by Antonio Buti
It soon becomes clear that Dr Moffatt wonders the same thing. Bruce and Martha visit the Child Guidance Clinic during March and April 1967. Dr Moffatt’s assessments are not encouraging. She is very worried about Martha’s emotional and psychological state. She is still not coping well with Bruce’s behaviour. At times she wants him to be with her, at other times she no longer wants to look after him.
Bruce, too, has problems. He has had infected lesions for a couple of months but Dr Moffatt is not greatly concerned. That is a medical condition she can bring under control with penicillin. His unstable behaviour, on the other hand, is not so easy to deal with. Bruce is also conflicted about who he wants to live with. He is unsettled and edgy, and is unreasonably angry that Martha allows Glynn, aged five and a half, to sleep in her bed. He believes Martha gives Glynn more attention than she gives to him.
What’s more, he now says he has three families: the Davies, the Karpanys and ‘his family in Christ’. That Bruce, at his young age, has turned to religion to find answers to his restlessness is a symptom of his confusion about where he fits in. Dr Moffatt wonders who convinced a little boy, so emotionally fragile, to embark on such a spiritual journey. Martha’s confused state of mind does not help. Dr Moffatt prescribes tranquillisers for Bruce. They don’t resolve his unsettled state but they do calm him down.
When Thora misses an appointment at the Child Guidance Clinic, Dr Moffatt wonders whether the money she would receive has in part motivated her to seek custody of Bruce. But she is also certain that it is no longer viable for Bruce to stay with Martha. It is difficult to know what is best for the wellbeing of this fragile little boy. Perhaps a third option: a boys home, from which he can attend a city high school and continue with his treatment at the clinic? Though this last option is discussed, Dr Moffatt and her colleagues agree that it would not be in Bruce’s best interest. He has had enough disruption in his young life. He needs a family. But which family?
Martha wants Bruce but cannot cope. Thora wants him but Dr Moffatt is not sure why. Bruce is not sure what he wants. In the midst of this confusion, somebody has to make a decision.
Chapter 6
TICK A BOX, SLAM SHUT A FILE, CASE CLOSED
An overwhelming majority of Australians will vote on 27 May 1967 in a referendum to change the Constitution so the Commonwealth Parliament can make specific laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The laudable aim, which 91 per cent of Australians will support, is to remove inequality.
Well, that is the stated aim at least. Many think this means giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the right to vote. Yet this had already been legislated for before the 1962 federal election. The last state to grant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the vote was Queensland, in 1965. It would be no surprise if many people think that the right to vote is all it takes to bring about equality. And so the people will go to the polls to say, ‘Yes, you and I can be equals.’
Early on the morning of 12 May 1967, two weeks before the referendum, Miss Lee picks up Bruce in a Department car to drive him to the station, where he will catch a bus to Victor Harbor for two weeks holiday, which Martha planned with Miss Lee some weeks ago. Bruce is already in the back seat as Martha says to Miss Lee, ‘I don’t know whether I’ve packed enough clothes for him.’
‘You needn’t worry about that,’ Miss Lee replies almost nonchalantly. ‘He’s not coming back.’
‘What do you mean?’ Martha asks, puzzled, the dreadful truth not yet registering.
‘He’s staying there for good.’
Martha whimpers; she does not cry. ‘What!’ Then, already resigned, ‘You didn’t tell me that.’
Miss Lee shrugs a bureaucratic shrug. Officious and final. Without another word, she is in the car, slams the door and turns the ignition key. Now Martha does cry. Bitter tears course down her face, while a confused and frightened Bruce watches in abject helplessness from the back seat. He has not heard the conversation but Martha’s contorted face tells him all he needs to know. Something bad has just happened.
Now, some three hours after Miss Lee and Bruce began their motorcar ride, Thora is sitting at the kitchen table in Victor Harbor with a confused and traumatised child. Hilda, George and Tom are there, just as they were all those years ago in the Trevorrow shack at One Mile Camp. Back then, Hilda was Bruce’s constant playing partner. But too many years have passed, and so much has happened, that this is not even a distant memory for Bruce. He cannot remember Hilda encouraging him to walk: ‘Come on Brucey. Come on Bruce.’ Hilda can remember. But the closeness has gone. She speaks to Bruce with the detached courtesy of someone speaking to a house guest.
Milk Arrowroot biscuits and jellybeans sit invitingly on the table. Bruce loves the biscuits. Eating helps ease his nerves. George and Tom seem more interested in the biscuits and jellybeans than in their brother. Cyril and Devon are also here, as is a new half-brother, Victor. They, too, are more interested in the delights on the table. Cyril Senior is not here today. He no longer lives with the family, though he often returns for brief reunions with Thora.
Thora breaks the silence by saying how good it is going to be for all of them now that Bruce is back. Before long, the biscuits and jellybeans disposed of, all the boys are out the back playing kick-to-kick footy. Bruce impresses his brothers with his skills.
Over the next few weeks, Thora drives Bruce around to meet members of the extended family. There are many relatives; too many for Bruce, who finds these family gatherings difficult. Most of the time he joins in but at other times, unsure of where he fits in, he holds back, while his brothers and sisters engage, secure in their belonging. On one visit, Bruce just won’t get out of the car. They are meeting some relatives at Gerard Reserve in Victor Harbor. Bruce sees them and is overawed. He freezes. Will not budge from his car seat. Thora tries to cajole him and then to threaten him. It makes no difference. Bruce feels he is an outsider. Thora realises it is no use and takes him home.
Thora finds it difficult to travel up to the Child Guidance Clinic in Adelaide so, on 8 June 1967, Dr Moffatt is driven to Victor Harbor by a welfare officer from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Thora greets Dr Moffatt with a smile and shows her and the welfare officer in to the small but neat house.
The doctor notices with some concern that Bruce looks scruffy. But the pustular rash on his leg worries her more. She wonders whether Thora is taking proper care of him. Is she coping? She talks to Bruce. He seems to have settled in well at school. But at home? Although on the surface he seems well settled, Dr Moffatt is not so sure. She picks up many small signals of underlying anxieties.
Bruce finds it disturbing that George is nearly always home. Shouldn’t he be out working, he asks, he is eighteen years old. Don’t all eighteen-year-old males go out to work? Why, Dr Moffatt wonders, does this distress a young boy so much? In his troubled mind, does Bruce take it as a portent of his own future? He also seems to be in conflict with Hilda. She is always telling him what to do. Yet his foster sister, Carol, could be bossy, too. Did Bruce expect something more from his ‘real’ sister? Perhaps deep down, beneath his conscious memory, he does remember her being his playmate, and the memory surfaces as an unsettling feeling of not fully belonging here anymore.
Perhaps this is why he tells Dr Moffatt, ‘I am sorry I did not say goodbye to the Davies.’ Has he burned that bridge to the family who cared for him for nearly ten years? His eyes show how deeply he feels his sorrow. Dr Moffatt does not say anything. She waits.
Bruce looks at her, ‘I wanted to say goodbye to Martha. To the whole family. But I didn’t have the chance.’
Still, Dr Moffatt says nothing; she senses there is more to come.
‘I didn’t know I was leaving Martha and the rest of the family for good.’ It is almost an accusation. ‘I thought I was only going to be with Thora for the school holidays.’ He is upset. ‘It isn’t right that I wasn’t able to say goodbye properly.’
Dr Moffatt k
nows she does not have an answer that will soothe Bruce’s hurt. Nevertheless, she tries. ‘Bruce, I want you to come up to the clinic in July. You might be able to catch up with Martha and the family then.’ But she is treading carefully. She does not want Bruce to harbour any thought that he can return to live with the Davies family. The Department certainly does not want that.
In Campbelltown, the Davies are fretting. Martha especially makes many attempts to find out where Bruce is and whether she can see him. The Department thwarts her at every turn. Desperate for answers, Martha and Frank take up station at the office of the Premier, Don Dunstan. In the coming years, Dunstan will be widely acclaimed as a social reformist in the area of equal opportunity and especially in Aboriginal land rights, though for the moment he will be more concerned about the upcoming election. He has not long taken over from Frank Walsh, who resigned under pressure from his own Labor Party. Dunstan had previously been the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, and a good one. Martha and Frank feel sure he will help them.
They wait at the Premier’s office for four hours but do not meet him. Undeterred, Martha writes to Dunstan asking the whereabouts of Bruce. He replies promptly but provides no joy. Bruce having contact with his former foster parents ‘is not desirable’. Though they were told Bruce would be moving to live with Thora and his biological family, they are not sure he is still there. Anyway, they don’t even know where Thora lives, only that it is somewhere in the Coorong region.
Meanwhile, things are starting to go haywire back in Victor Harbor. Not saying a proper goodbye, a final goodbye, to Martha is eating away at Bruce. It makes him sad, makes him angry. He is lonely at his new school. It was different in Adelaide. He started school there when he was young, grew up with his fellow students and forged a strong bond of friendship with most of them. At Victor Harbor Public School he has no close friends. There are many relatives around him, of course, but he feels remote from them.
The nation’s attention is captured when, on 17 December 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt disappears while swimming in heavy surf at Cheviot Beach, near Portsea in Victoria. His body is never found. The Prime Minister—who politics renders first among equals—is lost to the sea and the nation reels. A little Aboriginal boy—who supposedly is now rendered equal with his white peers—is lost to public service malpractice and nobody pays any mind.
Dr Moffatt is worried about whether Thora has the ability to cope with Bruce. His behaviour is deteriorating. He has run away from home, trying to make his way to Adelaide—to Martha and her family. She wonders whether Bruce thinks of them as his family. But she still does not believe that Bruce should return to the Davies. For Dr Moffatt and the Department, that is no longer an option.
Thora, on the other hand, does see Martha as an option. She writes to her on more than one occasion to tell her about Bruce’s behaviour and his trouble with the law (though it seems that Thora’s letters never reached Martha); she wonders if Martha would like to take him back. She tells Martha that all her children are having difficulties, much of it associated with the racism they are experiencing at school, from students and teachers alike. In a reflective and telling moment in Thora’s second letter to Martha, she writes as a postscript, ‘You don’t know what it meant to me when I got your letter this morning and read it. I was so glad you have still enough love for Bruce. I realise your love is something more than I could ever give him.’
As 1968 progresses, Bruce’s behaviour becomes more worrying. He is in trouble with the law, being charged with three counts of larceny, which involved stealing a transistor radio from a car and money from a teacher’s purse. When the Victor Harbor police bring Bruce home, Thora snaps. In front of the police officer, she repeatedly hits Bruce. The police officer is so worried about the severity of the beating, he takes Bruce back to the station for the night to allow Thora to cool off.
How things have changed. Thora is trying to recapture the desolation she felt when they took baby Bruce away from her, the misery of not knowing where he was for so many years, the fire of the mother’s love she felt then. But too much time has passed. Bruce is no longer the baby he was and his erratic behaviour is difficult to deal with. He steals a pair of shoes and a bike. On the same day, he breaks into and enters the home of a schoolteacher, stealing a wallet containing $16.71. The court remands Bruce to appear at the Victor Harbor Magistrates Court on 11 July. Until then, he will stay at Windana in suburban Adelaide, a secure accommodation facility for children on remand.
Established in 1965 within the grounds of Glandore Children’s Home, later exclusively a boys home, Windana also provides temporary accommodation for children aged two to eighteen years who are in state care while being transferred between institutions or foster care. Dr Moffatt visits Bruce at Windana. By now, because of Bruce’s behaviour, she and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs have decided that Bruce ought to be made a ward of the state under the Social Welfare Act. This will put him in the care of the Department of Social Welfare, and her preferred option for him is Glandore. There, she believes, he will receive appropriate treatment for his chronic emotional disturbance. The Victor Harbor Magistrates Court orders his transfer there, following Dr Moffatt’s recommendation, on 26 July 1968. The magistrate has ordered that Bruce be placed in the care of the Minister for Social Welfare until he reaches eighteen years of age, and that he remain at Glandore until May 1969. His assigned supervisor will be Probationary Officer Lambert. This will be the beginning of a long period of institutionalisation for Bruce in his troubled teenage years.
Bruce feels abandoned and lonely. Thora doesn’t want him and he has not heard from Martha. He is not aware that his brother Tom is also at Glandore Boys Home, sent there for six months for not attending school regularly. Apparently, nobody thought to tell Bruce.
Frank, Martha, Carol, Jayne and Glynn finally visit Bruce at Glandore. Although Bruce is very happy to see them, he is also angry and upset because Dr Moffatt and others from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs have told him that Frank and Martha do not want him anymore. Frank tells him, ‘Rubbish! We did not give you up. They took you away from us.’
Giving action to his words, Frank goes to the offices of the Department on 5 August. He tells them, ‘We want Bruce to come back to live in our family home.’
The welfare officer is blunt, ‘No,’ he says. ‘Dr Moffatt believes Bruce should not have any further contact with your family.’
‘Why not?’ Frank demands.
‘Dr Moffatt believes, and the Department agrees, that it is more therapeutic for Bruce to live in an institutional setting.’
‘What does Bruce want?’ Franks asks.
‘We know what is best for him,’ is the dispassionate, bureaucratically heartless rejoinder.
Bruce’s behaviour shows he is disturbed and unhappy. He continues to steal and at times is violent, for which the administration’s solution is medication. But it does not solve the underlying cause. On a number of occasions, he absconds from the home during the evening. He always comes back, sometimes voluntarily and other times brought back by police. On her regular visits, Dr Moffatt discusses her concerns with other medical officers at Glandore. She arranges EEG testing, which confirms some organic brain damage. They control this with medication but that does not ease Bruce’s chronic insecurity, which is a contributory factor in his aggression. It does not help that many boys at Glandore tease him constantly.
Bruce’s aggression is there for all to see in late September while playing a game of cricket. Something makes him snap, yet no one is sure what. Maybe it is being hit for four or being called for a no ball. He shakes violently and his face turns blue. He yells as the supervisor, who is acting as umpire, attempts to take the ball from him.
‘Give me the ball,’ he screams at the supervisor. ‘It’s my turn to bowl.’
‘No, Bruce, you can bowl again later.’
‘It’s my turn! Give me the ball.’
‘No. Not yet.’
Br
uce kicks the stumps, knocking them out of the ground, and runs off, still screaming. The violent outburst eventually subsides, his face regains its normal colour and he becomes quiet.
These violent outbursts are unsettling for staff and for the other boys. In late October, after examining Bruce’s EEG results, consultant neurologist and senior registrar in neurology at the Royal Adelaide Hospital Dr Rischbieth prescribes Tegretol, an anticonvulsant drug, to control the aggressive outbursts. At the same time, the medical team stops Bruce’s antidepressants and tranquillisers. This makes him acutely disturbed and he spends time in the sick bay with a skin rash. For Bruce, the beneficial side effect of time in the sick bay is relief from constant conflict with the other boys.
‘I hate Glandore,’ Bruce tells Dr Moffatt on one of her visits. ‘All the boys hate me. I don’t have any friends. Why do I have to stay here?’
Dr Moffatt arranges for Bruce to spend two weekends with Thora, one at Victor Harbor and one in the Adelaide suburb of Norwood while she is visiting relatives. He doesn’t enjoy this. He feels no more wanted than he feels at Glandore. Thora barely tolerates him. When Cyril dies on 20 November 1968, she does not include Bruce in the list of children on the death notice.
Martha, however, is still keen to have Bruce visit her and the family. In early December, she contacts the Department of Social Welfare to see if Bruce can spend the Christmas holidays with them. The Department says no. It has long ago decided that Martha is unsuitable to be Bruce’s carer.
Christmas passes without any joy for Bruce. The New Year comes and goes, and it seems clear to young Bruce that 1969 will be just like all those past years that have let him down. He and some others at Glandore abscond one night, returning at two o’clock the next morning. That transgression earns him six strokes of the cane, which he accepts with a shrug of resignation.
Dr Moffatt observes with compassion a twelve-year-old boy who acts out because he is angry and feels isolated, abandoned and unwanted. She knows his aggressive behaviour is turning the Glandore staff against him. She also knows that prolonging his stay at Glandore will not help him. Bruce is not coping socially and on one occasion he defecates in view of people waiting at a bus stop and exposes himself to a female staff member. His appearance is scruffy and he appears to be dragging one leg. One night, angry and very much out of control, he runs frenziedly around the room, screaming, dragging his leg, falling and getting up to run and fall down again. All the matron can do is give him a sedative to calm him down.
