This paper traces the development of services to intellectually handicapped children and their families provided by Dr. Barnardo's North West Division in the U.K.

It has been a journey with and for the families and children. The milestones and lessons of the journey are described. It is a journey with still some way to go. It is a journey of hope - hope for better things for them now and in the future.

“Aboriginal people have not … invented childhood.” This statement goes to the very heart of the difference between Western and Aboriginal societies as far as children are concerned. Aboriginal children have always remained part of the adult world.

Separation or exclusion from adult activities was kept to a minimum. Indeed, most of those activities were planned and organised to ensure the maximum involvement of as many children as possible. This applied to hunting and gathering, to dance, song, and many ceremonies. From the earliest age, they were aware of what was going on in the community, and were exposed to the whole spectrum of human relations. The expression “not in front of the children”, which became the title of a TV sitcom some years ago, would not have been used by Murris.

We are all familiar with Donald Horne's descriptive phrase “The Lucky Country” as applied to Australia. It was coined during the resources boom years of the late 'sixties. It referred to the luck we have to be living in a country so rich in mineral resources – all we had to do was to dig it out of the ground and sell the raw stuff to equally boom economies overseas. Actually those economies then converted the stuff into manufactured goods – cars, fridges, television sets, plastic toys and so on, which they then flogged back to us … and we could afford to buy – much of the money our wealth generated went to make already comfortably-off people more comfortable - not much went to the not so comfortable or to the really poor. But in line with the optimistic theories in economics, the trickle effect of the boom years would ensure that the poor too got a gnaw at the bones thrown to them; distribution of wealth already distorted, stayed distorted. Then came Gough and a new era was about to dawn, the new wealth would be used toward producing a more egalitarian society and an enhanced infra structure of welfare sevices, a spanking new health service, a broadening of the social security system, more job opportunities, free tertiary education, the Australian Assistance Plan, and the list went on. But history has a mischievous, even misanthropic turn of mind, and no sooner was Gough crowned than the resources market turned sour and the money started to dry up, the dream faded and you know the rest. The Fraser years were years of cutback and belt-tightening, of dour and unglamorous attempts to keep the ship afloat. No more vision of building a new Jerusalem in Canberra's green and pleasant land.

The idea of respite care is of recent origin, having come about largely as a result of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960's and 70's.

Before that time, it was generally not expected that families keep a disabled member at home: and there is considerable evidence to show that those families who chose to do so, were expected to cope with the consequences on their own. No-one asked how they did it; and only the provision of crisis orientated counselling indicated that care providers recognized that these families might sometimes have hardships.

Perhaps the best definition of foster-care is that of the influential, and extremely carefully drafted, Standards of Child Welfare League of America:

Thank you for the invitation to address a session of your Conference on the topic “Future Trends in Education”. I am not sure of the basis of my expertise to address such a topic. It is a topic normally reserved for the gurus of academia and of educational bureaucracies. Perhaps, however, the invitation is in relation to the role of the College with which I am associated in being at the “leading edge” of developments in post-compulsory education in Australia.

Perhaps before I say anything, I should direct attention to my belief in the capacity of people to respond to need. Yesterday, I sat with two of our teachers who had taken themselves off to help the centre develop their “detention activities” into credit courses associated with courses at our College and then provide completion experiences on Saturdays and at the end of children's sentences. There is hope.

In the first month of life, prematurity and congenital anomalies account for the majority of deaths to children. Between one month and one year of age, the still unexplained Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or cot death remains very much an unsolved problem causing untold distress and grief to parents.

If, however, we consider the childhood commencing at one month of age and carrying through until the completion of at least primary school and possibly secondary schooling, then accidents cause over a quarter of the deaths and, in considering those deaths in the first five years of life, drowning constitutes the number one cause. If we are looking at a spectrum from birth to fifteen years, deaths from motor vehicle accidents, whether as a passenger, pedestrian or bicyclist, are responsible for 50% of the deaths. Drowning features second on the list whilst such things as burns, poisoning, electrocution and suffocation now constitute a very small percentage of the deaths in childhood.

Lifeline Brisbane has a team of professional family therapists who provide family therapy services from 3.30p.m. to 10 p.m. on four nights each week. The team consists of a full-time coordiantor (40 hours per week) plus five part time therapists, who between them work 48 hours per week.

The Unit uses a systems approach which assumes that the behaviours of individual members of a system are the invevitable response to the behaviours of the other members of the system. Hence, for example, a child's stealing behaviour, is seen as inevitable when the child is viewed not in isolation, but in the context of the system within which the child exists.

Many people believe that top sportsmen earn far greater sums than they deserve. It is certain that there is much envy in this. Why should someone be paid millions of dollars for doing something he enjoys?

The justification, to me, lies not so much in the proper appreciation of genius or talent, but in the recognition that sportsmen have the highest responsibility to young people.