Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
man’s interference in the Orphan School. 31 In July 1867, a parliamentarian told the
House of Assembly that the children at Brighton were ‘dying like rotten sheep’. The
Destitute Board supplied a report showing that of the 102 children at Brighton, 53
were sick. Twelve had died, four from gangrene following measles. 32 This appalling
information brought, at last, immediate action. Temporary relief followed by the
opening of the government industrial school at Magill, by January 1869, improved
the children’s condition. But the water supply at Magill was inadequate, and there
were no proper lavatories; a ‘nuisance’ in the east parklands in October 1869 was accused
of coming from Magill. By 1872 the building was overcrowded. The chairman
of the Destitute Board began boarding out the children who could not be fitted into
the industrial school. 33 He paid allowances to their guardians, but made no arrangements
for supervising or inspecting them. Only the ages of the children boarded out
distinguished his practice from baby-farming. The legislation of 1872 was making a
virtue of necessity when it legalised his actions.
When Emily Clark discovered what was going on in 1872, she sprang into action
again. She re-formed the Boarding-Out Society, its original members constituting
a committee with Clark as secretary and Catherine Spence as treasurer. They
then offered the Destitute Board their services for superintending the boarded-out
children. The Board accepted, and laid down conditions for the Society’s work. They
were to visit the children and their guardians once every three months, at irregular
intervals, and report each visit to the Board within three days of making it. Most of
the Board’s conditions were designed to compel the Society to fulfil the task it had
undertaken, or relinquish it, and to preserve the guardians and children from undue
interference. The Society added one condition of its own: ‘Should ill-treatment be
suspected, the Visitor shall immediately investigate the case, and if necessary report
upon it to the Destitute Board and to the Hon. Secretary of the Society’. 34
The Boarding-Out Society was a small body with a continually changing membership.
Any subscriber of five shillings, and anyone appointed as a visitor, became a
member: the largest number of subscribers recorded was 26, and the largest number
of visitors 123, and as many as 23 visitors resigned in one year. 35 But the core of the
society, its committee, remained much the same. It met on the first Tuesday of every
month to consider duplicates of the visitor’s reports to the Destitute Board and appoint
a visitor for each area in which children were boarded out. The committee was
well-suited to its task: its patroness, the governor’s wife, Lady Musgrave, was a north
American and was the Society’s source of information about measures introduced in
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