Six years ago today, the Australian Parliament issued an apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants. Six years is a long time – in Canberra alone, so much has changed since that day in November, 2009.
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Back in March 2014, when we used to publish a regular Find & Connect newsletter, our former Lead Archivist, Mike Jones, wrote a piece about the importance of ‘non-traditional’ records. Mike wrote: we must be aware that we have a collective responsibility to locate, preserve and provide access to more than just paper.
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Finding information about a childhood spent in institutional ‘care’ is not easy. Even when records are found and released, decisions affecting individual lives may not be clearly explained in case files.
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We launched the Find & Connect web resource in November 2011. There is a back-story to the development of this website, and telling it is a good way to reflect on where we’ve come from, how much we’ve learned along the way and where we’re going.
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The first children’s Home in the Colony of New South Wales (and, by extension, the first in mainland Australia) was the Norfolk Island Orphan School (1795-1814). This home for orphaned girls, or those ‘deserted’ by their parents was opened in 1795 by the Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island, Philip Gidley King. The history of the Norfolk Island Home is the starting point for the history of children’s institutions in Australia.
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Once My Mother is a film by Sophia Turkiewicz from 2014. In the film, Sophia explores her troubled relationship with her mother, Helen. Sophia spent ‘two bewildering years’ at an orphanage in Adelaide until Helen was able to bring Sophie to a new home, with her new husband. In this film, Sophia looks back on her childhood and tries to learn more about Helen’s life, while her mother battles dementia.
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A memorial dedicated to children who were in institutional ‘care’ has recently been installed on the Geelong foreshore in Victoria. The hand-carved limestone couch (by local artist Jacinta Leitch) was officially launched in July 2015.
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Earlier this month, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) delivered its final report, including 94 ‘calls to action’. Two of these refer to Aboriginal peoples’ ‘inalienable right to know the truth about what happened and why, with regard to human rights violations committed against them in the residential schools’. What is this right to know the truth?
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Our readers might be interested in a book by Tanya Evans – Fractured Families: life on the margins in colonial New South Wales (2015, UNSW Press). Launched last week at the State Library of New South Wales, the book draws on the archives of The Benevolent Society (founded in 1813) to tell the stories of the ‘ordinary as well as the extraordinary’ people who lived and worked in colonial Sydney.
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Photographs play an important role in everyone’s life – they connect us to our past, they remind us of people, places, feelings, and stories. They can help us to know who we are. For people who grew up in children’s institutions, photographs are especially important – sadly, this is because for so many people, the photographs most of us take for granted, don’t exist.
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Dec 18, 2024
Nov 15, 2024
