Introduction
This article gives an account of the conflict between social workers and prospective adoptive parents which developed in the 1970s in Australia, taking as a case study the conflicting roles of adoptive parent advocates and professional social workers within the Victorian Standing Committee on Adoption. Its overarching concern lies with the attitudes of the social work profession towards adoption, both domestic and intercountry, as these have developed historically.
Little has been written on the history of social workers and adoption in Australia. The major history of adoption, The Many-Sided Triangle: Adoption in Australia, is written by two senior social workers, Audrey Marshal and Margaret McDonald (2001). Despite the challenge in their title to the limits of the ‘triangle’ metaphor, their study remains focussed on the three groups understood as constituting that triangle: adoptees, parents separated from their children by adoption and adoptive parents. Their analysis and narrative do not historicise the role of the group who might be thought of as the fourth side of the many-sided triangle – social workers.
More recently, two researchers trained as social workers have published on the changing understandings of adoption experienced within the profession. Susan Gair interviewed a sample of social workers in the Australian state of Queensland, and identified a series of shifts in attitudes to adoption, from an unquestioning acceptance to a recognition of the need to forge a more ‘reflective practice’ (Gair, Reference Gair, Spark and Cuthbert2009: 80). Christine Vickers reports the ‘tea room talk’ about adoption she encountered as a newly graduated social worker in the early 1980s. She reports the tales she heard about undocumented, irregular adoption in the ‘bad’ old days of pre-reform adoption, and her hope when she entered the practice that adoption was being rethought and renewed (Vickers, Reference Vickers, Spark and Cuthbert2009: 95–100). This study builds on the insights of Gair and Vickers, looking in more detail at the historical grounds of the attitudes they describe.
Social work and adoption in Australia
During the 1960s, the administration of adoption became a significant and valued part of social work practice in Australia, a process discussed below. This is no longer the case. Current social work textbooks tend to dismiss adoption as an outmoded practice at best and at worst a means of perpetuating oppressive social practices (Alston and McKinnon, Reference Alston and McKinnon2005). Sociologist Rosemary Pringle (Reference ‘Pringle2004: 225) suggested in 2004 that ‘the suffering caused by past adoption practices’ made it ‘almost impossible to speak up for adoption as a policy option’. The witnesses testifying to that suffering have been in the main mothers separated from their children by adoption, and adoptees, Aboriginal and more recently white, and their representations have been a major factor in shaping the profession's understanding of adoption. But, as argued in this article, the complaints of the third side of the ‘adoption triangle’, the adoptive parents, have also played a significant role and one that entered the context early on.
Numbers of adoptions in Australia are currently very low by the standards of the western world – a total of 412 in 2009–10, making ‘a 24-fold decrease’ from a peak of nearly 10,000 in the early 1970s (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2010: 12, 39). Fifteen per cent of these were local adoptions, representing a continuing decline in this field, in contrast to comparable figures from Europe and Great Britain (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2009: 73).
Critics of social work in Australia have suggested that these unusually low levels of adoption reflect ‘a dominant anti adoption culture’ in this country. The 2005 federal parliamentary inquiry into Overseas Adoption characterised the position of social workers administering adoption as ‘negative’, ‘indifferent’ and sometimes ‘hostile’ (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, 2005: 35). The Overseas Adoption report is frankly hostile to social work as a profession, characterising social workers and government bureaucrats as ‘intimidating’ prospective adoptive parents (Murphy et al., Reference Murphy, Quartly and Cuthbert2009: 209). Notably, some within the profession are also calling for a more sympathetic reassessment of adoption policy and practice. In Victoria, for instance, the recommendations of a symposium recently convened by the Department of Human Services included a commitment to explore ways of making adoption a more ready option for children with special needs (Cuthbert and Quartly, Reference Cuthbert and Quartly2010).
Conflict between social workers and adoptive parents over adoption policy and practice has a long history in Australia. This article looks back to the 1970s and the first public struggles over the conduct of intercountry adoption. It takes as a case study the conflicting positions of adoptive parent advocates and professional social workers within the Victorian Standing Committee on Adoption, a body working to establish standards of practice for local and international adoption. A minor though significant incident is thus used as a focus for examining the self-understandings of the parents and the social workers involved. The analysis reveals that these understandings grow and sometimes harden in interaction with each other.
The Victorian Standing Committee on Adoption
From late in 1976, the Victorian Standing Committee on Adoption was tested by a debate which set the interests of parents’ groups in stark opposition to those of professional social workers. The Standing Committee had recently been established to continue the work of adoption reform begun earlier that year by the First Australian Conference on Adoption. Like that conference, the Committee was deliberately open and inclusive. Social workers representing professional organisations, agencies and the State Department of Social Welfare met with representatives of groups identified as ‘consumers’ of the services of social work: single mothers, adoptees and adopting parents.Footnote 1
The work of the Committee – establishing standards of practice for local and international adoption, pushing for reform of adoption legislation – was delayed for several months by the representations of one of these consumer groups, Rights for Adoptive Families (RAF). RAF pushed the Committee to recommend to the Director General of Social Welfare a document accusing social workers in his department of ‘unprofessional conduct’, and asking for an agreement that ‘in future social workers who are childless and/or unmarried should have little influence and no authority in adoption matters’.Footnote 2 The ensuing debate tried the patience of the professionals who formed the administrative backbone of the Committee. A social worker responded from her professional understanding that the ‘primary purpose’ of adoption was ‘the wellbeing of the child’ (Victorian Council of Social Service, n.d.); ‘we find families for children, not children for families’.Footnote 3
This article discusses below the way in which the Committee dealt with RAF's obstructive tactics, and the implications of this for the developing language of social work. First, we need first to go back to the history of adoption and social work in the 1960s.
Social workers and adoption in the 1960s
Professional social work as career and pedagogy hardly existed in Australia before the Second World War (Markiewicz, Reference Markiewicz1996; Marshall and McDonald, Reference Marshall and McDonald2001). When trained social workers began to be appointed to hospitals and welfare departments, adoption work was shared with other professionals (Gair, Reference Gair, Spark and Cuthbert2009). The taking of consents from birth mothers and the placement of babies with families was most often done by hospital matrons and doctors, lawyers and clergymen. Social workers were quick to claim that their expertise in the management of human relations made them the best people to work with birth mothers and adopting parents, a claim initially opposed by those they displaced (Gair, Reference Gair, Spark and Cuthbert2009; Bowen, Reference Bowen2010). The growing power of the profession can be seen in the 1955 report of the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Child Welfare (cited in Standing Committee on Social Issues, 2000: 23):
Adoption has become recognised as a process requiring scientific understanding and professional skill. Indeed, all modern adoption legislation presupposes the use of trained and efficient social workers.
From the mid-1950s, social workers pursued ‘modern adoption legislation’ of this kind through their professional associations and wider alliances like the Councils of Social Service (Bull, Reference Bull1967; Markiewicz, Reference Markiewicz1996). The reform legislation implemented in all states during the 1960s attempted to bring all adoption under the control of trained social workers, whether in government bureaucracies or private adoption agencies licensed by government. From this time, social work practice came to shape the processes of adoption, though at different rates in different states (Gair, Reference Gair, Spark and Cuthbert2009; Marshall and McDonald, Reference Marshall and McDonald2001).
When social workers were able to influence the making of policy, they drew on overseas models, notably the Standards for Adoption Service developed by the Children's Welfare League of America, together with the psychoanalytical theory supporting these standards (Carp, Reference Carp1998; Herman, Reference Herman2008). The pivotal professional claim of social work across the western world was that only trained social workers could deliver in ‘the best interests of the child’ (O'Shaughnessy, 1994: 116). This claim underpinned the principles of adoption practice: rapid placement of very young babies with their new parents; absolute separation from their old parents; ‘matching’ of children's appearance, intelligence and social class with that of their new parents; and ‘telling’ – letting the growing child know as a normal part of her existence that she was adopted. The last of these sat awkwardly with the discourse and practice of secrecy established by the other principles, but like them turned on psychoanalytical understandings of normal as opposed to deviant psychological development (Bull, Reference Bull1967).
The NSW government report on past adoption practices, Releasing the Past (2000), criticised social work's claim to act always in ‘the best interests of the child’. Noting the effects of the adoption market in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘when there were large numbers of babies available for adoption and a shortage of adoptive parents’, the report observed that adoption came to be understood by social workers as ‘a service to infertile couples’ (Standing Committee on Social Issues, 2000: 22):
Consequently, the interests of the child were very much identified with those of the adoptive parents and the underlying thrust of practice was on finding homes for healthy and ‘appealing’ babies from ‘promising’ backgrounds, rather than helping children in most need.
The report cites a 1964 article from the NSW Public Service Board journal Progress which describes ‘matching’ a baby with an adoptive family. The social worker is shown examining the file of the baby to be adopted (Standing Committee on Social Issues, 2000: 24–5):
The child's mother is a university graduate – a slim attractive girl with regular features, pale skin, curly brown hair and wide, grey-green eyes . . . an accomplished pianist . . . most of her family is musical. She described the child's father as being tall, of fine physique, with blue eyes, ruddy complexion and a shock of fair, straight hair.
Assuming the baby is ‘above average in intelligence’, the social worker sorts through the applicants’ files, rejecting those of ‘limited intelligence’ whose ‘income would not run to a university education for the child’.
Finally . . . a school teacher and his wife . . . answer exactly to the physical description of the baby's own parents . . . the adopting father is passionately fond of music, and conducts the school orchestra.
This search is driven by a conviction that the process will work equally in the interests of both baby and prospective parents. A social work educator, looking back on those halcyon days, remembered:
[Y]ou are giving or helping to give something very precious and desired to people who are selected for their good qualities. That's very seductive. (Cliff Picton in Bowen, Reference Bowen2010)
John Triseliotis makes the same point: ‘Adoption work by its very nature is seductive because of the amount of power it transfers to its practitioners’ (Triseliotis, Reference Triseliotis1989; Gair, Reference Gair, Spark and Cuthbert2009: 85).
Childless couples worked within a similar paradigm, assuming their right to adopt. The community agreed; stories and advice columns in popular women's magazines of the 1940s and 1950s assumed that ‘a married couple is entitled to a child’ (Harper, Reference Harper1990: 8). With increasing professional control after the passage of the Acts, assessment began to be taken more seriously; applicants were assessed on economic, marital and religious status and on criteria borrowed from the American literature: ‘emotional maturity and financial security; the stability of their marriage and their motive for seeking the adoption of a child’ (Victorian Council of Social Services, n.d.). A witness to the Releasing the Past enquiry recalled rejecting applicants (Standing Committee on Social Issues, 1999: 100–1):
When I felt it was not a satisfactory marital relationship, where one was keen and one was not, or where one had not accepted their infertility problems . . . or whether they were just wanting a baby for the wrong reasons . . . not for what they could give to a baby but what a child could give to them.
There is some evidence to suggest that applicants were not comfortable with the developing process of assessment – the interviews, the questionnaires, the increasingly lengthy counselling. A witness to the same inquiry, asked whether she was satisfied with her contact with the adoption agency, replied (Standing Committee on Social Issues, 1999: 92):
We were desperate to have children, so we accepted anything and everything. Whatever they told us we accepted . . . What could you do?
A major source of tension seems to have been the insistence by social workers that adopting parents should let their children know that they were adopted. There was no official policy requiring this; like much else it arose out of patterns of practice. O'Shaughnessy (Reference O'Shaughnessy1994: 113) notes that The Age newspaper reported on 13 August 1969 that a social worker had been transferred from the state government adoption agency ‘after opposing court approval of an adoption unless the prospective parents gave an assurance they would tell the child he was adopted’. O'Shaughnessy attributes this ministerial intervention to ‘public backlash from vocal, connected and authoritative adoptive parents’.
In the 1970s, with a slump in supply and the entry into the market of a new group of parents, these voices would become more strident.
Social workers and the growth of the adoptive parent ‘consumer’ groups
Australian adoptions peaked in 1971–2, with 9,798 children adopted across the country (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2001: 5). Numbers dropped sharply and suddenly. In New South Wales where the slump was sharpest, the Standing Committee on Adoption reported in June 1973 that:
[T]he number of babies being born and surrendered for adoption has reduced dramatically in the last 6–8 months. Probably reasons are more knowledge of contraception, more termination of pregnancy, more mothers retaining custody. At the same time there are larger numbers of prospective parents applying.Footnote 4
This dramatic shift in the market coincided with the entry into the field of a group of parents with a new agenda who were very ready to challenge professional authority. A social worker remarked that they ‘come to agencies not for a counselling relationship but for reinforcement of their own self concept of well-being. Not the least part of [the social worker's] skill is the . . . ability to help them accept that they may even need such counselling’ (McGuire, Reference McGuire and Picton1976: 104). The authority of these applicants lay in part in a social and educational background very different from social work's usual clients. In part, their authority lay in their agenda: the ‘rescue’ of children from war and poverty overseas.
The Vietnam War created an increase in intercountry adoption into America, generated some said by national guilt focussed on the unwanted babies fathered by American (and Australian) personnel.Footnote 5 In Australia, the response came more slowly. In 1968, the Commonwealth Immigration department reversed its earlier stand that adoptions from Vietnam ‘would not be in the children's best interests’ (Curtis, Reference Curtis1968), but the trickle of adoptions which followed had to be authorised by the governments of both Vietnam and Australia, and placement in Australia required the prior authorisation of the relevant, and reluctant, state authorities. A senior agency officer reported:
extreme reluctance for adoption agencies to become fully involved in the intercountry adoption process. The reasons appear to include an unwillingness to co-operate in adoption arrangements by individuals, doubts held about intercountry adoption as an advisable practice, and the view that their responsibility was to Australian children – that ‘foreign’ adoptions were ‘foreign’ to their work (Gregory, Reference Gregory and Picton1976: 43–4).
Between 1968 and mid-1972, the refusal of state bureaucracies, agencies and social workers’ associations to co-operate with parents seeking to adopt from Vietnam meant that only half a dozen babies were granted visas to enter the country, despite very active pressure from parents’ groups (Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 1972; Frizell, Reference Frizell1972).
This position crumbled in May 1972 when a Melbourne woman, Elaine Moir, flew into Sydney with five children already adopted by Australians in Vietnam, but without Australian visas (Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May 1972). She was greeted at Mascot airport by the adopting families, and the press. O'Shaughnessy (Reference O'Shaughnessy1994: 109) observes that in the flurry of front-page articles that followed, the activists were invariably presented as ‘responsible people-of-action . . . impeded by the Australian government's “red-tape” and “nonsensical”, “barbaric”, bureaucratic requirements’. Within days the federal government backed down, granting visas for the children and promising to expedite future arrivals. In June 1973, the Whitlam government capped a series of reforms by changing Australia's immigration laws to allow the entry as assisted immigrants of orphans adopted by Australians (The Australian, 30 May 1972, 31 May 1972, 28 June 1973).
Welfare authorities responded more slowly than politicians to parental pressures. Victorian bureaucrats were particularly obdurate in insisting that all adoptions must be locally approved, perhaps because they were better shielded from the voices of activists. The New South Wales Standing Committee on adoption had been formed in 1967 at the instigation of the Minister for Social Welfare ‘to provide a meeting point for statutory and voluntary agencies to share problems concerned with adoption’.Footnote 6 From 1972, two adopting parents were included in its activities as representatives from that ‘client group’ (Martin, Reference Martin2011). In Victoria, the body recognised by the Minister of Social Welfare as representing the adoption sector was the Conference of Adoption Agencies, a ‘user’-free committee. Despite what was later described as ‘open warfare’ between would-be parents and social workers refusing to consider intercountry applications (Calder, Reference Calder and Picton1976: 152), it was not until mid-1973 that this body officially recognised the need for Victorian agencies and the Department of Social Welfare to ‘establish effective channels for intercountry adoption’ (Gregory, Reference Gregory and Picton1976: 42).
As Saigon fell in April 1975, aid workers despatched thousands of babies and children to America, and hundreds to Australia, in aircraft supplied by the American and Australian governments. In Australia, the mass arrivals sorely tested the resolve of ministry and agencies that professional standards would be maintained in their placement (Hawley, Reference Hawley1975). Rosemary Calder was the Victorian secretary of the Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Children), a parent support group which had become involved with finding children in Vietnam for adoption by Victorian couples. She remembered that despite continuing tensions between professionals and ‘consumers’, ‘the overwhelming crisis of the collapse of Cambodia and Vietnam and the airlift threw the two sides into intensive co-operative efforts to cope with the demands of the situation’ (Calder, Reference Calder and Picton1976: 152). Parents from Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Children) took on ‘much of the administrative and even initial screening functions of the agency workers’ to free them for assessment of families – ‘and after the crisis the relationship had changed. We, the parents, had seen social workers harassed, emotional and caring and they had seen us as effective contributors.’ Graeme Gregory, the social worker and Methodist minister in charge of the Victorian resettlement, gave a more qualified account of the outcomes of the operation. He acknowledged that the process required social workers and agencies to rethink the categories of parents deemed acceptable for adoption, but stressed that this was done in the hope that with counselling ‘unsuitable’ parents could learn to grow and change and to approach the status of a ‘true intercountry applicant’ (Gregory et al., Reference Gregory, Kyatt and Lancaster1975 cited in Peres, Reference Peres and Picton1975: 54, 57).
In 1976, Graeme Gregory, Rosemary Calder and Eileen Moir were all members of the Victorian Standing Committee on Adoption. Gregory represented the Australian Association of Social Workers, Calder the Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Children) and Moir RAF. When the Committee was founded in July 1976, one of its briefs was to represent ‘users of adoption services’ as well as the agencies providing those services. The professional members of the Committee were mostly drawn from what Mendes (Reference Mendes2005: 125) has termed the ‘radical’ wing of the profession: men and women who ideally worked to change society, and to transform their ‘clients’ into active, self-motivating ‘consumers’ of welfare. The founding membership of the Committee included several ‘consumer’ groups with close and largely cordial relations with the social work profession: in addition to Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Children), the Council for Single Mothers and their Children, and the Adoptive Parents Association (APA).Footnote 7 RAF was not amongst the foundation members of the Committee.
RAF applied to join the Committee in September 1976. Although no criticism is recorded in the minutes, their application seems to have been less than welcome. It generated a long discussion ‘centred on the problem of limiting membership without limiting the service to small groups’. The subcommittee charged with proposing draft criteria for membership presciently acknowledged that open membership could involve ‘some conflict in meetings which unless controlled could be disruptive and prevent decisions being made’. But weighing inclusivity against consensus, the subcommittee proposed that at least as an interim measure membership should be extended to all ‘properly constituted organisations with an interest in adoption’ and that ‘all requests for membership should be granted’. RAF was invited to join, and responded by sending two representatives (rather than the required one) to the December meeting.Footnote 8
RAF was newly formed in 1976.Footnote 9 Its President was a Warrnambool school teacher, Alan Scarfe. The RAF letterhead carried an ambitious set of aims, paralleling the aims and functions of the Standing Committee itself:
• to establish a code of rights for adoptive children and parents;
• to advise, assist and protect adoptive families;
• to expand the opportunities for adoption in Victoria of handicapped and intercountry children, and for parents offering to adopt them;
• to obtain consultative status with government and with adoptive agencies and with other adoption-support organisations, so that the standards of adoptive agencies and practices in Victoria may be influenced;
• to bring to the widest public and official notice any injustices, short-comings or archaic attitudes in adoptive practices in Victoria.Footnote 10
Membership of the Standing Committee offered an immediate opportunity to do battle on most of these fronts. The Committee determined to prepare a policy paper on the subject of intercountry adoption, and circulated for discussion a document from the Victorian Conference of Adoption Agencies proposing standards for its local administration. RAF responded very promptly with a detailed list of fourteen ‘procedures . . . unsatisfactory and unacceptable to our members’, in essence every procedure asserting professional authority.Footnote 11
Written criticism to a fine level of detail and fierce defence of every point in debate, these were the hallmarks of the RAF style. At their first meeting, Moir and her fellow representative presented a complete redraft of a policy document already approved by the Committee, together with the document discussed above which criticised the professional capacity of social workers, and recommended that ‘in future social workers who are childless and/or unmarried should have little influence and no authority in adoption matters’. The same document set out to place the RAF as an advocate for all the parents’ groups concerned with overseas adoption, proposing:
That the Standing Committee write to the Victorian Adoption Conference requesting it to make the reforms suggested in the Report into Child Care Services in Victoria, especially in regard to opening membership to the three consumer organisations in Victoria, R.A.F., I.F.A. and A.S.I.A.(C).
Over the next six months many hours of the Committee's time were taken up with discussing submissions from RAF. Their anticipated role as an advocate for parents’ groups did not eventuate: Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Children)) and APA distanced themselves from the RAF. RAF submissions were treated with a careful courtesy: thus the chairman was minuted as asking ‘E. Moir to convey the committee's appreciation to the RAF for the work put into the document’. Some RAF interventions bore fruit, the understanding of the working party on intercountry adoption was at least clarified by Moir's insistent querying of the definition of ‘private adoption’: did it include ‘residential adoptions overseas where the legal guardian of a child may be an orphanage director and adoptions may proceed with his consent alone and without the involvement of an agency or State department?’ But most of their suggestions were ignored or gently rejected.
Allan Scarfe wrote to the Committee in February 1977 asking them to set up ‘an independent, impartial investigation’ into ‘complaints by couples of possible unprofessional conduct on the part of social workers’. In a long discussion, the professional members of the Committee repeatedly made the point that the Standing Committee was not constituted to carry out this kind of activity, and that ‘the appropriate course was for such complaints to be referred to the adoption agency concerned and thence to the Minister if satisfaction was not gained’. The RAF representatives, Elaine Moir and Paul Day, argued that parents might not feel ‘capable of undertaking such a course themselves’. Moir suggested that ‘parents needed to talk to someone about the nature of their complaints, as they felt they had been treated badly but did not want to take it as far as the Minister’. At the end of the discussion ‘there was general consent to the Chairman replying to the RAF in appropriate terms, recommending an appropriate course of action’.
Day and Moir may have been happy with this consensual outcome, but Scarfe was not. Over the next few months, he seems to have lost patience with the Committee. Late in 1977 he wrote to the Prime Minister and the state Ministers for Welfare criticising the Committee and the interstate bodies with whom it was working to convene the Second Australian Adoption Conference, and asking them to refuse any financial assistance to the Conference:
unless all adoptive family organisations are permitted representation on the Organising Committee of this Conference. Organisations such as ours which have been deliberately excluded from the Organising Committee do not see why public funds should be made available . . . to a Committee which appears to be a self-appointed clique.Footnote 12
The Committee response was even-handed; it requested the RAF representative to ask Scarfe to retract his criticisms, while acknowledging he might not have been fully informed about the organisation of the Conference. Scarfe refused.
The Standing Committee's activities were delayed by RAF's interventions. The second Australian Adoption Conference went ahead in Melbourne in May 1978, with representative speakers from adoptees, ‘relinquishing’ mothers and adoptive parents. All three took as their theme the ‘rights’ of the group they represented: the key speaker from Britain, John Treseliotis, addressed ‘The Rights of Adoptees, Adoptive Parents and Natural Parents’. Rights for Adoptive Parents were not invited to speak, but in her brief address a Sydney Northside Adoptive Parents’ Group representative made the points about authoritarian social work practice which RAF had reiterated to the Standing Committee (Wise, Reference Wise and Picton1978).
Conclusion
Rosemary Calder made an impassioned plea to the First Australian Conference on Adoption for a reimagining of the relationship between professionals and ‘consumers’. She called for ‘the acceptance by social welfare agency workers of the need for equality’ in that relationship (Calder, Reference Calder and Picton1976: 151). She saw the heart of the difficulty in social worker's view of ‘adoptive parents . . . as ‘consumers’. That is, they are at the receiving end of an adoption process, ‘consuming’ perhaps both the professional expertise of the agency workers and the product – ‘the child’. This ‘one-way’ relationship denied reciprocity, a mutual understanding of needs and feelings. In her work as secretary of the Standing Committee, Calder worked to make that mutuality possible, and the proceedings of the Second Conference seemed to show that, in her words, ‘those involved in the adoption field could speak with more of a co-ordinated voice, rather than a cacophony’.Footnote 13 In the long term, this was not to be.
The publicity generated by the Second Conference, and the Third in 1981, led to the establishment of activist groups of adoptees, of ‘relinquishing’ mothers and of adoptive parents across the country. Within the social work profession, the search for a ‘more reflective practice’ (Gair, Reference Gair, Spark and Cuthbert2009: 80) commenced: ‘[t]o be part of the revolution in adoption policy and practice was exciting’ (Vickers, Reference Vickers, Spark and Cuthbert2009: 96). Yet, the changes of the 1980s did not permanently alter the professionals’ relations with their clients. In Victoria, radical social workers worked with adoptees and single mothers to open adoption records, achieving reforms which became a model for similar laws across Australia (Pollard, forthcoming Reference Pollard2012). The push for reform empowered and politicised all three client groups. Adoptive parents opposed this reform, blocking it sometimes for decades in a battle which demonised the social work profession (Murphy et al., Reference Murphy, Quartly and Cuthbert2009). Despite social work commitment to open adoption, groups of adoptees and mothers joined in opposition to a profession which they saw as tainted by past injustices (Cuthbert and Quartly, forthcoming Reference Cuthbert and Quartly2012).
In adoption, social work in Australia today is embattled, under siege from the client groups it fostered in the 1970s. The story told here shows how a professional commitment to inclusive, consensual practice kept a space open briefly for mutual action, in the face of strong hostility. It also suggests that Calder's plea for equality within the practice of adoption asked too much of a profession unable in the end to query its own authority.
Acknowledgement
Research for this article was undertaken as part of the History of Adoption Project, funded by the Australian Research Council. My thanks to the anonymous referees whose suggestions have been very helpful.
