Author, Researcher, Historian
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 […]
I found this gem when I was trawling through the Report of the Victorian Royal Commission on the State Public Service (1917). The Commission was chaired by one Alexander Gooch, Esquire. I quote from the Report verbatim. Employment of women Until the war forced the position, the powers given by the Public Service Act […]
Associate Professor Jacqueline Wilson and I have published this article in the latest issue of International Journal of Heritage Studies http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IVwwDQZhmM8saZwXSuJF/full
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? 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 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 […]