If she had named her child’s father Florence would have been considered a brazen hussy, and because she did not she was considered worse. In any event she was unfit to raise a gentleman’s child; if she had kept the baby with her, both would have lived in penury and hence moral danger. So poor Florence gave him up, as she was told, only to be constantly threatened with having to take him back. Her mother offered to take Florence and her baby to live with her but Florence saw no escape that way. The only way to make a fresh start was to disappear.
In December 1904, another ward of state was confided to Emma’s care, but Emma was very busy with a new little boy whose name does not figure on the files of state wards; he was my father, Eric. The new little girl, her mother’s third illegitimate child, was placed with Emma when she was only ten weeks old. Six months later the Neglected Children’s Department placed her with another foster-mother, to see if she might not thrive better. Eight months later she was claimed by her mother who was getting married.
Emma had always lived in a house full of children. As she began to realise that she had a way with children she made herself available to take in more. She had the example of another neighbour, who employed a handyman to knock up extra rooms that were added to her rambling house whenever a new waif appeared on her doorstep, for she could never bring herself to refuse a destitute child. The Greeneys were too poor to own a house, and the growth of Emma’s family was relatively slow. In March 1907, she was given Eli, whose father had disappeared, and whose mother was considered ‘loose’. He had been declared a neglected child when he was eighteen months old; his mother had conceived her first child by her father and in 1911 this boy too, Eli’s half-brother Edgar, came under Mrs Greeney’s wing. About this time she had a girl, Vida Turner, but Vida was moved on to another foster-mother.
Emma built up the relationship with each child gently and gradually. All the state wards kept their given names, for no one knew when they might be claimed by a parent, but at school they were all Greeneys. Emma made no distinction between the state wards for whom she was paid and her own informally adopted children, or between the dolts and the dazzlers, the industrious and the lazy. She did her best to imbue the children with confidence and optimism, despite their poor beginnings. Her chief help in that was the Church of St John’s, where they all worshipped and sang in the choir and even the dullest won prizes in the Sunday School.
The Neglected Children’s Department had not only a responsibility to the children, but also to the public. The children could not continue indefinitely being coddled by a doting foster-mother at the state’s expense. No matter whether the child had its growth or not, or if it was seriously emotionally disturbed, at thirteen it had to go to work. Applications for ‘a lad for service’ or ‘a girl for service’ came into the Department every day. Each had to be supported by a referee, a Justice of the Peace or a clergyman. The employer had to promise to send the child to church and Sunday School; this was one way that the situation could be unobtrusively monitored, but many country clergy did not understand the significance of a child’s absence or truculence. The monitoring simply did not work, and many a child was kept to long hours and hard rations, reviled and struck when it did not understand what it was supposed to do or how. More letters came into the Department; the children were ‘too small’ for the work they had to do, or ‘useless’, lazy, untruthful, disrespectful.
Most who wrote in search of cheap labour were farmers, needy and otherwise. Most of the letters in the Department files are ill-spelt, ungrammatical scrawls, with a perfunctory endorsement from a local dignitary, usually a parson of one denomination or another. The youngsters were packed off from jolly households full of children to bleak hill farms where no one spoke to them except to give them orders from dawn to dusk. Bereft and grieving, they became confused. Their blunders were punished, sometimes brutally. The Neglected Children’s Department found itself wedged in a dilemma; the lives of farmers’ children were necessarily hard and the state wards could hardly be seen to be having a better time of it. The state wards were poor children and would have to be self-supporting eventually. It was never too soon to learn just how hard life is. Generally the Inspector tended to ignore complaints and simply exhorted the children to knuckle under and learn how to work. The foster-mothers watched and waited anxiously for news of their children, understanding how alone, bewildered and betrayed they must have felt. The children, tossed by the tempests of adolescence, stumbled through their grim round of daily chores, hungry, tired and heart-broken. Occasionally total strangers wrote to the department protesting that the system was little better than slavery. Sometimes the children were employed in lieu of an adult worker who pocketed the full wage and gave the child the departmental allowance. Some children worked more than sixteen hours in a day, and were given no shoes or clothing. When the letters that described ill-treatment showed in their style and orthography the evidence of a first-class education, the Department took the hint and removed the child before further opprobrium should attach, but the children’s furtive scrawls on filthy paper with a pencil stub usually led to more and severer punishment.
The children were not permitted to write letters without their employers’ knowledge; if any such letter was smuggled out and found its way to the Inspector’s office it was sent back to the employer, who was asked to explain it. Occasionally the Department moved swiftly, if a child was thrashed or debauched; in one case a boy managed to get word back to the Inspector that he was obliged to share his employer’s only bed, which was verminous, and his rail warrant back to Launceston was issued the next day. Mostly the children were utterly alone, menials in the house of strangers. They developed strange habits born of stifled mourning; one little girl stole small things from her mistress and buried them in the garden. Many refused to wash, became catatonic, and were declared weak-minded or psychopathic by ludicrous professionals who examined them at the receiving home.
‘Let me only have him back and he will be well,’ the foster-mothers chorused, but the Department told them curtly to desist from interfering, and blamed them for spoiling the children. Emma could not be said to have spoilt her children. Behind her stood the dark figure of Robert Greeney, of whom the children were afraid. Better to meet a policeman than Robert Greeney if you were up to no good. All the boys sang in the St John’s Church choir, regardless of how they were ragged; they all attended church and Sunday School, and they were always neat and clean. They attended school regularly and played sports. None of them ran wild with the barefoot street kids. But they did have fun and they did have each other until the dreadful thirteenth birthday when they were suddenly thrust into a hostile world.
The first of Emma’s boys to turn thirteen was Edgar. In 1914 he was sent into service with Mrs Frances E. Cockerill at ‘Killarney’ near Nicholls Rivulet, to learn the trade of orchardist. The local Inspector checked up on him in February 1916 and declared that he was ‘a very good boy indeed: he has gained two prizes at his Sunday School, one for regular attendance and another for helping at the lessons and kindness to the younger children. He has a very good home and is very deserving of it.’
Suddenly Mrs Cockerill wrote to Mrs Greeney explaining that Edgar had not written because he was ‘a very bad boy very lazy disobedient and untruthful’ and to punish him she had told him that he would not be allowed to write to Emma. ‘He does not seem to mind,’ she added maliciously. He had chummed up with a boy from the Boys’ Training School, who he said was a cousin, a thoroughly bad egg. Emma, alarmed, showed Mrs Cockerill’s letter to the Inspecting Nurse, Sister Heathorn, explaining anxiously that Edgar was ‘not altogether responsible for his actions’. In fact Edgar suffered a degree of mental defect; he was fast turning into a gentle giant, easily led and slow to anger, but potentially dangerous. Emma begged to be allowed to sign the service conditions and take him on herself; Nurse Heathorn added her approval. ‘If Mrs Greeney fails to make a decent citizen of him it will not be any fault of hers.’
Mrs Cockerill was furious that Mrs Greeney had gone to the authorities. Edgar was not so dreadful a boy that she was prepared to do without his labour. ‘Of course he was no trouble to Mrs Greeney,’ she wrote. ‘She never made him do any work except in the house.’ Her reason for writing to Mrs Greeney was simply to get her to write to Edgar and encourage him to behave better. The letter was so venomous that Nurse Heathorn wrote again to the Inspector. ‘Mrs Greeney has always seemed able to bring out the best qualities of this lad,’ she argued, but Edgar’s stumbling letter to Emma was sent back to Mrs Cockerill and the poor fellow stayed where he was, even though his employer had found another little boy, only eleven years old, who made himself more useful than Edgar ever had.
When she realised that she had no further need of Edgar, Mrs Cockerill decided to send him back, giving as her reason that Mrs Greeney was ‘always interfering with him’, and that he was only able to do the simplest tasks such as hoeing around the trees. Edgar then played his trump card; instead of hoeing he went fishing and Mrs Cockerill threw him out. A new job was found for him with a Mr Richardson and for a time all seemed well.
When Ernie’s thirteenth birthday came round, Emma moved to prevent another debacle. She signed the conditions of service herself, undertaking to pay him a salary which she could ill afford, which was waived because she intended to keep Ernie at school. On the application she had to list the male members of her household; she had living with her besides her husband her brother (Robert Wise) aged seventy-one, an adopted boy of thirteen, my father, and two state boys aged fifteen and nine. The Inspector added a comment, ‘Mrs Greeney is an excellent foster-mother.’
Edgar Greeney’s half-brother Eli came to Emma when he was about twenty months old. From the beginning he had special problems; at nearly two years old he was not able to walk. He was less intelligent than her other children and poorly coordinated. The other children played tricks on him. Awkwardly enough, his age was within a month of my father’s. A teacher at Wellington Square school noticed one day from the roll that the two Greeney boys in the class were born within a month of each other and stupidly remarked on the fact, whereupon the whole class hooted with laughter, for everyone except the teacher knew that the Greeney boys were foster-children. It was the sort of embarrassment that Reg Greer did not forget easily, although he had no difficulty in forgetting almost everything else.
In 1915 Emma acquired a peck of trouble in the form of two of the three Radford boys, whose father had been killed by a falling tree. The eldest boy, who had been rejected by an earlier foster-mother who complained that he beat his little brothers and was very dirty in his habits, was sent to the Boys’ Training School. This foster-mother allowed the boys to sell confectionery at one of the Launceston theatres and, because she continued to do so after she had been warned by the Department of Neglected Children, they were taken away from her and given to Mrs Greeney, who had moved to a larger house so that she could take in more children. Percy went into service on Flinders Island, where he was made to work such long hours in the fish-processing factory that an anonymous observer wrote accusing the Department of Neglected Children of condoning white slavery, because he was being paid the apprentice rate while working at a job which was usually paid at the rate of a shilling an hour. The Department wrote to the employer at once asking for the boy to be sent back to Launceston, where, because he was then too old to be fostered, he was sent to the Boys’ Training School.
Fostering the Radford boys was a painful experience for Emma; they were big boys when they came to her and already declared uncontrollable. Her gentle ways made little impression on them, especially as their mother kept writing extraordinary letters to them, urging them to come and work in Burnie where they would be able to have lots of fun and plenty of girls. As the boys remained under the jurisdiction of the Department until they were twenty-one, their mother’s demands to have the boys back were invariably refused.
Another newcomer to the bigger house in 1915 was Thurza, whom Reg Greer did remember. He had told my mother that he had been brought up more by the maid, Thurza, than by his mother, who was delicate. Thurza was no maid, but his foster-sister. Thurza was four years older than Eric Greeney, a handsome, strong and energetic girl, with a distinct and unforgettable personality. She came to Mrs Greeney with her small brother, Clifton. Their mother had married and her illegitimate children could not adapt to the new situation. ‘They have on several occasions run away and slept in hollow logs for a week at a time before they were found,’ said a note on the file. On 20 October, 1915, Thurza opened a mailbag and stole the two pennies left inside it to pay postage, which she spent on sweets. That night she and her brother did not come home. To feed her little brother and herself Thurza lifted cans of food from the store. A logger saw them sitting on a fallen tree, sharing out a can of fish, but when he came closer they dropped the can and ran away. Neither the post-mistress nor the store-keeper wanted to press charges, saying that they were afraid the children’s stepfather would burn their outhouses down.
The Department knew desperate children when it encountered them. Ragged and dirty, the exhausted children were immediately brought to Mrs Greeney, who applied for their clothing allowance the very next day. Nurse Heathorn was confident that Emma would know how to deflect Thurza from her self-destructive course and reassure her that Clifton would be safe.
Thurza was with Mrs Greeney for less than a year, but Eric Greeney was at an impressionable age and he did not forget the adolescent girl who was later described as a ‘splendid little worker, when she is in the mood’. As soon as she was of age, Thurza went into service, but she was not separated from Clifton, for she went to Nurse Heathorn’s sister-in-law in Launceston. Mrs Heathorn was not as adroit in handling disturbed children as Mrs Greeney, and fifteen months later Thurza was sent to work at New Town Infirmary in the south of the island. This changed the quality of her life completely. Thurza became taciturn and unpredictable. A request from her mother in 1919 to have Thurza home to help with her other children because she expected soon to be lying-in was not passed on by the department. Instead Thurza went to work for a Mrs Patterson, but she was having great difficulty humbling her proud heart. A passionate mis-spelt letter suddenly arrived at the Department of Neglected Children, in which Thurza said that she could not stay with Mrs Patterson another moment. ‘Miss Patterson through it up at me tonight about my mother and Father not being married which has upset me very much…. I cannot bear anyone to say anythink about my mother….’ wrote the servant-maid sitting on her bed in the privacy of her own room. Her indignation casts an interesting light on Emma Greeney’s ways with her children, for clearly Thurza had never been subjected to this kind of humiliation before. She did leave her menial employment and ran as far away as she could, all the way to Sydney, where she married under an assumed name and never told her husband that she had been a ward of the state, let alone that she was a bastard child who had hidden from her mother’s husband in a hollow log.
Thurza’s little brother came of age to go into service in 1919; the offer of work was not made until 1920 but Emma asked that Clifton might be allowed to stay in Launceston for the celebration of the visit of the Prince of Wales, and her request was granted. Clifton had just a little more childhood left, and Emma must have been one of the few people who was glad when the Prince’s visit was delayed. Clifton’s apprenticeship on a farm at Spring Banks was unusually short; in October his employer caught the fourteen-year-old ‘in the act of sodomy’ with his nephew aged nine. Clifton was immediately recalled to Launceston and sent to the Boys’ Training School. When Emma heard she went at once to the Children of the State Department and begged to have him back. She would find him a job in Launceston, as she had for all her boys. The reply was a cold note from the Secretary who did not consider the child’s release advisable. Emma kept trying, and in December 1921 Clifton was finally released to her care.
If Clifton knew about her efforts on his beh
alf, he did not thank her for them. Instead he wrote a letter to another sister who was living in Victoria. ‘Mrs Greeney is not a very good lady. I had a bit of a row with her and I asked Mr Henery [Inspector Henry of the Children of the State Department], if he could get me a place but he could not…. I am working for Standage’ (he was doing a milk round) ‘for 10/- a week and out of that I have to give Mr Greeney 8/- and I am not having a pleasant time.’ The first thing Emma knew of this libel was when the Department, now called the Children of the State Department, requested an explanation of the distraint of most of Clifton’s money. Emma produced a savings book in his name; she was trying to build up a clothing fund so that he could appear better dressed and get a better job. This was not the first or the last time that Emma had to face disloyal accusations from her children; her charges, irked by her strictness and vigilance, nursed the usual adolescent quantum of grievance, but Emma was more vulnerable to their accusations than their natural parents would have been.
As soon as the new clothes were bought Clifton disappeared and Emma never heard of him again. When he would have turned twenty-one, his mother wrote to the CSD: she was ‘drooping a few lines’ to ask for the money held in trust for him from the short time of his apprenticeship. The Department replied in freezing tones; the money belonged to her son, not to her. Clifton never claimed it and it was eventually paid into the Treasury.
By 1918 Mrs Greeney had acquired some little girls; she had taken the tiny five-month-old daughter of a fifteen-year-old girl seduced by a miner. She took in three older girls called Edwards, whose mother had boarded them out with an old couple in Devonport, in a two-roomed house where ten children lived. The older girl went to Hobart, where she bore an illegitimate child in 1923; one of the others who were twins bore an illegitimate child in 1929. As neither girl was twenty-one at the time of the birth, and therefore both were under state jurisdiction, these lapses reflected badly on Emma who had insisted that they were good girls and should be allowed a little liberty. Her old colleagues in the State Children’s Department were retiring; the new brooms occasionally thought Emma too soft. Besides, eugenicist ideas were becoming fashionable; children of tainted stock needed to be under institutional control, to prevent them mixing with the uncontaminated. Emma clung to her own brand of tough-love. If her children were tainted then so was she and so was Robert, hard-working, honest and clean-living as they were. She knew in her bones that the doctrine of inherited moral defect was a doctrine of despair.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 31