AustLit

'Philip Larkin famously suggested that ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but the alternative is usually worse. Twenty years before Larkin wrote ‘This Be the Verse’, his compatriot John Bowlby published Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), which described profound mental health consequences when infants are denied parental intimacy. Bowlby delineated the centrality of this ‘lasting psychological connectedness’ to well-being in later life, something cruelly withheld from many members of Australia’s Stolen Generations.

'Bruce Trevorrow and Wally Carr were born in the mid-1950s into Aboriginal families that were incredibly poor, living in makeshift huts, foraging for bush food to supplement supplies, and terrified of visits from welfare officers. When Trevorrow was one, he was removed from his Ngarrindjeri family to live with a non-Indigenous family. Carr remained with his own Wiradjuri family. They were very different men with some crucial factors in common. Both achieved national prominence for different reasons. Both died prematurely.' (Introduction)