Her head was bowed forward and her shoulders were hunched, and she was wiping her nose and her eyes, and saying, ‘I was told that my child had been sent to a lovely place called Delaney House, and they told me she would be safe!’

I felt like standing up and saying, ‘Oh, look, this is ridiculous, are you seriously trying to suggest that the child would have been better off with this junkie? She abandoned the infant. Wanted nothing to do with her! Now she stands there, presuming to judge me?’

But on it went, a parade of people pointing the finger at me for doing my best.

There was all the rubbish about the money we supposedly earned. A forensic accountant, whatever that’s supposed to be, said we had nineteen kids, $600 a week each, so that’s $11,400 a week, and $220,000 for such and such financial year, which had all the journos up and running for the corridors to get on their phones so they could write their big stories:

‘House of Horrors Foster Mum Was Making a Fortune!’

Not that there was any secret about where it went, not with Mark putting at least that much into the Star City pokies every year.

But anyway, no way was I going to survive testimony like that, obviously, which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy some of the trial. Like when the Department got a grilling from the prosecutor. Dalrymple, that was the prosecutor’s name, wasn’t it? In my own mind, I was calling him Rumple because of his suit, which always looked like he’d slept in it. Did you see him when he said to the deputy director of foster care, ‘How did nineteen children end up in Delaney House, when the Department’s own limit is six?’ Which all the newspapers had already been asking anyway. And this woman, she had to say, ‘It was an oversight,’ like you could just overlook what happened to nineteen kids! And Rumple was saying, ‘To your knowledge, did any of the children placed in Delaney House by your department attend speech therapy?’ And she had to say no. He said, ‘Did any of the children placed in Delaney House by your department attend occupational therapy?’ And she had to say no again. ‘Did any of the children placed in Delaney House by your department attend swimming lessons, for the purpose of rehabilitation or exercise?’ She had to say no. ‘And did any of the children placed in Delaney House by your department go to school?’ And yet again she had to say no.

You could see the jurors sitting there, shaking their heads, like, how hopeless is this mob? And that’s the point of all this, isn’t it? That all I was doing was what they asked me to do, which was put a roof over the children’s heads and keep them safe and fed, and it was the Department that was supposed to tell me if I was doing things wrong.