And it’s not like those kids give anything back. They don’t smile and they don’t laugh and one mother even told me, ‘He’s never spoken to me, let alone called me Mum.’ Plus it’s not like the child is growing up into something interesting. They’re going to stay in their wheelchairs and their big nappies forever, and the bigger they get, the worse it is because you have to hoist them in and out of bed, and roll them over and change them.

When the disabled girls get to puberty they get acne that they pick and scratch so then they look ugly. They get periods and you have to manage that because they have no idea what’s going on, and people take advantage of them, so you have to watch them like a hawk so they don’t end up pregnant.

I remember the director of the cottage saying, ‘Maybe it’s a bluff, maybe they just want us to try and get the costs down,’ but none of us could see how we could get the costs down because we already had only one bus for fourteen kids and we’d been cutting corners on the meals, giving everyone a slice of bread to try to bulk them out a bit.

We saw the Minister in the paper saying, ‘Oh, but it will be much better for the children if they can stay at home with their parents or be out in the community,’ and of course I was thinking, ‘Now, where have I heard all this before? That’s right, at Caloola.’ Because it was all the same argument, and all the same pretending about how it was about human rights when it was actually about money.

The Minister was saying she’d get the Department to help the parents by getting foster carers to take the kids for them for a few hours a week, and some emails went around asking staff if they were interested in training as foster carers. I was thinking to myself, ‘Good luck finding anyone,’ because it’s not like an ordinary foster carer is going to be able to take a kid with the kind of disabilities that we had at Emu Cottage.

But it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was going to be much better off as a foster carer than I was working at Emu Cottage, because according to the emails they sent out, they were going to be paying $150 a day for people to take just one disabled kid in, which was more than I was making for one eight-hour shift at Emu.

People might think that sounds callous, but what’s callous about it? I was making $540 a week as a nurse with fourteen kids at Emu, and they wanted to pay me more than that to look after one kid in the comfort of my own home. I would have been stupid not to take the offer. Plus, I’m a nurse, so having a kid with problems in the house wasn’t likely to faze me like it might faze other people, who might think, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do it. What if something went wrong, and I was to blame?’ I’m not scared of handing out medicine, and I’m not scared of putting in a stomach tube for a kid who can’t feed himself. I’m not scared of a kid having a fit. I know exactly what to do.