Six years on from the national apology

apology-hands 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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Making records meaningful

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 The Find & Connect web resource team gave a presentation this week as part of the University of Melbourne’s Researcher @ Library Week. One of the things that we like to do when we’re presenting is to start with the ‘consumer voice’ – that is, to open proceedings with a perspective from someone with lived experience of being in a children’s institution.
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Not just paper: the importance of ‘non-traditional’ records

Mural at Magill Training Centre (2012) 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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Filling in the blanks…

Red Cross Poster 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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Have you seen us out and about?

tn_Capture.png You might have noticed we haven’t been as active recently on our blog – it has been a busy month for the team. We have been out and about gaining and sharing knowledge and raising the profile of the Find & Connect web resource.
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Access to the electoral roll

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 In April 2015, there was a change in policy on public access to the Commonwealth electoral roll. The final report on the 2013 Federal Election by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters stated that ‘public access to the electoral roll should be unfettered’.
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The right to know

tn_right to know 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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The importance of photos

tn_cooinoo02Photographs 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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