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Staunch: Ward of the State
During the 20th century, over 500,000 Australian children were raised in institutional or out-of-home care. Tragically, many were abused – physically, emotionally and sexually. Staunch is the story of one boy’s life as a Forgotten Australian, and the legacy he left behind.
Andy’s life began with difficulty – given up at birth, his adoptive father was a violent drunk, his adoptive mother a depressive. He became a ward of the state, and spent his entire adolescence in institutions and foster homes.
These were unhappy years, full of confusion, fear and abuse. It wasn’t until he met the kind-hearted Miriam that Andy found a parent figure he could trust, and the hope of happiness that had eluded him throughout childhood.
Ginger Briggs brings to life this true story with raw honesty and emotional depth. Staunch is a poignant portrayal of Andy and his friendship with Miriam. It also reveals the heroism of the many thousands who have survived harrowing experiences as Forgotten Australians.
Andy’s life began with difficulty – given up at birth, his adoptive father was a violent drunk, his adoptive mother a depressive. He became a ward of the state, and spent his entire adolescence in institutions and foster homes.
These were unhappy years, full of confusion, fear and abuse. It wasn’t until he met the kind-hearted Miriam that Andy found a parent figure he could trust, and the hope of happiness that had eluded him throughout childhood.
Ginger Briggs brings to life this true story with raw honesty and emotional depth. Staunch is a poignant portrayal of Andy and his friendship with Miriam. It also reveals the heroism of the many thousands who have survived harrowing experiences as Forgotten Australians.
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2012
28 people want to read
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November 30, 2013
In 1984, when he was twelve years old, Andy was sent to Wakma Reception Centre in Ballarat because Wakma Reception Centre was the type of place kids like Andy got sent. It was the place you went if your dad left your mum high and dry, or put her in hospital for a spell, or they just couldn't afford you. Or if they hated you. You ended up there if the department deemed you 'at risk', or if you'd already risked everything and lost. Nobody stayed there long; it was like a vestibule, a doctor's waiting room. A place you fetched up in until something else came along.
It isn't the first place Andy has been sent to. When he was only ten, his weak-willed mother, Dahlia, allowed her new husband, pony-tailed Victor, to divorce him. He was only adopted, anyway. Unwanted, unloved, isolated, Andy ends up in a place where the young, slightly effeminate social worker, Nigel, took him under his wing. What began as fun weekends trail biking turned into weekends at Nigel's place where the young boys were introduced to cigarettes, drugs and booze - and where Andy was introduced to Nigel's sexual appetites.
Broken, haunted and completely alone, Andy washes up at Wakma after a foster family situation goes badly, and it's there he meets the first person to show him unconditional love. Mary, or "Mez" as she's called, is only twenty-two; a small woman who's endured her own awful experiences at the hands of selfish, entitled men. She is Andy's first real friend, and he easily slips into the practice of thinking of her as his mother. When she leaves for a year of travelling the world, like so many Australians, Andy is taken in by a new foster family, one with a son about his own age. Unfortunately, without explanation (though the truth was that the couple's marriage broke up), Andy is suddenly removed from the home and sent to Ironside in Melbourne. He's only fourteen, and Ironside is not just a "youth training centre", a place where unwanted boys wash up; it's also a remand centre. There are real criminals at Ironside, rapists and murderers, grown men with violent pasts.
At Ironside, the boys live in cells with barred windows, are locked in at night, served bad food and rub shoulders with criminals. It is at Ironside that Andy makes his first friend his own age. Clunky, as he's called, has only a grandfather left, and they're fighting the system to be allowed to live together - something made difficult by his grandfather's history of alcoholism. Later they're joined by a boy nicknamed Spinner, a charismatic but ugly youth who leads Andy astray but teaches him staunchness, and honesty and dignity. It is at Ironside that Andy endures the kind of psychological trauma no child should ever have to experience: watching a cellmate hang himself. It's clear that, while no one knows about the sexual abuse he experienced with Nigel, this faked suicide gone wrong never leads to any kind of therapy or counselling for Andy.
Andy's path begins its new downward trajectory when Spinner, after a Sunday let out of Ironside, convinces Andy and Clunky to abscond, just for the day he says. But several drug deals, drinks and stolen wallets later, Andy doesn't know where he is until he wakes up in a Ballarat police station, strung out and washed up, with Mez there to greet him.
Over the following years, the path repeats itself many times. Absconding, drugs, stolen cars, bad crowd, back in jail again. Every time, Mez is there to catch him and hold him up, but even she starts to despair that the cycle can ever be broken, that Andy could ever have the chance to be the man he could be.
I knew this would be heavy, going in, and I knew it would be heartbreaking. I expected I'd cry quite a lot, but actually it didn't turn me into an emotional mess. Mostly I felt anger, and despair, and empathy. It was a forging kind of read, a story that hardens the heart rather than makes it a soppy mess, and that's just what you need, because it leaves you with a clearer head. I have to warn you, though: this review gets a bit ranty, a bit soap-boxy - sure sign of exactly the kind of emotional and intellectual response Staunch generates in readers.
Oh Andy, poor Andy. Truly - and he is just one boy of hundreds - what he went through, what he experienced, how he ended up, all of it is preventable. This story is a true story, Andy was a real person as are all the other characters, and it is in part inspired by the Forgotten Australians Senate Report, which looked at the fate and experiences of wards between 1930 and 1970. In her afterword, Briggs puts her story into this broader context:
From the very beginning, with the ease with which Victor got rid of him - and for no other reason than that he didn't like him, but bullied and tormented him while Dahlia simply fluttered her hand uselessly - to the sad fact that he never had a social worker, never had anyone talk to him, listen to him, find out anything about him (until Mez, who stepped out of her official role to do so); his file contained short reports on him, terse descriptions of his movements between centres, but nothing about working with him, no attempts were ever made to set him on a healthy, safe path toward adulthood. "No help." [p.160] The state failed him even worse than his adoptive parents did, than his horrible stepfather even.
Aside from the blatantly obvious fact that clearly no one actually cares about these kids - else they would watch over them better, make sure they didn't get taken advantage of by pedophiles like Nigel, or end up in what was essentially a jail when they'd done nothing wrong - the system seems set up to ensure these boys end up exactly where they end up. And then we, us "nice ordinary people" with loving families, an education, a roof over our heads and jobs, we look askance at these kids, these young men. We blame them, and then we dismiss them. All the stupid things they do, the mistakes they make: it's all their fault, we think, because we assume they have the same understanding of life that we do, have had the same childhood experiences and that it's merely a question of "turning their life around".
What gets me is that we know that children need safe, loving, supportive environments in which to thrive (and for sure, going in the extreme opposite direction doesn't help them much either), so who in their right mind thinks that the system set up for these defenceless, unwanted, vulnerable and often abused kids is a good idea? I would never ever want my own son to go anywhere near the places Andy was sent to live in, because I know how bad that would be for him. Briggs mentions that some changes have been made since Andy's time, and there's more of a focus on prevention - keeping them out of the ward system and with their families - but that, when that fails, once they're in the system nothing's changed.
Everything about Andy's story hurts. The picture of a little ten-year-old boy being taken away with no explanation, being divorced from his family, as shitty a family as it is, while his mother tells him he was "too naughty" and must seek forgiveness from God, oh that makes me so mad! And then, when I thought things couldn't get any worse after Nigel's predatory abuse of him - and young boys like Andy are prime targets, so desperate are they for a father figure, a role model, a friend - to see him end up in Ironside! What bloody stupid idiot thought putting young wards into the same place as criminals was a good idea?! These are kids with no role models of their own, no positive father figures, which makes them hugely susceptible not just to abuses but also to learning the "wrong", or destructive, kind of normalcy, the wrong kind of being. And if I can just point out the obvious: make these boys' "home" a jail, with its cement walls, barred windows, locked doors, regimented structure and strip-searches and rules, and it's not surprisingly that it becomes a kind of comfort zone for them. Getting sent to prison when they actually do something wrong isn't much of a punishment: it's their life story. It becomes normalised.
It is, of course, more than just the environment and lack of nurturing that shapes Andy and his friends. It's also the ready access to drugs, the lack of an education (he never finished grade 7), and the comradely community of cons and druggies and shifty types. It's the perfect combination for the creation of a shiftless young criminal stuck in a cycle of drugs, poor decisions, and incarceration.
Brigg's novelisation of Andy's life is highly readable, nicely structured and well plotted. It's not told in straight chronological form, which would lack tension and drama, but organised in such a way that the story builds on our curiosity and empathy and creates more just when you think you know it all. It's not just Andy's story, it's Mez's story too, and it's the story of all those kids - not all of them wards of the state, some just made bad decisions or had bad relationships with their parents or just didn't care - who become druggies and lost causes. Through Andy's story, all of us who've never experienced what they had, who probably just think it's a matter of will power to not do drugs, or stop taking them, who can't understand why they keep making such stupid, stupid mistakes when following the rules of society and law seems so easy for us - all of us gain a clear understanding and an empathetic perspective of those like Andy. Not all of them are as sympathetic as Andy is, but then we don't learn the full stories of many of them.
Overall, it's simply tragic. It doesn't end well. It doesn't make you feel very positive about the situation. What this novel does do, very successfully, is give voice to these "forgotten Australians", these kids who never really had the quality of life that we consider every child to have the right to in our cosy, affluent country. Staunch humanises these wards of the state, sheds a light on their life and opens it up for understanding. And the importance of this shouldn't be underestimated: this book, books like Staunch, this is our education, this is our chance to gain some insight, because without it nothing will ever change, we will never demand change, and we will simply go on creating more juvenile criminals and druggies and "hooligans" that we can dismiss and blame and castigate without guilt or remorse or the slightest smidge of empathy. Staunch is a memorial to kids like Andy, and it is a very powerful, emotionally-intense, moving, thought-provoking one. It taught me plenty, and it should be required reading if we ever want to really consider ourselves to be enlightened thinkers and compassionate civilians. It would be a start, anyway.
It isn't the first place Andy has been sent to. When he was only ten, his weak-willed mother, Dahlia, allowed her new husband, pony-tailed Victor, to divorce him. He was only adopted, anyway. Unwanted, unloved, isolated, Andy ends up in a place where the young, slightly effeminate social worker, Nigel, took him under his wing. What began as fun weekends trail biking turned into weekends at Nigel's place where the young boys were introduced to cigarettes, drugs and booze - and where Andy was introduced to Nigel's sexual appetites.
Broken, haunted and completely alone, Andy washes up at Wakma after a foster family situation goes badly, and it's there he meets the first person to show him unconditional love. Mary, or "Mez" as she's called, is only twenty-two; a small woman who's endured her own awful experiences at the hands of selfish, entitled men. She is Andy's first real friend, and he easily slips into the practice of thinking of her as his mother. When she leaves for a year of travelling the world, like so many Australians, Andy is taken in by a new foster family, one with a son about his own age. Unfortunately, without explanation (though the truth was that the couple's marriage broke up), Andy is suddenly removed from the home and sent to Ironside in Melbourne. He's only fourteen, and Ironside is not just a "youth training centre", a place where unwanted boys wash up; it's also a remand centre. There are real criminals at Ironside, rapists and murderers, grown men with violent pasts.
At Ironside, the boys live in cells with barred windows, are locked in at night, served bad food and rub shoulders with criminals. It is at Ironside that Andy makes his first friend his own age. Clunky, as he's called, has only a grandfather left, and they're fighting the system to be allowed to live together - something made difficult by his grandfather's history of alcoholism. Later they're joined by a boy nicknamed Spinner, a charismatic but ugly youth who leads Andy astray but teaches him staunchness, and honesty and dignity. It is at Ironside that Andy endures the kind of psychological trauma no child should ever have to experience: watching a cellmate hang himself. It's clear that, while no one knows about the sexual abuse he experienced with Nigel, this faked suicide gone wrong never leads to any kind of therapy or counselling for Andy.
Andy's path begins its new downward trajectory when Spinner, after a Sunday let out of Ironside, convinces Andy and Clunky to abscond, just for the day he says. But several drug deals, drinks and stolen wallets later, Andy doesn't know where he is until he wakes up in a Ballarat police station, strung out and washed up, with Mez there to greet him.
Over the following years, the path repeats itself many times. Absconding, drugs, stolen cars, bad crowd, back in jail again. Every time, Mez is there to catch him and hold him up, but even she starts to despair that the cycle can ever be broken, that Andy could ever have the chance to be the man he could be.
I knew this would be heavy, going in, and I knew it would be heartbreaking. I expected I'd cry quite a lot, but actually it didn't turn me into an emotional mess. Mostly I felt anger, and despair, and empathy. It was a forging kind of read, a story that hardens the heart rather than makes it a soppy mess, and that's just what you need, because it leaves you with a clearer head. I have to warn you, though: this review gets a bit ranty, a bit soap-boxy - sure sign of exactly the kind of emotional and intellectual response Staunch generates in readers.
Oh Andy, poor Andy. Truly - and he is just one boy of hundreds - what he went through, what he experienced, how he ended up, all of it is preventable. This story is a true story, Andy was a real person as are all the other characters, and it is in part inspired by the Forgotten Australians Senate Report, which looked at the fate and experiences of wards between 1930 and 1970. In her afterword, Briggs puts her story into this broader context:
When you read Forgotten Australians, when you read the testimonies, a whole lot of it sounds awfully like the experiences of Andy and other later state wards. Sexual abuse at the hands of a carer; the absence of a proper education; lack of belief, or succour, or affection. Dealing and coping with the horror of childhood. Andy, like so many state wards before his time and after, languished in jail...
When I started this book ... I thought I'd come up with answers to these questions. I haven't. All I have is this: kids need love and family - of whatever stripe - to thrive and grow. Only adults can parent, and many aren't very good at it. But one thing is certain - the state can never parent. When all the kids are waiting at the school gates, no one wants to acknowledge the mother who is cumbersome, impersonal, bureaucratic, twelve storeys high and has a letterhead. [pp. 292-3]
From the very beginning, with the ease with which Victor got rid of him - and for no other reason than that he didn't like him, but bullied and tormented him while Dahlia simply fluttered her hand uselessly - to the sad fact that he never had a social worker, never had anyone talk to him, listen to him, find out anything about him (until Mez, who stepped out of her official role to do so); his file contained short reports on him, terse descriptions of his movements between centres, but nothing about working with him, no attempts were ever made to set him on a healthy, safe path toward adulthood. "No help." [p.160] The state failed him even worse than his adoptive parents did, than his horrible stepfather even.
The letter [Mez] hated most confirmed the end of his wardship. Andy had been done with the government since his fifteenth birthday.
Andrew is still adamant that he wants to be able to go his own way and is confident in being able to do so. Given the firmness and thought put into Andrew's comments, his request for Discharge of Wardship is supported.
Everything possible would seem to have been tried to assist and direct Andrew in the past five years, it is therefore time to try it his own way and allow him the opportunity to make his own plans and carry them through, with voluntary assistance if he chooses to seek it from the networks he knows so well.
It sounds like a shitty ex-girlfriend, thought Mez. Fine. Try it your way. No one had invited Mez to this meeting because she had no official role in Andy's life, despite the fact that she had supported him emotionally and sometimes financially for the past three years. They dumped him. As if he would have said anything else but that he wanted to try it his way. What good had their way done? Andrew had a Grade Six education because they hadn't helped him at school, and no family home because their placement families never stayed around. No family, because they adopted him out to a nutter; and no job, because they didn't give him an education. And no love.
The state was a shithouse parent. And then, she thought, some bastard will have the gall to blame him when he breaks into their bloody car. [pp.160-1]
Aside from the blatantly obvious fact that clearly no one actually cares about these kids - else they would watch over them better, make sure they didn't get taken advantage of by pedophiles like Nigel, or end up in what was essentially a jail when they'd done nothing wrong - the system seems set up to ensure these boys end up exactly where they end up. And then we, us "nice ordinary people" with loving families, an education, a roof over our heads and jobs, we look askance at these kids, these young men. We blame them, and then we dismiss them. All the stupid things they do, the mistakes they make: it's all their fault, we think, because we assume they have the same understanding of life that we do, have had the same childhood experiences and that it's merely a question of "turning their life around".
What gets me is that we know that children need safe, loving, supportive environments in which to thrive (and for sure, going in the extreme opposite direction doesn't help them much either), so who in their right mind thinks that the system set up for these defenceless, unwanted, vulnerable and often abused kids is a good idea? I would never ever want my own son to go anywhere near the places Andy was sent to live in, because I know how bad that would be for him. Briggs mentions that some changes have been made since Andy's time, and there's more of a focus on prevention - keeping them out of the ward system and with their families - but that, when that fails, once they're in the system nothing's changed.
Everything about Andy's story hurts. The picture of a little ten-year-old boy being taken away with no explanation, being divorced from his family, as shitty a family as it is, while his mother tells him he was "too naughty" and must seek forgiveness from God, oh that makes me so mad! And then, when I thought things couldn't get any worse after Nigel's predatory abuse of him - and young boys like Andy are prime targets, so desperate are they for a father figure, a role model, a friend - to see him end up in Ironside! What bloody stupid idiot thought putting young wards into the same place as criminals was a good idea?! These are kids with no role models of their own, no positive father figures, which makes them hugely susceptible not just to abuses but also to learning the "wrong", or destructive, kind of normalcy, the wrong kind of being. And if I can just point out the obvious: make these boys' "home" a jail, with its cement walls, barred windows, locked doors, regimented structure and strip-searches and rules, and it's not surprisingly that it becomes a kind of comfort zone for them. Getting sent to prison when they actually do something wrong isn't much of a punishment: it's their life story. It becomes normalised.
It is, of course, more than just the environment and lack of nurturing that shapes Andy and his friends. It's also the ready access to drugs, the lack of an education (he never finished grade 7), and the comradely community of cons and druggies and shifty types. It's the perfect combination for the creation of a shiftless young criminal stuck in a cycle of drugs, poor decisions, and incarceration.
'You'd hate me if you knew. You'd hate me if you knew what I have to do to survive in here.' He seemed to nod off for a bit. 'Victor was a cunt to me, wasn't he, Mez? I should go get him. When I get out. Need to get it out of my system. Beat the fuck out of him. How come Mum never came for me? No family for me. Feelin' sorry for meself, Mez,' he said decisively. 'I'm letting it get to me, in'I?' He started crying. 'Wasted time. All of me youth. Now I'm old and I'm all screwed-up. Don't want to be in here anymore, Mez.'
'I know, I know.' She'd never heard him talk so much.
'I'm just saying, Mez. I've been trying to stop it in my head. I don't have any blood, don't feel like there's blood in my body. Maybe that's why the drugs. That's why they don't even work no more. They work but... Hard to explain... That's why I get so out of it. Need drugs, sometimes, to stop thinking. I remember Victor beating me up all the time. I think about it all the time. Why didn't Mum stop him?' [p.185]
Brigg's novelisation of Andy's life is highly readable, nicely structured and well plotted. It's not told in straight chronological form, which would lack tension and drama, but organised in such a way that the story builds on our curiosity and empathy and creates more just when you think you know it all. It's not just Andy's story, it's Mez's story too, and it's the story of all those kids - not all of them wards of the state, some just made bad decisions or had bad relationships with their parents or just didn't care - who become druggies and lost causes. Through Andy's story, all of us who've never experienced what they had, who probably just think it's a matter of will power to not do drugs, or stop taking them, who can't understand why they keep making such stupid, stupid mistakes when following the rules of society and law seems so easy for us - all of us gain a clear understanding and an empathetic perspective of those like Andy. Not all of them are as sympathetic as Andy is, but then we don't learn the full stories of many of them.
Overall, it's simply tragic. It doesn't end well. It doesn't make you feel very positive about the situation. What this novel does do, very successfully, is give voice to these "forgotten Australians", these kids who never really had the quality of life that we consider every child to have the right to in our cosy, affluent country. Staunch humanises these wards of the state, sheds a light on their life and opens it up for understanding. And the importance of this shouldn't be underestimated: this book, books like Staunch, this is our education, this is our chance to gain some insight, because without it nothing will ever change, we will never demand change, and we will simply go on creating more juvenile criminals and druggies and "hooligans" that we can dismiss and blame and castigate without guilt or remorse or the slightest smidge of empathy. Staunch is a memorial to kids like Andy, and it is a very powerful, emotionally-intense, moving, thought-provoking one. It taught me plenty, and it should be required reading if we ever want to really consider ourselves to be enlightened thinkers and compassionate civilians. It would be a start, anyway.
October 19, 2023
I read this book years ago and think of it often.
September 13, 2012
An important story told beautifully.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews