Welcome to the Wattle Place website!
We're glad you found us!
We designed this website with 3 main goals.
- So that people who are eligible for our service can find us more easily
- So that the wider community can learn about our work and the people we support
- To enable more timely communication with existing members of the Wattle Place community
We know that there are many people who are eligible for support from Wattle Place. What’s more, we believe they could benefit greatly from the services that we offer, so we really want them to know that Wattle Place exists so they can seek our support when they are ready. If that is you, a very warm welcome to you. Please have a look around our website and see if there is something we can do for you.
All of us here at Wattle Place are committed to the role we can play in increasing the ease and enjoyment you experience in life. If you have the need for a counsellor, or assistance finding additional services or managing a particular issue, you will be matched with one counsellor or caseworker who remains with you for as long as you need. If you want records from your time in out-of-home care or from an adoption, or you would like your identification documents, our Records team can take all of the hassle out of searching and applying for them, all with no cost to you. If you need other occasional support, our Administration team is here to help.
You may wonder why it’s important that the wider community know about Wattle Place as well. We believe it is important because the groups that we assist tend to be unfamiliar to people who don’t work with, or know personally, someone belonging to one of these groups, that is, Forgotten Australians, care leavers and people impacted by forced adoptions. We want to make society more familiar with these groups, their histories and and how those histories may have impacted the individuals within those groups. Knowing these stories is likely to change your perspective, and make you want to assist the people you come into contact with who are struggling with the impacts of trauma. Importantly, you won’t necessarily know who had a traumatic past, and you won’t necessarily know the cause of someone’s trauma.
We therefore need society to be more generous with assumptions and withhold judgements about people who do not necessarily fit in with the general ideas of how people should or shouldn’t behave and live. Those who have survived traumatic experiences, particularly in their childhood, are remarkable people, and incredibly strong. The responses they have developed are the instinctual survival skills that got them through the traumatic experiences and that kept them going despite their struggles afterwards. Just changing our assumptions, attitudes and responses to those around us can have a significant impact. The information in this website is designed to provide a basic understanding of the trauma that Forgotten Australians, Stolen Generations, Former Child Migrants, survivors of child sexual abuse and people impacted by forced adoptions are living with. We want to make it clear that each of us has the power to make our society kinder and more tolerable for every person. That’s got to be a good thing!
Last, but certainly not least, we hope this website will provide an extra form of communication with existing members of the Wattle Place community. COVID 19 has created a more urgent need for regular communications, to enable us to keep the community informed and let them know we are still here for them. We also recognise that there is a growing “digital divide”, which significantly impacts many members of our community, given that the majority tend to be in the older age groups and are more likely to be in lower socioeconomic situations. As the saying goes, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. So we hope this website will provide a “starting point” for those who have not yet made the move to the digital world, from there we will use the website to provide instruction on how to use technology in practical ways, to at least start to reduce that “digital divide”.
So a warm welcome to all of you! We hope you will find the information we share on this website useful, informative and easy to access. Enjoy checking it out and please let us know if you have any questions or comments.