commitment to his own education. Gavin answered almost no questions. His constant refrain of ‘Can I go now?’ seemed calculated to give offence, and is consistent with his school reports. Both children were defensive to the point of paranoia to the idea that Gavin might be ‘taken away’.
RECOMMENDATION
The Protective Services Act of 2007 makes the department responsible for ‘the care, wellbeing, safety and protection of minors, with a special duty to those who are in circumstances which give rise to reasonable concern for their physical, emotional, social or mental health, are at risk of abuse, or are not receiving proper care’. The Act charges us in those situations to act as ‘swiftly and urgently as is deemed to be in the child’s best interests’, and gives us the right to go onto any premises where we have reasonable grounds to consider that a child’s health and wellbeing may be in immediate danger, to remove the child from that danger, and to go before a court at the first available opportunity to seek an order for the child’s continuing protection. We are obliged by the statute to always place the child’s interests first and having done so to give due consideration to other interested parties, in particular parents. In this respect it should be noted that Gavin has a little sister, currently residing with a foster family in Stratton, but he has minimal contact with her, and given constraints of time and resources it was not thought necessary to interview her or her foster family.
In view of the fact that Gavin’s best interests are clearly not being served by his present circumstances, I recommend that the department take immediate action in respect to this child. Ideally he should be placed in a family situation, where he can experience normal life and school attendance would be better monitored. A special school may be indicated. However, given the shortage of foster or adoptive families since the war, and in light of his challenging behaviour and his disability, it is considered unlikely that a foster family will be found in the near future. A better alternative is Holy Cross Children’s Services in Stratton, which operates the old Saint Bede’s Orphanage. This has been refurbished and is now St Bede’s Child Protection Facility. It is a clean, well-managed facility which has been notably successful in dealing with troubled boys of this age. There is a swimming pool, two tennis courts and a football oval, as well as assistance available for children experiencing academic problems. (See Appendix 7 for further information about the facilities on offer.)
It carries with it the added advantage that contact between Gavin and his young sister may be easier and more frequent should he be relocated to Stratton.
Currently there are no deaf boys in residence, but in the past they have had a number of deaf children and they are experienced with this particular disability. Saint Bede’s has eight cottages where children live in a family situation, and although they are extended at the moment as far as resources go, they have indicated that they are willing to take Gavin for a trial period. It is recommended that it is in the best interests of Gavin for this to happen.
I am available to answer further questions with regard to this child.
Madeleine Randall, Investigations Officer
CHAPTER 23
And suddenly they came out of the woodwork. I don’t actually know what that expression means. What come out of the woodwork? Cockroaches maybe. Mice? Are these rhetorical questions, like I just learned about on one of my rare visits to school? Was that a rhetorical question? Is it a paradox when you ask rhetorically if a rhetorical question is a rhetorical question? I think I’d better stop this before I get a headache.
Well, I’ll come back to the woodwork in a minute. So much happened during the next couple of days, the next month, that I felt like I was in a tumble-dryer most of the time and the heat was on high. It was hard to keep control of my own life, impossible at times. The first and worst and least expected thing was the speed of the Department of Social Responsibility. Everyone always says that government departments move slowly, and this one had for many many months, but now, suddenly, they were as fast as a car accident. Two days later a grey Commodore arrived when I was in the machinery shed, out gets Ms Randall as I come out of the building and from the back seat two lanky men who look a bit like the Blues Brothers and are dressed like them too and I suddenly realise what’s happening and I move swiftly for the house thinking, ‘Oh God, Gavin, don’t appear at this moment, see them before they see you, go bush, go to Homer’s, go to Hell, go anywhere’, but Gavin’s timing has never been good and he’s excellent at turning up in the very place I especially don’t want him to be, so I shouldn’t be surprised when he chooses that exact moment to walk out of the house eating an apple and looking like a kid who hasn’t got a care in the world.
And so he got kidnapped for the second time, and in a way I think this was the worse of the two, because it wasn’t done by people who were identifiably ‘baddies’. You couldn’t fight them. Oh we did of course. Gavin struggled and screamed and begged me for help and although my first reaction was to jump at them they held me off pretty easily, and I realised from the babble coming out of Ms Randall’s mouth that she was right, and it would us more harm than good to fight them in this way.
It was the first time that I hadn’t been able to help him.
So I convinced Gavin to calm down. To cooperate with the kidnappers, to allow himself to be led away to a new type of captivity. They let him pack some stuff and they took him away. White and trembling as he was, looking like a statue on a grave at the cemetery, they took him away.
I could barely take in the enormity of what had happened, and although Madeline left an envelope with a whole lot of paper in it and although she wrote some more notes on the outside of the envelope for me and although I tried time and again to read all this after the Commodore had driven away, I couldn’t comprehend it. I sat in the yard, about a metre from where the car had parked, a metre from where I’d said goodbye to him, and that was as far as I could go. It was like they’d succeeded in doing what soldiers and guns and high explosive and prison and murder and beatings had never done, and that was to defeat me.
But that’s what friends are for, I guess, in the words of the old song. It’s such a corny phrase that I’m embarrassed to write it, but I gotta record the facts here, as always, I hope, and the fact is that my friends came out of the woodwork. First one of them, a big ugly Greek guy who lives next door, then another one, a Thai- Vietnamese guy from Stratton, then Bronte the Scarlet Pimple, then Jess, then — and my heart leapt to see her — Fi. Jeremy was still away sulking but when Homer asked where he was — because to Homer it was incomprehensible that when your girlfriend’s in trouble you don’t immediately arrive with everything you can think of, from soup to guns to a Blackberry — Bronte said he was ill and when Homer said, ‘What with?’ she said ‘Depression or something’, which scared me because I didn’t know if I was the cause. I suspected that at some stage I’d have to do something about it. But I knew I couldn’t do anything right then and there, I had an even more urgent problem to work on.
These friends were followed by the adults. Homer’s parents of course — well they were my guardians after all — followed by Fi’s mother and, to my surprise, Bronte’s father. To my greater surprise Rosie’s foster parents drove out from Wirrawee with Rosie. They’d already been out to the farm three or four times and Rosie loved it. But now they were on a serious mission. They couldn’t stay long but I guess they were keen to let me know that they were on our side.
After they’d gone, and the Yannoses too, Fi’s mother and Bronte’s father disappeared into Dad’s old office for a legal conference. The rest of us stayed in the kitchen and talked tactics, but I had the feeling that the two lawyers were the most important people in the house and part of my mind was away with them, wondering what they were talking about, what they’d come up with. It’d need to be good.
Meanwhile, once we got over ideas like using Liberation to storm the offices of the Department and take Madeleine hostage, or plucking Gavin out of their arms in a daring 3 am raid, we got into the serious stuff. I told them that I was going to sell the property. I’d told Mr Young the day before, because even though I knew deep down he was mostly agisting his cattle at my place because he felt he owed me a favour, at the same time he had three hundred head of stock and he’d have to find a new home for them. Depending on who bought my place of course. I’d thought it might be Homer’s parents; he said they wanted it but didn’t think they could afford it. They already carried a lot of debt, as did we all I guess. I know I did.
Then there were the Sandersons, the people who’d been given a part of the place after the war, when all the big properties were broken up by the government. They were making a good go of their farm, unlike the other three
