Mothers subjected to forced adoption of babies can apply for $30,000 compensation in Victoria

More than 50 years have passed since Glen Rattenbury’s baby was taken away from her at birth but that memory is “as clear as day”.

“I didn’t even get to see him after a 35-hour labour,” she said. “I could hear the nurses saying, ‘No, that one is earmarked for adoption.’ And they took him away.”

She was heartbroken.

“They put a form in front of me – I was still under the effects of morphine – and they asked me to sign him away.

“For years, I remember looking into prams and thinking, ‘That could be my baby.’ Even though I knew he would’ve grown.”

Rattenbury is among an estimated 3,500 Victorian mothers whose babies were removed under historical forced adoption practices, who will soon be eligible for an Australian-first redress scheme.

Under the $138m scheme, to be announced by the state government on Thursday, mothers affected by historical forced adoption practices before 1990 can apply for $30,000 in financial compensation. They can also receive counselling, psychological support and individual apologies under the program.

The Victorian Adoption Network for Information and Self Help (Vanish) will also receive $530,000 in extra funding.

The scheme was a key recommendation of a 2021 parliamentary inquiry into the practice, which found at least 40,000 adoptions were arranged between 1958 and 1984. It is impossible to know how many of those were forced.

The inquiry heard that unmarried women were sent to maternity wards with harsh conditions, forcibly restrained when they gave birth, immediately separated from their babies, and pressured or coerced into signing consent forms for adoptions.

Their names were often deliberately excluded from birth certificates.

One of those mothers, Sheryl Johnson, was in year 10 when she found out she was pregnant in the 1970s.

“My parents and the powers to be decided I will finish year 10 by correspondence,” she said. “The baby will be taken at birth and that was that. No more conversation.

“In fact, it wasn’t referred to as a baby or a pregnancy. It was the ‘time I was off school’. Four weeks later, I went back and started year 11, and didn’t talk to anybody about it for years.”

For Johnson, accessing the records of her experience brought on a “second round of trauma”.

“I had come to accept what had happened, but then to find there was a record [of her daughter’s birth] out there that does not tell the right story, that painted a completely different picture of my experience. I couldn’t believe it.

“It just sounded like I just wanted to get back to school with my friends and I didn’t care less.”

As part of the redress scheme, an addendum will be added to her daughter’s record to state it is neither true nor accurate.

Johnson and Rattenbury met the state’s attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, on Wednesday to mark the 11th anniversary of the Victorian parliament’s apology for past adoption practices. A national apology, by the then prime minister Julia Gillard, followed in 2013.

“I was reflecting back on it and I realised don’t have a clear memory of it because I was at home with a four-month-old,” Symes said of Gillard’s apology.

“These women have been fighting for so long because they didn’t get that opportunity as their babies were forcibly removed.

“They were young women, hidden away, not given their rights and opportunities to raise their child and in many cases not even see them.”

Symes said about 74 women who accessed a $700,000 interim hardship fund would still be eligible for redress, and applying for the scheme would not prevent them from seeking civil action.

She said support for fathers and children was also being considered, alongside the remaining 23 recommendations from the parliamentary inquiry. The government has supported in full or in principle 33 of the 56 recommendations so far.

Applications will open in February.

Rattenbury and Johnson reconnected with their children later in life but the journey has not been easy.

Rattenbury said while the pain would never go away, the redress scheme would provide her with some closure. “It’s overwhelming,” she said. “I got a little teary.”

Johnson has thought of the many mothers who have died without recognition of what happened to them. “I really am the end of a long line of people who campaigned for this,” she said.