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 […]
The Past is Not a Closed Chapter
The Past is Not a Closed Chapter – It Shapes the Whole Book of Our Lives This was the title of a talk I presented in Adelaide on 30 November 2016 at a workshop as part of the Routes to the Past Project, co-sponsored by the University of Melbourne, CLAN and the Dulwich Centre located in Adelaide. […]
Our childhood lives – in our own words
UPDATE: Reaching back into a strange past There was a gratifying amount of interest in my presentation at Parramatta on 20 October as part of a panel on Righting the Record: Towards a National Summit. The Archivists Society of Australia has placed a live video of the presentation on U-Tube at: Furthermore, it will appear in the next issue […]
Ideas for Collaborative Research
This is the text of a short presentation I gave at a gathering at Monash University on 14 September 2016. The occasion was the 10th Anniversary of COSI (the Centre for Organisational & Social Informatics – a flash name for a dynamic group of research academics who work in partnership with community groups on issues around records, […]
Svetlana Alexeviech didn’t make it to the Royal Commission
A brilliant essay given by Maria Tumarkin at the University of Melbourne on Wednesday 7 September 2016. A short version was published in The Conversation on Friday 9 September – reprinted here with permission. Among other things, Maria asked: “Have we outsourced the witnessing of child sexual abuse in Australia to the Royal Commission?” Some say yes. Others, […]
Grants for Documenting Care Leaver Records
Copy of a Find & Connect blog post announcing a new grants round by Genevieve Wauchope | RAD2 Grants Officer, Find & Connect project: A new round of the Records Access Documentation grants for organisations to document records relating to care leavers will open in October. Successful projects will be funded to $15 000. The grants are being funded as part […]
Ballarat’s Difficult History: Outcast Children
This is an updated version of a paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Historical Association in Ballarat July 2016 Scene 1: 1956 I’m 18 and studying at the Ballarat Teachers’ College in Dana Street. It’s our weekly assembly. We all stand up to sing from our blue song-books: ‘Ballaarat’. A city built on […]
Child Sexual Abuse in Out-of-Home Care
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has recently released 55 submissions in response to their ‘Consultation Paper: Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Out-of-Home Care’ You can download and read the submissions here. This is my submission dated 11 March 2016. I became aware of the above Consultation Paper only […]
Our Side of the Story
As a guest blogger, I posted this on the Find & Connect website today. Other Care Leavers share with me their shock at some of what we find in our records. The language hits us between the eyes. Our counterparts in the nineteenth century were tagged by a battalion of adjectives: criminal or neglected, destitute, […]