Forgotten Australians

Launch of That’s Not My Child: Five generations on the welfare treadmill

The Hon Jennifer Coate AO, a distinguished former Royal Commissioner, whose career encompasses many roles: Magistrate, Judge, President of the Children’ Court, State Coroner (among other roles) launched my book on Tuesday 16 April 2024. Almost 100 people from a wide spectrum of the child welfare sector attended. golding-invite-v1 Justice Coate gave an excellent analysis […]

Refuge, Rescue and Reform: Voices of suffering and survival

Another book!  I’m very pleased to announce that a book Dot Wickham and I have been working on for a few years is finally at the printers and will be launched in Ballarat by Hon. Catherine King MP, the Minister for Transport on 24 May as part of the Ballarat Heritage Festival. The publisher is […]

Do you care what you’re called?

Caring about language, knowledge, rights and identity: Discourse analysis and framing the problem: a paper for the National Aged & Community Care Roundtable for Forgotten Australians Frank Golding, On line 8 February 2023   Over the past decade or two I’ve been doing a lot of research and advocacy on Care Leaver voice and agency. My PhD […]

Problems with Records Are Not Confined to the Past

Just published on line through Springer. Will be printed in Archival Science in due course. Below is a pre-publication version of the manuscript. Some minor changes will be found in the on line version which can be accessed at ‘Online First’: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-019-09304-0 DOI  10.1007/s10502-019-09304-0 “Problems with records and recordkeeping practices are not confined to the past”: A […]

Another Apology

Formal Apologies: What do they mean? Do they matter?     The Prime Minister has set up a committee to provide advice on a proposed national apology to Australians who were sexually abused as children. (See more here.) There are many things we’ve learned from past apologies. Care Leavers and survivors of child abuse have inspired […]

The Missing Dads of Spring Street

This is a piece I wrote for the Melbourne Herald-Sun nearly a decade ago. It was published on 4 September 2008 in time for Father’s Day. The editor cut it back a bit to fit the space he was allowing. It’s a bit dated in the detail, as you will see, but the sentiment still […]

Lost and Found: State Children in Victoria (1)

Paper presented to the Hotham History Project, North Melbourne Town Hall, 25 July 2017 I am posting this very long paper in separate sections so as not to tax my readers too much. It should be noted that the paper was presented to an audience with a particular focus on the history of North Melbourne and neighbouring suburbs and that influenced my choice […]

Archives: The Care Leaver’s perspective

This article based on my presentation at the ASA Annual Conference in Parramatta in October 2016 has just be published in Archives and Manuscripts – links below. The Care Leaver’s perspective Frank Golding Cite this article as: Frank Golding (2016) The Care Leaver’s perspective, Archives and Manuscripts, 44:3, 160-164, DOI: 10.1080/01576895.2016.1266954 To link to this […]

Redress – Claytons or Fair Dinkum?

Redress – Claytons or Fair Dinkum? In late October/early November I was invited to Sweden along with Associate Professor Jacqui Wilson of Federation University (another Care Leaver) to talk about the state of play with the Australian Royal Commission’s recommendations on redress. We planned to present an essentially negative story about why the Australian government had rejected the Commission’s […]

Lost and Found: Reconstructing a family at war

Lost and Found: Reconstructing a family at war This was the title of a paper I presented at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne on 13 December 2016 at a conference entitled (Re)Examining Historical Childhoods: Literary, Cultural, Social.  The conference was organised by the Australasian Society for the History of Children and Youth. I am working this paper up as […]

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