Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

understanding. Indigenous children continued to be institutionalised disproportionately.They continued to be subjected to a standard of care below that provided to non-Indigenous children at the same time.Failure to prevent harmThe second type of breach was the failure of the Protectors and Boards to preventthe abuse and exploitation of so many of the children in their care. The Inquiry heardevidence not only of the sufferings of many vulnerable children in government andprivate institutions and foster families but also of the repeated failures of adequatepreventive oversight by officials.Melbourne law firm Phillips Fox submitted that,In our view, by taking the children away and making them State Wards – by becoming ‘legalguardian’ to these children – the State took on parental responsibilities, or fiduciary duties, inrelation to each such child.On our instructions, the State in many cases failed to fulfil these responsibilities and duties, notonly by denying the children their culture, but by failing to ensure that they were safe from illtreatment, whether they were in institutions or foster care. Many of the children were verbally,physically, emotionally, or sexually abused – or all of these things (submission 20 page 5).The children were accommodated in institutions whose physical condition wasfrequently appalling and not conducive to their proper care and maintenance oreducation. In 1929 the Rector of Port Lincoln visited the institution at Jay Creek outsideAlice Springs. His observations received widespread press coverage (Markus 1990 page29). The children’s dormitory accommodated 48 in a space 24 x 50 feet or 7.3 x 15.3metres.… a more draughty ugly dilapidated place one could hardly imagine. I think that the childrenwould be less liable to colds in the open than in the disgraceful accommodation provided forthem (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 30).In 1938 the Northern Territory Government Secretary wrote of the school for ‘halfcastes’at the Telegraph Station that,[It] and its furniture was in keeping with the rest of the institution which could only be describedas nauseating and long overdue for demolition (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 35).Officially-recognised instances of physical abuse have been quite well-documentedand some have been mentioned above. In 1933 the manager of Kinchela Boys’ Home inNew South Wales had to be warned about punishments he had employed and the NSWAborigines’ Protection Board received allegations from a former Cootamundra Girls’Home staff member about brutal punishments there in 1927. In Western Australia, ChiefProtector Neville had found it necessary to draw up regulations to ban ‘degrading and