Josie McSkimming was a 24-year-old government social worker in December 1984 when she was sent to Seoul to meet with the partner agency responsible for finding Australian homes for Korean babies.
She was taken on a tour of orphanages and group homes, but it is the Angel Babies’ Home she remembers vividly. It was a hospital-like facility with rows and rows of newborns in cribs waiting to be placed with foster families before being assigned to adoptive parents overseas, including in Australia.
“They were well cared-for by the staff,” she says. “I do remember feeling overwhelmed and upset that so many babies, apparently, were unable to stay with their families, and thinking they are going to lose their culture and their country and their families.”
Dr Josie McSkimming has backed calls for an Australian inquiry into the Korean adoption program.Credit: Janie Barrett
McSkimming, who worked in the NSW government’s adoptions branch, recalled there was no government funding available for the trip. It was decided by the state’s then-Department of Youth and Community Services that the airfares for her and her husband would be paid by two sets of adoptive parents.
In exchange, McSkimming and her husband, then aged 26 and not a department employee, would escort two Korean toddlers on the flights to their new lives in Australia and unite them with their adoptive parents at the airport in Sydney. She recalls briefly meeting at least one of the toddlers with a foster parent during the trip, but otherwise, they were strangers to the children, who were delivered to her at the airport in Seoul.
The toddlers sat on their laps for the flights, which connected through Hong Kong – a trip she says was traumatic for all of them.
“I’m horrified,” McSkimming says, recounting the trip more than 40 years later.
“The whole way home on that plane, the two of them sobbed ‘eomma’, which is ‘mummy’ in Korean. We had not one clue what to do.
“At 24, I knew that it was going to be a challenging trip, but I’d underestimated the impact on the children. My older self now realises that it was wrong, and a highly traumatising, terrible thing to do.”
Rows of babies waiting for overseas adoption in 1984 at the Angel Babies’ Home orphanage.
McSkimming’s memories of the Seoul trip have taken on new significance after a landmark South Korean inquiry last month identified systemic failures in the country’s adoption program, including fraudulent orphan registrations, leading to a profit-driven “mass exportation of children” with minimal procedural oversight.
The adoption agency that McSkimming, now 64, went to visit was Seoul-based Eastern Child Welfare Society – now called Eastern Social Welfare Society. Eastern is one of four privately run adoption agencies under investigation for human rights violations by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Today, McSkimming is a PhD-accredited mental health social worker and an adjunct lecturer at the University of NSW. But between 1983 and 1985, she was part of a team in the state government’s adoptions branch that interviewed prospective parents from NSW hoping to adopt children from South Korea.
She says she and her colleagues were fundamentally guided by the principle of acting in the best interests of children, but some processes were not as rigorous as those today.
She is sharing her recollections to help shine a light on intercountry adoption practices from that era and to add her voice to calls for an inquiry to determine whether Australia’s historical overseas adoption frameworks failed adoptees and their families.
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“I don’t believe any of us acted unethically,” she says of her NSW government colleagues. “It was a different time and context. Eastern was seen as a highly reputable agency with an unblemished reputation, licensed by the Korean government.
“But, with hindsight, we owe it to the thousands of Australian-Korean adoptees to assess how adequate and ethical the adoption practices were.”
Since 1978, Eastern has facilitated the adoption of about 3600 South Korean babies by Australian families, many of them in NSW and Victoria. Many Australian-Korean adoptees and their families are wrestling with painful new questions about their identities following the South Korean investigation, and some are calling for a federal parliamentary inquiry to determine the scale of the scandal in Australia.
In a set of preliminary findings, the South Korean inquiry found evidence of children being falsely documented as orphans when they had known parents, failures to secure proper consent from biological parents for adoptions, inadequate screening of adoptive parents, and charging adoptive parents excessive donations that were then used by agencies to secure more children.
The commission’s report, after more than two years of investigation, identified human rights violations in the cases of 56 adoptees, including five Australian adoptees. The specifics of these cases were not disclosed. The commission is still investigating 311 cases, including a further five Australian cases, with its inquiry set to end in May.
As part of her job, McSkimming had access to Eastern records of the Korean adoptees’ profiles, which gave a one-paragraph summary of the birth parents’ histories and the reasons for adoption. At the time, she noticed the striking similarities in the birth mothers’ backstories and says she raised it with her superiors but was advised that it would be inappropriate to question the Korean agency.
The profiles typically detailed a single mother who discovered she was pregnant after separating from the father, often using near-identical phrasing or keywords.
McSkimming, then aged 24, visits the Angel Babies Home in Seoul in 1984.
“I remember saying, they can’t all possibly be the same,” McSkimming says.
“I was told that due to cultural sensibilities, we couldn’t possibly question this, that there was a huge stigma of illegitimacy and there was huge cohort of unmarried mothers. This accorded with our experience of local adoptions in Australia in the 1970s.”
Many Australian adoptees are now questioning the accuracy of these profiles. Some have been told conflicting accounts about their birth mother’s history by Eastern, while numerous adoptees have Eastern-issued birth certificates stating there were “no records” for their birth parents, despite the agency holding such records.
McSkimming says there was enormous pressure on the NSW adoption branch to match prospective parents with Korean babies, and that during her 1984 trip to Seoul, Eastern representatives raised concerns about NSW’s vetting process. They were concerns she agreed with.
“Not enough hours had been spent with these [prospective parents], clarifying what is involved in adopting a child from overseas, what the concerns might be in not only raising a baby, but from an identity point of view, to be adopting a child that’s a different race to you and has come from another country,” she says.
When she returned from South Korea, she says, she reported these concerns to her superiors and the processes were improved, including lengthy assessments with trained social workers specialised in adoption.
McSkimming at the Angel Babies’ Home.
Responsibility for managing intercountry adoptions in Australia is splintered across federal and state departments. Until 2006, the NSW government had lead responsibility for the Korean adoption program, which was then transferred to federal control. The federal Department of Social Services (DSS) now has oversight of the partnership with Eastern, while state authorities are responsible for assessing cases, facilitating adoptions and providing post-adoption support.
The NSW Department of Communities and Justice did not comment on McSkimming’s recollections. It said it first became aware of issues with Eastern’s processes when it was approached by the Australia-United States Korean Rights Group, an adoptee advocacy group, in 2023.
It had since worked with the group to “provide adopted people with timely access to their adoption records held in NSW”, a spokesperson said. The department has not facilitated any adoptions with Eastern since 2021.
In response to a series of questions, DSS declined to say when it became aware of issues with Eastern’s processes or why it had maintained partner status despite the agency being under investigation since 2022. It has previously confirmed that no further adoptions will take place. DSS said it had not been asked to provide evidence to the South Korean inquiry.
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In a statement, a spokesperson said intercountry adoptions were facilitated only “if the principles and standards of The Hague Convention and relevant international obligations are upheld”. The convention only came into operation in 1995 and Australia ratified it in 1998.
The DSS, and the NSW and Victorian departments, did not directly answer questions about whether there had been any internal investigations into Eastern or the Korean adoption program.
All three departments said they had no financial relationship with Eastern. Eastern did not respond to questions.
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