Shurlee Swain

The Market in Babies tells the history of adoption in Australia from its beginnings in the 19th century to its decline at the beginning of the 21st. In the early years, supply outstripped demand; needy children were hard to place. In the mid-20th century, demand and supply grew together with adoption presented as the perfect solution to two social problems - infertility and illegitimacy. Supply declined in the 1970s, and demand turned to new global markets. Now these markets are closing, but technology provides new opportunities, and Australians are acquiring babies through the surrogacy markets of India and the US. As the rate of adoptions in Australia falls to a historic low, and with parliaments across the country apologizing to parents and children for the pain caused by past practices, this book identifies an historical continuum between the past and the present, and it challenges the view that the best interests of the child can ever be protected in an environment where the market for children is allowed to flourish. The book's authors are long-established scholars with expertise in the history of the family, welfare history, and the making of public policy in Australia. *** "The richness of this book lies in equal measure in the sources it uses and its ability to synthesize history and public policy. The voices of adoptees and parents gathered here are moving and sophisticated, even as they tell diverse stories about their experiences. Highly recommended." -- Choice, Vol. 52, No. 2, October 2014 ? ? ? ?

The Family Law Act of 1975 and the establishment of the Family Court of Australia in the following year aimed to revolutionize the settlement of marital disputes. But the court quickly became the focus of hostility, and many saw it as a failed experiment. Drawing on interviews with judges, lawyers, and counselors, this book challenges that notion and captures the complexity of the early years as the Family Court grappled with increasing media criticism and acts of violence never before seen in the Australian legal system. This intriguing oral history provides a deeper understanding of the legal institution that arguably impacts a larger proportion of Australians than any other.

Child, nation, race and empire is an innovative, inter-disciplinary, cross cultural study that contributes to understandings of both contemporary child welfare practices and the complex dynamics of empire. It analyses the construction and transmission of nineteenth-century British child rescue ideology. Locating the origins of contemporary practice in the publications of the prominent English Child rescuers, Dr Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Benjamin Waugh, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and their colonial disciples and literature written for children, it shows how the vulnerable body of the child at risk came to be reconstituted as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. Yet, as the shocking testimony before the many official enquiries into the past treatment of children in out-of-home ‘care’ held in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada make clear, there was no guarantee that the rescued child would be protected from further harm.

Confronting Cruelty investigates the history of the detection and treatment of child abuse in Australia through the lens of the Victorian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children - now the Children's Protection Society (CPS) - from 1896 to the end of the 20th century. This book explores the inner world of a child protection agency within the outer world of the broader historical context and changes in both child protection policy and the social constructions of child abuse.

This book is the first comprehensive history of single motherhood in Australia. Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe tell the powerful, if painful and often moving, story of these women and their children and the lives they constructed. Starting in the 1850s when abandonment and infanticide were not uncommon, the book’s main focus ends in 1975 when the legal status of illegitimacy was abolished. The book covers issues of baby farming, infanticide, abortion, sex education, birth control, adoption and marriage, in effect becoming a history of sexual practice in Australia. While tracing profound changes from a time when single mothers were locked in gaol for discarding their babies to the establishment of state benefits, the authors find a good deal of continuity over the period. This long-awaited book makes an important contribution to social, welfare and women’s history in Australia.