I’ve had a bit of a dig into the newspaper files at News Limited and there was a bit of coverage of that decision. One story, which was in The Sydney Morning Herald, had the parents of a boy called Robin who had fallen into a swimming pool as a toddler and had lain on the bottom for several minutes before he was found. The paramedics got him breathing again but he had severe developmental – and behavioural – problems.

The Herald story quoted his mum, saying, ‘Robin comes to Emu Cottage three days a week and I don’t know how we’d cope if we didn’t have a place for him here. He has friends here, and they can do so much more for him than we can do at home.’

The story said the Emu Cottage parents were planning a march on Parliament House and there was a bit of coverage of that, with the disabled children in their wheelchairs and parents chanting, ‘Don’t Take Our Emu Away!’ and parents holding up the signs saying, ‘No School For Me = Discrimination!’

There’s always a belief that these kinds of protests actually achieve something, but it costs a lot to run a place like Emu Cottage: it needs staff, a manager, facilities, insurance, and so on, and closing it would have been about money.

Some reporters asked the Minister for Community Services where the kids were supposed to go once Emu Cottage was gone. She said, ‘We’re going to fund a pool of new foster carers to take children into their homes for a few hours each week, to give the parents a bit of a break.’

They also wanted to know what was going to happen to the staff, and the Minister said they could apply to become one of the foster carers, which is precisely what Snow Delaney did.

Chapter Thirteen

Dear Jack,

You might think that I’ve never noticed how you don’t have a good thing to say about me, but I have noticed and I don’t think that’s actually very fair because I have done good things in my life, including the work I did at Emu Cottage.

I mean, parents would come into that place with their kids in their wheelchairs and they’d leave them with us, and that might be the only break they’d get all week. We’d take the kids out on the Emu Bus to feed the seagulls at Manly or whatever and it was actually pretty fun.

When I first heard the rumours that the funding was going to be cut I thought it must be some kind of joke, because parents would actually tell us, ‘I couldn’t survive if I didn’t have a couple of days’ respite every week. I’d go out of my mind.’

I knew what they meant because it was hard keeping those kids occupied all day and we were being paid to do it in eight-hour shifts, so imagine those parents, getting no money and having them 24/7. They didn’t know what to do to kill time except to sit them in front of the TV and hope they didn’t scream too much. The look on their faces when they dropped them off at Emu, it was relief. They’d say, ‘I just feel that he – James, or whoever he was – enjoys being here so much more,’ when what they meant was, ‘When he’s here, he’s not my problem, he’s your problem.’ And I don’t say that because I’m judging them, because it was boring and frustrating looking after those kids.