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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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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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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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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A project based at Macquarie University is seeking former residents willing to share their recollections of life at Weroona Home.
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Recently I’ve been working on an article about children’s institutions in Victoria in the early 1950s. This work saw me actually get up from my desk and leave the office to do some research – at Public Record Office Victoria, the State Library of Victoria and at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. These days, there is so much digitised historical material to access via desk-based research that a historian can get lazy …
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Dec 18, 2024
Nov 15, 2024
