Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  And while the housemaster’s language for the act itself was obscure, the punishments he meted out were vivid, at least by Lee’s account. ‘Now if any of you boys have done certain things you should not have done, you must come and tell me,’ Mr Denton is heard to bark in the story. ‘If you tell, I’ll let you off and help you. If I find out myself, I shall flog severely.’ And flog them he did, apparently, as if his life depended on it. Sadly, recounts Lee, this was never without reinforcing the sexual depravity that so exercised his imagination. Thus:

  As the branch grows crookedly to avoid an impassable obstacle, do did [our] sex life grow warped. The boys were the victims of an urge as old as life. Boys were thrust back on the fact of sex, however they tried to escape. They could not achieve forgetfulness in literature, in music, in exercise of the crafts. They had to sit down in leisure hours or lie down in bed at night with no book and with no competing interest, thoughts went unerringly to certain manifestations of dawning manhood. And as the primal urge hypnotized their attention they knew they were unclean, for were they not told so by the manager. They were caught in the toils of foul sex, and turned upon themselves with secret loathing. As they were virile and healthy, so were they self-convicted. In their ignorance they believed they were not as other boys, and racked themselves with contrition.

  Mr Denton had his political supporters. In the same year Lee was sent down to the Christchurch correctional facility, a parliamentary report by the country’s stipendiary magistrate and commissioner, H.W. Bishop, made a ferocious case for punishing boys of ‘low morals’ with indefinite imprisonment.

  After all, Bishop reasoned, ‘it is no more right to endanger the community by giving such a person unrestrained liberty than it would be to release a savage wild beast into a school playground’. Nor should legal adulthood be an impediment to the state holding on to these degenerates. ‘I can imagine no greater incentive to reform in the case of most of these young people,’ Bishop raved, ‘than the fear of indeterminate detention. I believe it would do more to help forward the work of the reformatories than anything else.’

  Well, why not? Didn’t all the available official evidence confirm as much? The social historian Bronwyn Dalley’s account of the same period includes the improbable but apparently true story of a visiting delegation to Otekaike in North Otago being awoken on their first morning at the school by a squad of children singing in unison ‘The More We Are Together (The Happier We’ll Be)’ while polishing the linoleum in the passageway outside the bedroom doors.

  From around 1916 the pendulum had begun to swing again. This was spurred by a couple of developments. One was the lingering disquiet in the wake of an official inquiry into conditions at a girls’ residence in Christchurch known as Te Oranga, later Kingslea. It was found that female inmates were routinely stripped and flogged, forced to wear grotesque outfits and to undergo humiliating haircuts at the punishing hands of a notably joyless matron, Harriette Petremant, who told her accusers:

  Corporal punishment is the only punishment that tells. [The children] have neither brains nor consciences for any other form of punishment to have effect. They rather enjoy being sent to bed than otherwise. The things they do I am sure no normal child would either think of or dare to do.

  A far more positive development at this time was the intercession of the reform-minded John Beck, a Scottish immigrant who felt the colonies could be doing better in respect of their most vulnerable lives. Beck was determined to show the way by fashioning a Child Welfare Branch whose main objective was to ensure that the kids it dealt with required no future contact with the authorities. Taking their cue from both developments, officials soon stopped using the term ‘industrial school’ altogether. By 1920 there was only one such institution for boys anyway, in Caversham, Dunedin, with another centre for older boys located in Levin. Institutionalisation had come to be seen as a last resort.

  At the same time the government decided to systemise what residential work it did control by promulgating the Child Welfare Act of 1925, arguably Beck’s most enduring legacy, which gathered pace with the introduction of the notion of the social security system introduced in the 1930s and was to hold sway for the next 60 years. This Act also legislated for a separate children’s court for offences other than manslaughter or murder — typically a small room in a regular courthouse where a uniformed cop read out the evidence to a magistrate seated behind a small desk facing the relevant guardians and social workers, and the child, who was usually required to stand in front of him while the case was heard.

  Here again, the word ‘court’ was a bit misleading, since those who appeared in them enjoyed no presumption of innocence, had no right of appeal and sometimes were not even informed what decision had been made, except in cases where the court decided to show leniency and place a child under supervision, in which case a copy of what became known as Form E. 5/118 was duly sent to the ‘offending’ parents:

  Today your child .............................. was placed under the supervision of a Child Welfare Officer for .......... year(s), and this information in the form of a legal order will be sent to you later.

  During the period of supervision, any instructions of the Child Welfare Officer, or any conditions imposed by that officer, must be complied with. If the Child Welfare Officer is not satisfied with your child’s conduct, or with living conditions, your child may again be brought before the Court.

  If this should happen, the child could possibly be taken away from home, a step best avoided by your co-operation with the Child Welfare Officer in the interests of the child.

  Legislation provides for a right of appeal against the Order, and should you wish to exercise this right, I suggest you consult a solicitor immediately.

  However, the government remained a stern taskmaster. The petty nature of much of the offending — theft, truancy, drunkenness — disproportionate to the very considerable power of the children’s courts; as well as dispatching these high-handed edicts in minor cases, they committed children to institutions and could order that the names of boys be gazetted by the police in order that their occupational movements could be tracked through their adult years, thus making whatever sentence they passed a lifetime ruling. The child welfare agency also had its functions expanded; the Act granted institutional managers the right to administer whippings, for example, a practice only outlawed in the early 1940s but still permitted to be administered by the agency’s own welfare officers.

  Following the war, and especially from the time of the country’s first National government in 1949, the so-called child savers began agitating for even more emphatic solutions to the problems that were now dominating the political chatter.

  According to a report presented to Parliament in June 1949, the preceding year had seen 2520 young people in residence in ‘orphanages’ — just 104 of these cases related to children whose parents were in fact deceased. Rather, these kids were in institutions because some perceived weakness, ill fortune or irresponsibility on the part of the parents had led to their offspring being committed to care. And their number was clearly on the rise, well up on the fewer than 300 mostly female wards in institutional settings over the previous two decades. The government responded by ordering the Department of Education to upgrade and expand its residential capacity, which would see the number of institutional cases over the next few decades eventually treble.

  Liberal New Zealand was not entirely impressed with the policy moves afoot. Among the impassioned media correspondences of the time, the response sparked by a dissenting leader-article published in the New Zealand Listener in 1949 was reckoned to be of such consequence that a small book was eventually published reprinting both the piece (‘Orphanages Without Orphans’) and the tsunami of letters it provoked. The article’s author, child welfare lobbyist Doris Meares Mirams, had said that the care of wards overall was open to serious criticism, specifically in regard to whether the government had adequate powers of inspection and, if it had, wheth
er those powers were being put to good use by throwing kids into large ‘homes’. Mirams argued for the abolition of big institutions in favour of smaller foster-care arrangements that would see problem children in more natural settings. While advocating better staff-training opportunities, for the most part she argued that these ‘costly, long out-of-date and in no way satisfactory’ establishments shouldn’t exist at all.

  Questions of ethnicity were also starting to inform at least some of the discussion. As recently as the mid-1930s just 8000 Maori people, or one-tenth of the officially designated Maori population overall, lived in any of New Zealand’s urban centres. Only a very few of their offspring were in any kind of state care. This was generally off-limits to the country’s indigenous inhabitants, who received virtually no discretionary welfare services from their white political overlords and were excluded from most forms of charitable aid administered by local governments.

  Over the next couple of decades the Maori presence in the cities and towns swelled, and with it a host of social problems blamed on the accelerating process. Within a few years, according to Bronwyn Dalley, the number of Maori kids appearing before the courts was growing and child welfare officers were already speaking of ‘juvenile delinquency’ as a particularly Maori problem, initially more so in the case of young Maori women and their supposedly loose moral attitudes.

  No doubt, juvenile crime figures among Maori were rising after remaining roughly on a par with the percentage of Maori in the total population throughout the young country’s history. But as the process of urbanisation grew, so did the Maori share of offences tried in court, which by the mid-1950s was up to nearly one in every five cases; by the end of the decade it would be up to a quarter of the judicial workload, with Maori boys leading the statistical way, just as the clearly destabilising urban drift of their families into the cities was the era’s major demographic shift — both factors, of course, being sides of the same cultural coin.

  But perceived problems among Maori youth were not the only factors at play. As much as any specific piece of legislation, committee findings or demographic shifts, it was the sweaty moral climate of the period that put the wind into the sails of the burgeoning system that would hold sway for the next 30 years.

  Viewed in retrospect, this deepening moral panic seems amazing in light of the economic bounty and social tranquillity of the period. New Zealand stood among the world’s wealthiest countries on a per capita basis, with full employment an economic fact of life until at least 1967. And serious crime was rare, at least as far as can be told given that precise figures on youth offending were virtually impossible to track down, and what data was available often seemed contradictory.

  Among the obstacles encountered by the writer Eileen Philipp in compiling her landmark 1946 study, Juvenile Delinquency in New Zealand, for example, was what the researcher described as a chronic departmental muddle of statistics that left researchers little the wiser about what was the actual problem. Philipp complained that the lack of reliable information served as an impediment not only to her own work, but also to the practical business of making any sense whatsoever of the problem at the heart of what was fast becoming a national obsession. Indeed, she hinted it was almost as if public concern was surging in inverse proportion to the real problem.

  Thus began a banner period in the official search for a residential plan to deal with wayward youth. By 1954 the government had opened its first ‘family home’, the name for the larger residential houses owned, furnished and maintained by the state, and run by a couple of foster parents who received a special board rate for the children in care. The plan was that these residences would provide temporary care for kids in transit, and long-term care for others who, while not thought to be in need of institutional training, were unsuitable candidates for fostering.

  Next the government convened what it called the Joint Committee on Young Offenders, an interagency initiative comprised of officials drawn from the departments of police, justice, child welfare and education, to nut out a more durable solution. The committee looked at the efficacy of the children’s courts and, in the time-honoured tradition of political leaders picking out safe issues on which to cut a tough posture, announced the constitution of a dedicated research group to consider the problem afresh.

  Part of the political answer was also the hasty passage of another Child Welfare Amendment Act, spurred in part by yet another public outcry after 29 children were found to be in the care of a single woman who was subsequently convicted on a charge of neglect. The legislation tightened the rules surrounding childcare, allowing greater opportunities to streamline more young offenders into ‘correctional training’ institutions.

  The next big challenge was to identify the best geographic setting in which to build a new institution.

  HISTORICALLY, WHAT WE KNOW TODAY AS THE SUBURB of Epuni was named for Honiana Te Puni, a Te Ati Awa chief who was among the signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi and of the deed of purchase of the land about Wellington. Epuni (as he was known) was just about the best friend the English settlers could possibly have asked for. Along with his nephew, Wharepouri, he turned up in 1839 to welcome the New Zealand Company traders from the Tory, the first colonial ship to anchor in Port Nicholson, assuring the newcomers that he would be only too happy to do business with them.

  Unfortunately, the two sides had strikingly different ideas of what doing business meant. For Epuni, the bedazzling natural setting in which they met was not among the commodities to be traded; still less were the river and valley lying to the immediate north, an expanse of few souls and deep shadows, items to be bartered like so many muskets. No, the land stood as a sacred gift, a treasure that the Maori received from Hands they did not have a chance to see clearly but in whose thrall they lived and moved and had their tribal being. The river in question they called Te Awakairangi, or the watercourse of greatest value, a mirror of their own legendary journey to the new isles. This was their papa kainga tuturu, an earth home where one can stand.

  The settlers did indeed have other ideas. Within days they had renamed the same river after one of their company directors back in England, William Hutt, and soon they began reconstituting the area they named for him as their own market garden. Epuni saw the writing on the wall. Gathering some of his fellow chieftains and their sons, he headed back to his ancestral lands in Taranaki, arriving in time for some of the worst bloodletting between the European settlers and the Maori during the 1860s as they put their respective ideas of what constituted a home to the military test.

  As disenchanting as this must have been, the record suggests Epuni never entirely lost the belief that things could have been different, enjoining his people, in the words that were read out at his mist-shrouded funeral, to remain ‘kind to my European brothers and sisters, be patient, be tolerant’.

  Generous sentiments. Whatever the confidence the European settlers had in their own strength, they were at the time seriously outflanked by Maori. Epuni’s intercession, spurred by his belief in the inherent benevolence of the settlers, clearly saved a great many lives and influenced things for the better, not only in Taranaki but also back in Wellington, where uncommitted Maori were still doing a brisk business in violently settling scores with the newcomers. The city’s Evening Post was sufficiently moved to respond in kind at the time of his death, admitting that, while it was ‘not often that we say much on behalf of the Maoris, in this instance it would be unjust not to allude to the services of the venerable chief who passed away’.

  Over time the white establishment would kindle a variety of incense around his memory, including the naming of a far-flung native horticultural reserve, located to the north of Wellington and prized for its fertile earth and comfortable microclimate, after the memory of the man who, the Evening Post also wrote, ‘when the spirit of trouble brooded over the Hutt Valley, helped to keep harm from the Europeans’.

  Despite the Maori desire to stay on and cultivate that same hamlet, t
he colonial imprint quickly deepened. Among the first of the owners to snatch a significant parcel of farmland — the same stretch of land where portions of modern Epuni now sit, including the site for what would become Epuni Boys’ Home — was Baron C. Alzdorf. The Baron later died during the city’s big earthquake in 1855, apparently felled by a giant mirror in his own Wellington Hotel, but not before he had welcomed scores of other colonialists to help cultivate his fields with their 20 varieties of vegetables, in what would become the new country’s second borough and soon enough one of its fastest-growing urban centres.

  Alzdorf’s offsiders cultivated their airs too. Or as much as circumstances allowed. Unlike the surrounding suburbs, many of which had been identified for what would later become the largest state-housing project in New Zealand’s history — an urban ribbon eventually stretching down from what became Stokes Valley to the Petone foreshore — the pioneering residents of Epuni were different, better.

  They were the custodians of nothing less than a gentrified holdout against the great Fabian housing experiment going on around their enclave. Not for them the petty brutalities and bad manners of nearby Naenae, the city’s fastest-growing neighbourhood, or persistently ugly Taita. And their conceit, partly nurtured by the fact of the area’s chronic drainage problems, which rendered parts of Epuni unsuitable for the kind of state-house forests that had grown in these suburbs to the immediate north, remained long after it was absorbed into wider Lower Hutt in 1941.

  Walking along some of the suburb’s main arteries in 2010, including those abutting what became the neighbourhood’s most infamous correctional facility, one is struck by the larger properties and more ample vegetation that is to be found there in comparison with the immediately surrounding suburbs.