1887 to 1912 - Outside World

IN THE STRANGE LAND OF THE IDIOT CHILDREN. 
THE SADDEST CALL OF SANTA CLAUS. 
HE'S WELCOMED WITH CHATTER, SONG AND LAUGHTER EVEN THERE.

Oh, it was like walking out of this most intelligent and intellectual, not to say exceedingly knowing, world into some strange, uncanny Land, all deep rivers, and weird wooden bridges and silent ferries, lit by dim lamps, and shadowy wooded places, where a lot of climbing had to be done if you wanted to arrive anywhere. Of course, the fact that it was getting dark, and that we had never walked from the Johnston street bridge to the Kew Asylum before, was responsible for the feeling that we were entering a country from which something was missing for ever, and over which hung a cloud, even through all the long summer day. And the feeling was enhanced by the knowledge that in this strange land, there were children who had queer, unchildlike faces, lack-lustre eyes, and hard, vibrationless voices that didn't echo round the walls and in your heart (save very sadly), long after the children had gone. What a strange land it is! What a lightless world yours and mine would be if its children looked like those of the Strange Land, if their voices and laughter had no ring, if we could never pick up original ideas from their quaint comments on the people and things around them, if the care, no matter how kindly, of strangers were the only fostering love they knew from earth, at least. Poor little mites!

In a breezy, healthy dip of the high land upon which Kew Asylum stands, there is a comfortable cottage with a wide verandah and garden about it. It is some hundreds of yards from the big building and looks quiet and solitary, certainly shut off and far away from rollicking childhood and happy homes and holidays and all the busy mystifying world. Here, for 3 years and a half now, the idiot children of the colony have been housed together and cared for and trained. "Trained!" "Train up a child in the way he should," we have all read; but read it to mean training a child who could learn much of his own observation, and required only just some guiding here, some pruning there, of the budding ideas. In this cottage, it must be all training from the very beginning, or else a blank, and no children, but gibbering, helpless, perhaps violent, human figures.

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But, thank goodness, they are children, in spite of it all, who live in the cottage. And so it is that even there the missionaries of good Santa Claus came last night with all the toys and good things that delight the other children in the big city just being lit up down below. And the Christmas tree was put up at the end of the biggest room, and kind-hearted ladies revelled in almost hiding its sombre green with the bright colors of their many gifts. Then the tables were laden with cakes and lollies and fruit and milk. The rafters were hung with flowers and greenery and numbers of little flags, and all was ready. Tell the children to come in! And they came. There were sixty boys and thirty-one girls. The very little ones were barely four years old, and the biggest were not more than eighteen at the most. All were well and cleanly dressed. All were in a high state of pleasurable anticipation of their yearly treat. They filed into their places on the forms that filled the room, and they chattered and laughed just like the other children. Listening to them from the hall, where you could not see the faces, it might have been the merry juvenile "Tree" of a happy home without a cloud. And we stood in the hall a while, willing to revel in the delusion a little longer. Presently the distribution began, and, so generous had the good missionaries been, that there were actually three times as many gifts as there were recipients, which gave the missionaries infinite pleasure.

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What's going to happen now? They're all standing up, and someone has gone to the piano. The idiot children are singing, and they are to sing again at intervals, until at half-past eight they all rise for the National Anthem. The idiot children of Victoria are singing lustily "God Save the Queen". But we haven't yet heard their full vocal powers. Before they break up and get to bed they give three grateful cheers for the missionaries who have brought them and send them the tree and its fruit. Well, those cheers cannot be said to have no ring in them. 

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Just before they broke up, Dr McCreery, the medical superintendent of the big asylum, led us into the room, and we looked on from beside their Christmas tree. Then the taint was too obvious. The foreheads, the eyes, the mouths, were all wrong. They were not the faces at all of the other children. There was scarcely two alike, and there were 91 of them. The number reminded us of the New Year, and that made us think of those children's new years. So we got talking as quickly as possible to the kindly doctor about his charges, and Mr Eastham, the head teacher of the cottage, joined in, and a new children's book was opened to us in their account of child life in The Strange Land. But that cottage mustn't remain unknown to us down here any longer. Kindly interest and general help are not unknown there now by any means, but much more can be done by us who are, at least, not proclaimed idiots, and whose children are growing up without any need of a trip to the uncanny country. Just let's make a note of it, and help to make it a little less uncanny.

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We learnt that those children's lives are made lives of usefulness. They are taught first to do the little acts of self-help that other children do naturally, such as clothing themselves, putting things in order, and so on. While the fun was at its height last night we went through the dormitories and saw the working clothes neatly folded on the chairs beside the little beds. In the daytime, the girls are trained in house and laundry work and the boys in garden work. In the majority of cases the idiocy has been transmitted from the parents, while in a few it is the result of sunstroke, or convulsions soon after birth. 

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Said the doctor, "This mental disease is a growing study. It must be so in our big towns, where competition is so keen, and where there is so much high education. Mental strain of such various kinds must tell on nervous organsiations."

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In time it is hoped that a trade in basket making, or something will be opened up for these children, and meanwhile every care is taken to train them night and day, both bodily and mentally, to the highest standard possible. But livelier public interest in the work is badly needed. It is not pretended that the children are turned out quite capable of taking care of themselves, but they are so far cured as to be useful members of the community. Beside the cottage in which the gathering was held, there are three others, also in the Asylum grounds. There are thus two homes for the boys and two for the girls. The Institution is the first of its kind in Australia, and is certainly a vast improvement upon the old system of boarding the children with the adults, from whom they learnt bad language and worse habits. Here they are watched by attendants night and day, and are free from all contaminating influences.

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It's very clear that if mental disease is a growing study, the Idiot Children's Asylum will have to be enlarged, and this can only be done by increased Government assistance and by help form the people of the big towns, who provide its inmates. For the Strange Land, alas! is a permanency.

‘In the Strange Land of the Idiot Children: The Saddest Call of Santa Claus’, The Herald, 1890, page 2.

Courtesy of The Herald & Weekly Times Ltd.