‘I’m still trying to find out who I am’: the little-understood plight of Forgotten Australians

They number more than half a million, yet the ongoing trauma from their time in orphanages and institutions remains poorly known

When Judy Leonard entered the orphanage, she was given a bed with a number. That was how the staff would refer to her. Not by her name, or even by one of the cruel nicknames the other children gave her, but by her allocated space in the dormitory: C2.

“I would like the readers to close their eyes,” Judy says now, “and imagine that it was them at age nine.”