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Stubbs Terrace Children’s Home
Content note: This post discusses historical child welfare practices, institutional discipline and lived experiences of harm. It is shared to document history, not to traumatise or sensationalise.
Stubbs Terrace
From June 1973 through to the early 1990s, Stubbs Terrace Children’s Home in Shenton Park operated as a short-term government facility for kids who needed somewhere to go, whether that was for care, assessment, or just somewhere safe while decisions were being made about what happened next.
It was a 15-bed inpatient unit tied into Western Australia’s mental health system and managed by Graylands Hospital. In 1974, it was formally set aside under the Mental Health Act to operate specifically for children. Kids would only stay for a short time, sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a few months, while welfare staff, doctors and families worked out the next step.
The place went by a few names over the years, including Selby Clinic, Selby Child and Adolescent Clinic and Stubbs Terrace Hospital.
Who Stayed There
Children ranged from 4 to 17 years old. Some were in crisis, some needed psychological or medical assessment and others were just waiting to be placed somewhere else, like foster care, residential placement or to return home. A number had developmental or behavioural conditions, including autism, though at the time diagnoses were often recorded under broader or outdated terms like “developmental delay” or “behaviour disorder.”
It was never meant to be long-term. The whole point was to stabilise kids, assess their needs, then move them on. But for those who lived there, even short stays could leave lasting marks.
Education and daily routine
Primary school-aged children attended Graylands Primary School (later Mount Claremont), a designated placement school for children in state care, offering smaller classes and closer support. Older children attended nearby high schools such as Hollywood Senior High, depending on their age and needs.
Primary school-aged children attended Graylands Primary School (later Mount Claremont), a normal local primary school. A small number of children from Stubbs Terrace attended during their stay but they were only a minor part of the student population. Older kids went to nearby high schools like Hollywood Senior High.
Life inside the home followed a strict routine. Chores, set meal times, limited recreation and constant supervision defined daily life. Small moments stood out like Friday night fish and chips, a trip to the deli with $1 to spent, followed by a movie but it wasn’t every week.
Discipline and control
Discipline was strict and often heavy-handed. If a kid broke rules or tried to run away, they could be confined to bed for the week, excluded from activities or isolated from everyone else. Communication was restricted. Isolation rooms were used where possible. Kids inside could see others outside, playing, while they were stuck inside. That was how control worked there and that’s what it felt like to live in it.
Staff
The facility had a small but mixed team, typically 15 to 25 staff across day and night shifts. This included nurses, child care officers, welfare workers, visiting doctors, administrative staff, and support workers like cooks and cleaners. Workers who spent more time with the children to facilitate their needs and order, were a much smaller team of possibly six, with two on nightshift, sitting in the office closest to the linen cupboard, the last room next to the isolation rooms.
There were roughly 15 to 25 staff across shifts. Nurses, welfare workers, child care officers, doctors, admin, plus support staff like cooks and cleaners. The workers actually dealing with the kids day to day were a much smaller group, maybe six or so. At night there were usually two, sitting in the office right next to the isolation rooms.
Lived experience (not hearsay)
This isn’t second-hand or pulled from reports. These are lived experiences.
Some staff were decent, like Mrs Dwyer. Calm, kind and those moments stood out. Others weren’t. Punishments could be random, humiliating, or just flat-out frightening. Fear shaped behaviour far more than care.
Children were punished collectively or without clear explanation. Talking after lights-out could mean being made to sit alone in a cold hallway. During movies, a child might be sent to bed even if staff weren’t certain who had spoken. Attempts by older children to comfort younger ones were often met with anger from staff, rather than understanding. That included trying to help little Gareth, a tiny six-year-old who was often too scared to use the toilet, even at the home.
There were things that happened, violence, distress, neglect, that were never written down and never followed up. Something as small as slamming the top drawer in your bedroom cubicle could get you grabbed by the scruff of the neck and violently shaken by the short-tempered, orange-haired manager.
Leaving and loss
One of the hardest parts was watching other kids leave. Going home or being placed elsewhere, while you remained behind. Even celebrations marked loss. A child leaving would get to choose a cake from the Women’s Weekly cake book, which the kitchen staff would make for everyone to share. It was meant to be a good thing but it just highlighted who was still stuck there.
It was even harder when you had formed a close friendship with a child who was leaving. The sense of loss was felt most strongly at night, when they were no longer there to talk to or play with. They were simply gone. Continuing friendships outside the facility was never done, likely because both children were seen as needing treatment and parents were discouraged from allowing their children to maintain contact with others who were considered “troubled.”
Gender-nonconforming children
Between 1975 and 1980, eight primary school-aged children were admitted to the psychiatric unit after being diagnosed with what was then called “gender disorder”. At the time, gender-nonconforming behaviour was widely treated as something that needed fixing.
These children were kept there for months, often arriving already distressed, lonely and struggling at school. While staff claimed they weren’t suppressing behaviour, records describe prolonged periods of distress.
What was called treatment back then is now widely recognised as harmful.
Closure
The inpatient service shut down in 1994 and the site changed to outpatient and community-based child health services. Today, it forms part of the child and adolescent health precinct, with the nearby Shenton CAMHS clinic (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) providing mental health support for young people.
Stubbs Terrace was one link in a chain of WA’s child welfare and health facilities, similar in purpose to places like Hillview, though more focused on short-term inpatient care under the mental health system. For about twenty years, hundreds of kids passed through it.
The Family Pathways Program
Stubbs Terrace Hospital was renamed Stubbs Child & Family Mental Health Service and came under the management of Princess Margaret Hospital in 1997. The program evolved into a non-residential intensive community-oriented program and was placed under the Psychological Medicine Clinical Care Unit (CCU) in 1998.
The Family Pathways program was established in 2001 following the restructuring of the Stubbs Terrace Hospital.
The Child Abuse Review Panel
The Superintendent Psychiatrist from Stubbs Terrace Hospital sat on the Child Abuse Review Panel, which was established in May 1984 to review the child protection system in Western Australia.
The panel was jointly commissioned by the Ministers for Police, Health and Community Services, and reported back in July 1985. Its role was to examine how the system was working, provide advice to child protection workers and recommend changes to improve both policy and day-to-day operations. One of its key recommendations was that the underlying causes of child abuse needed to be properly understood and considered when designing interventions.
It was chaired by the Chief Social Worker at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children (PMH) and included senior officers from the Department for Community Services, the Officer in Charge of the Police Department’s Child Care Unit, the Senior Paediatrician from the PMH Child Protection Team, the Superintendent Psychiatrists from the Hillview Terrace Child and Adolescent Unit and the Stubbs Terrace Hospital, and an officer from the Advisory and Coordinating Committee on Child Abuse (ACCCA).
Especially compared to Hillview in East Victoria Park, very little information can be found on the Selby Child & Adolescent Clinic. It’s as if it barely existed, nor the experiences of so many children, many who may experienced a profound level of trauma that changed the course of their lives.
