My Messed-Up Family Tree
My adoptive father and adoptive aunt came from there. They'd say the name, and nothing more. They'd been trained never to talk or think about it and trained their own adoptive children to do the same, but it hurt them deeply. A two-generation adopted family -- we were supposed to role models. I guess we were, if you looked beneath the surface.
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Doesn't entirely surprise me though. There are roughly similar stories from Britain at that time. There was a strong belief that children would be better off taken from the less well off families and placed elsewhere, and also a strong belief that Britain would be better off with less of "that sort of person". As far as I know there was no personal money-making involved, although it wouldn't surprise me if there was some somewhere. In Britain, many children were taken from their families, both legally and under false pretences, and sent in their droves to new homes in Australia, often as cheap labour for farms. The whole story came out fairly recently, and there have been attempts to try to put things right. Not that there's much that can be done.
Social eugenics. A cold and convenient term for some mind-bogglingly awful stuff.
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