Roma

Roma

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 8, 2005

Words Penelope Debelle

After a lifetime of transience, Aboriginal elder, Roma, 60, finally wanted a home. Born in the Kalgoorlie area of Western Australia where she grew up on a mission, she moved to South Australia and spent most of her adult life travelling between the two states. "I moved around," says Roma with understatement.

At 24 she met and married her husband, Victor, and had three daughters. The marriage was troubled, she says, because of her husband's dependence on alcohol, which contributed to their unsettled lifestyle and financial problems.

They went to South Australia to be near her family and, for a time, she and Victor worked with the Aboriginal Sobriety Group. She used to drink, she says, but gave up. Victor, she says, had found it more difficult and after giving up for a time had started drinking again.

In South Australia she still moved around, staying in Port Augusta with one daughter, a former policewoman. Back in Adelaide, she was staying with another daughter and helping to care for her three grandchildren, aged between five and 10, when their mother left, abandoning her children.

Roma was already caring for two older children who had come with her from Western Australia. For the first time, she needed a proper home. "The mother came back but she's gone again," Roma says, accepting the situation without question. "I didn't know what to do so I stayed with them."

She had tried other organisations before but Roma says Mission Australia was the first one to help. Apart from securing public housing, it also assisted with the children's schooling and helped provide furniture.

Roma's caseworker, Jasmine Ressom, says Roma got help from Mission Austraia's family-support service, the Parks, which provided personal as well as physical support.

While housing and schooling were both crucial, the program also set goals and provided counselling for the children who were confronted with issues that included grief management for one child whose father had passed away, and the obvious pain for all of them of being abandoned by their mother, twice.

Ressom says Roma would one day live on her own but for now the load of parenting had fallen on her. After six months with the Supported Accommodation Program, the children were settled and, for the first time, had real stability in their lives.

The scene

She was helping to care for her three grandchildren when their mother left.