When we discuss and think about responsibilities to intercountry adopted children, we have to answer several questions first:

I will answer the second and easiest question first.

How many intercountry adopted children arrive each year in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Great Britain, other European countries, Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada?

The Family Court was introduced in Australia in 1976, almost by legislative legerdemain. There had been little debate about it beforehand. There was no Royal Commission, no Law Reform Report. There was little public agitation or debate about its merits. It was suddenly upon us, as part and parcel of the reform of the divorce laws.

How this differs from the position in other countries! In England, the Law Commission invited submissions on Family Courts as early as 1970. The Finer Committee in 1974 strongly recommended them! Numerous commentators since have advocated them in one form or another. The debate continues! But none has yet been set up! France and Germany have established tribunals loosely akin to our Family Court. But they are pallid imitations only. Other countries have tried some experiments. But I know of no country, save possibly Japan, that has established such a radical reform as Australia.

Single fathers (i.e. men rearing their children without support from a ‘live-in’ adult companion) have been termed an ‘unnoticed group’ in Australian society (Bain, 1973).

Apart from the author's own recently completed research (Wilson, 1988), only three previous Australian studies about single fathers have been undertaken. This evident lack of interest in single fathers needs to be understood within a broader context of traditional family research approaches, which denied the significance of the fathers' role in the socialisation and nurturance of children. Fathers have been termed the “forgotten contributors to child development’ (Lamb, 1975) since traditionally, social scientists have viewed fathers as aloof and distant from their own children, with little capacity to undertake core caretaking roles in families (Fein, 1978).

What you see depends on where you stand. It is all a question of our perspective, our world view. Attempting to understand other people's perspectives is said to be a mark of adulthood.

Journalists, on the other hand, are often asked to ensure that a narrow and local interest is catered for in stories. Thus we see stories of disasters where hundreds have been killed overseas, in a plane crash for example, and the cryptic sentence “No Australians were believed to be on board” appears in the text.