Name Kate Cocks | ||
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Kate Cocks (born Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks on 5 May 1875, died 20 August 1954) was welfare worker and the state's first policewoman in South Australia. She is best known for her work with unmarried mothers and their babies. The Kate Cocks Memorial Babies Home named after her in honor of her work.
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Early life
Kate Cocks was born Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks in Moonta, South Australia. Her father was a miner and her mother was a school teacher. Cocks was home tutored after the family moved to a farm near Quorn further north in the state.
Professional life
In 1900, Cocks returned to the Yorke Peninsula area to teach at a school in Thomas Plains for a year. After this, Cocks moved to the suburbs of Adelaide to teach at the Edwardstown Industrial School (1898-1949) of Edwardstown, which had opened on the site of the former Girls Reformatory on Naldera Street, Edwardstown. Cocks served as schoolmistress and sub-matron there.
In 1903, Cocks joined the State Children's Council, which had been formed in 1886 as part of the Destitute Persons Amendment Act, 1886 as a clerk and in 1906 was appointed the state's first probation officer for juvenile first offenders.
In 1915 Cocks was appointed as South Australia's first woman police constable. Her responsibilities included female offences around youth sexuality and alcoholism, prostitution, and solicitation.
After retirement in 1935, Kate Cocks worked with the Methodist Women's Home Mission Association to care for homeless girls, and she served as voluntary superintendent until 1951. In 1936 the Methodist Church purchased a home in the Brighton area to serve as a care facility for unmarried mothers and their newborn babies, and Cocks moved to the area in 1937 act as Superintendent.
The Kate Cocks Memorial Babies' Home
The facility became known as the Kate Cocks Memorial Babies' Home in 1954. The Home was located in Wattle Street, Brighton now part of Hove. Prior to 1954, the facility was known as the Methodist Home for Babies and Unmarried Mothers. The facility provided health care services and housing for single young women and girls who were pregnant or who had recently given birth. The home also housed children in need of institutional care. An adoption service was run from the facility. Kate Cocks Memorial Babies' Home closed in 1976, and the Methodist Church developed the land into an aged care facility currently called Eldercare Oxford Retirement Village. The Kate Cocks name continued as a day care centre.
The Home played a role in the forcible removal of Aboriginal babies and children from their families known as the Stolen Generations, and in November 2011 the Uniting Communities and the Uniting Church Synod of South Australia, as the Methodist Church became known, formally apologised to generations of mothers who may have experienced coercion to give their babies up for adoption or the forcible removal of babies and children in their care.
Testimony about the Kate Cocks Home is included in the Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, including testimony by Una Clarke who had worked there, and the book Many Voices, prepared for publication by Anna Haebich.