Pastoral Relationship with People with Intellectual ... - Theses

102an Aboriginal word meaning ‘place of shelter and protection’, was registered as‘The Home for Weak-Minded Children.’ 267Information gleaned from the initial Prospectus and Opening of the Homepoint to the perceived need to provide the children with a segregated environmentof shelter and protection in which to receive requisite care. The articulated needsconcerned the provision of special care and treatment of the children so that theirminds could be “opened to intelligent life ... if they are to be saved fromdeterioration into idiocy.” 268This evangelical spirit is reinforced in Minda’s poetically constructedmission statement of 1900.God help the imbecile! more dark their lotThan dumb, or deaf, the cripple, or the blind:The closed-soul vision theirs, the blighted mind;Babes, thou full-grown; the page of life a blot.Yet say, shall their affliction be abhorred?Their need o'erlooked/shall charity pass by,Leave them to perish with averted eye?Forbid, the love that burns to serve her Lord! 269Apart from detailing zealously the need of Minda’s children to receivesaving care early documentation also describes the need for able-minded familymembers to be protected from their feeble-minded family members. In referenceto the feeble-minded child, it states, “... such a child, however loving and tenderthe parents, is in the way in a small home, and may, too, be a detrimentalinfluence upon the normally, healthy children.” 270 The concept of feeblemindedness,fundamental to the founding ethos of the organisation, wasrecognised widely at the time as the primary classification system for groupingindividuals regarded as having inferior intellectual abilities. 271 However, evenmore significantly, it became the principal diagnostic category that allowed the267 Disability, Information & Resource Centre. History of Disability in South Australia:Minda Home. Disability Information & Resource Centre, 2007 [cited February 21 2009].Available from http://history.dircsa.org.au/1800-1899/minda/ sec. 1, par.1; sec.2, par.1; sec.3,par.1.268 Minda. "Prospectus." 6.269 Minda. "The Second Annual Report." 1-23. (Adelaide: Minda – The Home for Weak-Minded Children, 1900), 1.270 Minda. “Prospectus.” 6.271 Snyder, Sharon, and David Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability. (Chicago andLondon: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 79.