from the Court to ‘dispense with the mother’s consent’. Tom understood that once the children were adopted there was no chance of them returning home. According to a letter Tom had received from the Department of Family and Community Services, the last reference in his file to the possible return of him and his siblings to their parents was correspondence with the Housing Commission dated 21/06/1961. Tom had shown me this letter during one of my visits to his home on the Central Coast. According to the letter, the Department’s correspondence with the Housing Commission ‘indirectly suggests that your parents wanted their children back’. Te Department had replied to James and Kath’s request for housing support by

Jimmy and Dadda, date unknown. Photo courtesy of Tom Moffatt.

stating, ‘Te onus (was) on the parents to provide and maintain a satisfactory home standard for a period before consideration (could) be given to the return of the children’. Tom could imagine the heartbreak his parents would have felt knowing there was a chance to get their children back but being turned away. ‘In that way it was sorta a bit easier for me because at least I know they tried. It just didn’t happen’. Dennis’s resentment softened when I asked him how he felt hearing Tom’s view of confronting the Welfare. He named the 11 children born to Dadda and his mother and reflected on what it would have