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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“I remember saying, they can’t all possibly be the same,” McSkimming says.