Bobbin Up (1959) by Australian writer Dorothy Hewett is set in 1957 in a spinning mill in an industrial suburb of Sydney.

It is a series of vignettes of the lives of 15 women who work in the mill and the families they go home to.

One of those women is 19-year-old Shirl who is 4 months pregnant and determined to marry Jack despite her mother’s protest.

In an argument with her mother, Shirl complains of having been “in and out of bloody Welfare homes all me life” (p. 7).

Later it was mentioned she was also in the now notorious Parramatta Girls Home.

There is also Vic, married to Maisie.

Vic in one passage is reflecting on his time in & out of foster homes and Dorothy Hewett makes the point that the money foster families received from the Government to care for Vic would have helped keep their own child/ren out of the Welfare system.