The records held by past providers are vitally important to Care Leavers seeking to understand their own past, and are potential evidence for individual legal action and enquiries such as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Access to records is a key step to restorative justice, and organisations can show their commitment by being transparent about the records they hold.
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Recently at Lotus Place we have noticed a flurry of interest in service records, particularly from World War Two. Overwhelmingly these relate to fathers / grandfathers / brothers / uncles but there are also a number of mothers / grandmothers / sisters / aunts who enlisted. People find a range of benefits when they access a service record.
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New resources and information are continually coming to light around the historical institutions that provided care for children. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is one of the ways that significant amounts of knowledge is being shared with the broader community.
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Nearly two years ago, toward the end of Blogjune 2014, I wrote a post about a visit to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, Canada, and the overwhelming feeling that stories about the residential school system were eerily similar to those I knew from working on the Find & Connect web resource.
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Care Leavers share with me their shock at some of what we find in our records. The language hits us between the eyes. Our counterparts in the nineteenth century were tagged by a battalion of adjectives: criminal or neglected, destitute, abandoned, deserted, unkempt, illegitimate, wayward, slovenly, deserving or undeserving.
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We all know how beneficial reading to children is. Studies also tell us that family storytelling – reminiscences about our own childhood, family stories going back through the generations – is linked to a range of benefits, beyond literacy and communication skills.
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Usage of the web resource continues to grow, with stats gathered from Google analytics showing a steady increase in page views and visitors over the period from 1 Jan – 30 May. This is remarkable given that in the last 6 months of last year our stats were showing a downward trend.
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Today is International Archives Day, a day to acknowledge and promote the work of archivists and archives. You might not know that the Find & Connect web resource relies heavily on archivists and the records held within archives to create the website you see today.
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In 2008, then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered an apology to the Stolen Generations. Many thought that this would be a momentous step toward reconciliation and a fresh start for Aboriginal Australians.
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May 2016 saw the publication of the 100th edition of the Clanicle, the newsletter of Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN). This significant milestone in CLAN’s history made me reflect on how much has changed since we first met clannies Leonie Sheedy and Frank Golding back in 2009, and how much they and other clannies have affected our world view and changed our lives for the better.
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Dec 18, 2024
Nov 15, 2024
