Guildford Truant School for Boys was a School for Specific Purposes established by the Department of Education in the property Linnwood in 1917. It opened in 1918 and housed boys who were persistently absent from school and were under sentence from the Children’s Court. The school closed at the end of 1935. In 1936, Linnwood…
The Shaftesbury Reformatory School opened in 1880 on a site on Old South Head Road (in the present-day suburb of Vaucluse), as a replacement for the Biloela Reformatory School for Females on Cockatoo Island. It included a series of cottages and three solitary cells surrounded by high fences, and usually housed a total of around…
The Newcastle Industrial School was established on 6 August 1867 in the former Military Barracks on the Newcastle Government Domain. It was a place of detention for girls charged with neglect, wandering, street-trading or being ‘uncontrollable’. From 1869 the site was shared with the Newcastle Reformatory School for Females. In 1871 the institution was relocated…
Ormond House, in Oxford Street Paddington, was used by the State Children’s Relief Board from 1884 until 1923. It was the Central Home or Central Depot, and was a receiving home and shelter for children of all ages. It took girls from Shaftesbury Reformatory in 1904 and Hillside Home for Mothers and Babies moved there…
Ormond, Thornleigh, also known as Thornleigh Training School for Girls and Thornleigh Girls’ Home, was established in Duffy Avenue at Thornleigh in 1946 by the Child Welfare Department. It was an annexe to the Parramatta Girls Training School, and housed Parramatta girls who were defined as being ‘privilege’: they were at the end of their…
Myee, also known as Myee Babies’ Home and Myee Hostel, was established in 1926 in Arncliffe and run by the Child Welfare Department. It was a home for babies and up to 16 young unmarried expectant mothers who had been committed by the Children’s Court to state care. Some mothers retained their babies after they…
Montrose was a house in Burwood that was turned into a maternity hospital and infants’ home in 1920 by the State Children’s Relief Department, caring for unmarried mothers and their babies, and infants who were state wards. By 1936 it had been converted to Montrose Hostel by the Child Welfare Department. Montrose was one of…
Corelli Hospital for Women (known as ‘Corelli’) was opened in Marrickville as a home for mothers with babies and expectant mothers by the State Children’s Relief Board in September 1919. In its first year it housed 41 mothers with 39 children, for an average of four months. By the 1930s it seems to have served…
Winbin, in Strathfield, sometimes referred to as Winbin Depot, was purchased by the Child Welfare Department in 1954 and converted to a children’s home. It provided short-term care for around 20 preschool-aged boys and girls. It was, at first, a disability institution. It had a kindergarten teacher on site. From 1974 four female wards lived…
Royal Far West, also referred to as Royal Far West Scheme and Drummond Far West Home, was set up in Manly in 1924 as a holiday home, to enable children from far western New South Wales to escape the conditions of the outback by holidaying by the sea. Over the years it has evolved to…