Dr Frank Golding OAM

Author, researcher, activist and historian

I am happy to be able to share information on my special interests: 

• Child & family welfare and institutions, especially records and redress
• Social history 
• Social justice &
• Human rights.

My childhood as a Ward of the State of Victoria in Australia in the ‘care’ of three foster mothers and three institutions underpins my active involvement in Care Leaver issues as an advocate and lobbyist.

Read other pages on this site to see information about publications, Care Leaver records, justice issues such as redress, inquiries, formal apologies, and issues of heritage and how history is constructed and owned.

The lived experience of childhood becomes the living experience of the adult.

When I was 2 years old, I was made a Ward of the State and sent to the Andrew Kerr Memorial Home at Mornington. It looks idyllic, but I have no memories of this place which my brother Bob and I were taken to from the Children’s Welfare Depot at Royal Park in Melbourne. The records are flimsy, but there is a receipt signed by the Matron and given to the chauffeur who delivered us – on Bob’s 4th birthday, 23 December 1941. I was two-years old. 

Many years later I found a record of my Medical Certificate issued on Armistice Day 1941. On it I found: “As far as I able to determine, free from syphilis or epilepsy (without blood tests)”.

After nine months we were released “on probation” to our mother. The peace did not last. 

 

We were soon to be long-term inmates of the Ballarat Orphanage – from 1943 to 1953. While nothing remains in my memory of Andrew Kerr Home or the Royal Park Depot, I have vivid memories of the Ballarat Orphanage located at 200 Victoria Street (pictures below).       

          

My website is something I do in my spare time, so it is always under construction and review. I can’t claim to have said the last word on anything.