Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Edging out of the domestic sphere
that none of the children in the Asylum could even dress themselves; the nurses found
it less trouble to do it for them than to teach them how to look after themselves. Clark
remarked, ‘when we remember that these children were to be sent out as little servants
to help others when they could not help themselves, it may be imagined how useless
they would be’. Clearly, Clark had taken over, wholesale, the ideology informing the
philanthropic groups pressing for boarding out in Britain: pauperism threatened the
social order; paupers must be transformed into docile and industrious workers, in
this case into domestic servants. She formed a Boarding-Out Society and headed a
deputation, which included Catherine Spence, to persuade the government to supply
allowances for the children whom the Society would board out. 27
She achieved only half her aim in 1866. Blyth’s government agreed with her
that the children should be separated from the adult destitute; it acknowledged that
boarding out was an excellent system, but refused the Boarding-Out Society’s request
and proceeded to pass legislation almost identical to Victoria’s Neglected and
Criminal Children’s Act of 1864. This, following precedents in Britain, provided for
building government industrial schools and reformatories, but not for boarding the
children with members of the community. 28 She had to wait six more years, until
1872, to achieve the rest of her aim. Faced with overcrowding in the new industrial
school, and recognising the precedent established in 1870 by the English Poor
Law Board, the South Australian Parliament passed the Destitute Persons’ Relief and
Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act, 1872: it was a piece of portmanteau legislation
demonstrating how similar poverty and crime, or at least juvenile crime, were
thought to be. This Act permitted boarding out. 29
However, the legislation was less a triumph for the Boarding-Out Society than a
recognition that after six years of disastrous maladministration, action of some kind
was urgent. Indeed, action had been urgent for most of those years. In November
1866 the children in the Destitute Asylum had been removed, to provide barracks for
two companies of the Fourteenth Regiment returning from the war against the Maoris.
30 Over 100 children were lodged in the Exhibition Building for several months,
so ‘seriously deficient in the most ordinary appliances of cleanliness and decency;
that their health rapidly declined … very many of the children presenting a squalid
and emaciated appearance’. They were moved to a house called the Grace Darling at
Brighton. It was large enough for only a third of their number; it needed repairs; the
matron was harassed not only by lack of space and assistance, but also by difficulties
in getting her requisitions attended to by the new Destitute Board, and by its chair-
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