Author, Researcher, Historian
DOWNSIZING—DESIRABLE BUT NOT ALWAYS EASY One last example, because it shows that changes in welfare policy were not uniform or consistent: St Joseph’s Homes for Children in Flemington 1981-1997: the Family Group Homes era. It’s probably true to say that, broadly speaking, child-savers like Selina Sutherland and those involved in the boarding-out movement were […]
THE CHILD SAVERS – CHILD RESCUERS Let’s return to the 1880s where we find a crusade for reforming dissolute urban working-class family life through Christian charity—middle-class morality and concern for social stability. The tropes of child as victim and child as threat intersected. The Scots Church Children’s Aid Society explained: children must be rescued from […]
ROYAL PARK IN PARKVILLE – THE DEPOT AND MUCH MORE Against that back-story we come to Royal Park in Parkville. No site has had such a confusing history as Royal Park. You get a sense of this in its more than a dozen alternative names and functions over the years (matched by repeated changes of […]
ORPHANAGES NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT When Governor Hotham laid the foundation stone for the Melbourne Orphan Asylum in Emerald Hill (South Melbourne) in 1854, he warned that it was not just a matter of supporting the ‘innocent victims of misfortune’, but the citizens of the colony had another political duty. ‘Remember,’ he said, that these orphans, […]
THE LARGE INSTITUTIONS In 1849 the Mayor of Melbourne, approached a charitable organisation, the Dorcas Society, for urgent help with the children of a man who had murdered his wife. A stop-gap was found for these and other urgent cases of destitute and homeless children, the ‘uncriminal orphans and friendless children’. In 1850 the Dorcas […]
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 […]