She’d taken to dropping him at the Children’s Hospital once a week just to get a break, claiming he was sick, but they woke up to that pretty quick and they said, ‘You can’t bring him here, we’re not a respite centre,’ and finally she’d just snapped and said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t do it any more.’ The Department said, ‘Sure, okay, we’ll take him off you for the day’ and they dropped him off with me but then the mum said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to pick him up.’ You might think you can’t do that, but plenty of parents who have got disabled kids do it, and you might think that the Department would have called the cops, but that’s not how it works. What happens when a mum won’t pick up her kid from hospital is, the Department has to quickly go to court and get an order saying he’s been abandoned.

They said, ‘Can he stay with you while we get an order?’ I said sure, and I put some sheets on a bed and put him in it, and it was awful. He was yelling and screaming and thrashing around and Mark was going off his tree. I kept telling him, ‘It’s only for one night, and we’ll get $400 for the overnight stay.’

The next day Mark said, ‘I’m not doing that again,’ but I said, ‘What about if we had one that wasn’t a screamer – what if we had a quiet one, or even two quiet ones – and we had them for a few days? That would be six or eight hundred dollars a week.’ And he said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’

It wasn’t exactly cheap or easy to get the house ready to take disabled kids overnight. We had to put up a ramp and rails out the front and clear out a room at the back of the house to use as a bedroom, but once that was done, we got approved for overnights pretty quick, and that’s when we decided to call ourselves ‘Delaney House’. Delaney House for disabled kids. It’s got a bit of a ring to it.

I told the Department that we didn’t want ‘screamers and dribblers’, as Mark called them. We wanted Category Two kids that wouldn’t make a huge amount of fuss and noise. The Department was thrilled because most people say they don’t want vegetables – they actually want kids they can play with or something.

We weren’t expected to do it for nothing because who’d do it for nothing? It was our business. And the Department was rapt. The number of times one of their social workers said, ‘Oh, you’re doing such a great job at Delaney House. If only everyone was like you.’ And maybe you don’t know this, but the Department actually gave me a prize for doing all that foster work, which means, now I think about it, that I might be the only inmate in Silverwater who has an award from the government. That was in 2008, after we’d been taking those kids for about five years. I got an invitation in the mail, saying, ‘The Governor of New South Wales requests your attendance at a gala event,’ and it was all to celebrate the work the foster carers were doing.