Mrs Wallace and her husband went to St Vincent’s to meet baby Polly when she was just six weeks old. Mrs Wallace isn’t the type to hide how she felt.

‘The moment I laid eyes on her I was gone, just completely gone,’ she told me. ‘She was so tiny and so needy – all swaddled up in a hospital blanket with a crocheted bonnet on her little head. I couldn’t believe that anyone would abandon so precious a child, but the doctor said, “Look, just so you know, she’s going to have real problems, so be aware of what you’re taking on.” But it was too late, she was already mine.’

Polly’s mother had given the baby a name – Nhung, which in Vietnamese means Velvet – but over time Mrs Wallace started to call her Polly. ‘I think because she was so small, when I was up at night and rocking her, I would say, “Look at you, you’re so small you could fit into my pocket,”’ she said, ‘and so I suppose somehow she became Pocket, and then Polly Pocket, and then just Polly.’

‘It’s all lovely now, but the first few weeks . . .’ Mrs Wallace said, shaking her head at the memory, ‘I had to get up twice a night to give her methadone from a syringe, orally. She was tiny so she wouldn’t take much food. I wouldn’t like to count the number of appointments she’s had over her life: speech therapy, occupational therapy, everything. And she still struggles.’

Mrs Wallace soldiered on, enrolling Polly in different classes for special-needs children until she turned eight, when her biological mother suddenly turned up again, determined to get her daughter back.

‘We’d heard that could happen,’ Mrs Wallace said, ‘and we were terrified, having to go to court to fight for Polly. I can only thank God that the magistrate wasn’t born yesterday. He was sympathetic to the mum, sitting there in her borrowed suit, but I think he could see that she was mainly in it for the money. She’d get a pension if she was a single mum, you see. He said it was probably best for Polly to stay with us, and to visit her mother on a regular basis.’

That decision was welcome but it still put Mrs Wallace into a kind of legal limbo: technically she was now Polly’s legal guardian, but that did not give her the same rights as a parent.

‘There are things I can’t do with Polly,’ she explained to me during our meeting in her home. ‘I can’t authorise any serious medical procedures for her, and we also can’t travel with her interstate.’

If that last condition seems odd, it shouldn’t: child welfare is a State concern, and children who are State wards are routinely prevented from travelling across State lines.

‘If you have a State ward in your care, you simply can’t leave the State with them – not without the Department’s permission – and that’s often difficult to get,’ Mrs Wallace said. ‘So we’ve always understood that if we wanted a holiday it would have to be in New South Wales, to Bega on the south coast, for example. But on two occasions in the past ten years, I’ve had to ask the Department for respite care for Polly, meaning she had to go and stay somewhere else.’