Infant Life Protection was a program that emerged in response to rising concerns about ‘baby farming’ in the late nineteenth century – this was the practice of infants, usually born to single mothers, being placed in private homes to be nursed and boarded, for a fee. There was a very high mortality rate for ex-nuptial…
Adoption Information Services came into being in July 2019 when the delivery of local adoptions, inter-country adoptions and information about past adoptions were transferred from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Justice and Community Safety. Previously, the Victorian government adoption information service was called Family Information, Networks and Discovery…
The Clifden Farm and Try Boys Home was a farm training Home for boys at Wedderburn opened by The Try Society in 1923. It had previously been the privately run Clifden Children’s Home. The home had capacity for approximately 25 boys. In 1929 the Clifden Home moved to St. Andrew’s (also referred to as Diamond…
Clifden Children’s Home was a privately-run Home for “destitute children” and Convalescent Home opened in 1891 in Smythesdale, moving to Wedderburn in 1894. The Home aimed to provide farm training for homeless and “neglected” children of Melbourne. From the early 1900s a number of state wards were placed in the Home. In 1923 the Home…
The Heidelberg Girls’ Home was a Salvation Army Home for younger girls opened in 1896, on the premises of the former Heidelberg Boys’ Home. The first girls in residence in the Heidelberg Girls’ Home were the younger residents of the Brunswick Girls Home. The Home closed in November 1899 and the girls were moved to…
Woodlands Home opened in 1886 in South Preston as a domestic training school for selected girls from the Government Reformatory for Protestant Girls at Pentridge in Coburg. Woodlands, described as a “cottage”, had capacity for eight or nine girls. The objective of Woodlands was for the “better conducted girls” of the Reformatory to spend a…
Kingsbury Farm Reformatory was a training farm for Protestant boys that opened in Newstead in April 1893. It was operated on the ‘family system’, run by a married couple, and had capacity for six boys. Boys were sent to Kingsbury from other reformatories in order to learn practical farm skills, such as land clearing, dam-making,…
Mental deficiency is a term that was commonly used to describe intellectual or developmental disability in the first half of the twentieth century. It was regarded as a disease, and the popular belief was that people who were diagnosed as ‘mentally defective’ needed to be segregated from the community, to receive special ‘care’ and treatment….
“Correspondence files, single number series with ‘B’ [Child Endowment] prefix” is an archival series held by the National Archives of Australia. Its series number is A885. The records in A885 relate to child endowment and family allowances. The records were created by the Commonwealth Department of Social Services. Many of the files document the payment…
In 1951, a British Home Office official named John Moss inspected and reported on Australian and New Zealand institutions where British child migrants were living. Moss spent July-December 1951 travelling around Australia and to New Zealand, inspecting institutions and making recommendations. His report, known as the Moss Report, was submitted to the British government in…
Dec 18, 2024
Nov 15, 2024
