“If only they’d kept proper records”: Care Leavers speak back to history: A paper by Frank Golding at a seminar titled ‘Honouring stories of struggle: reassessing Australian records of disadvantage’, Canberra, 21 October 2022.
The seminar was sponsored by the Steering Committee of the Documenting Australian Society of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee in collaboration with
- the National Archives of Australia and
- the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA).
The event was run as a satellite seminar for the Australian Society of Archivists 2022 Annual Conference in Canberra.
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Introducing Care Leavers
You’ve asked me to speak about what should be kept for future generations that records and honours the struggles of disadvantaged groups. Let me start by giving a snapshot of my childhood in out-of-home ‘care’ because I think it typifies some of the issues we want to discuss today.
When my father enlisted in the Army in 1940, he dumped me and my brothers at the Children’s Depot in Melbourne as a drunken act of punishment against our mother. When he failed to pay the agreed maintenance for four successive weeks, we were committed as Wards of the State of Victoria. The law required us to be charged with the offence of being neglected. I was 2 years old.
My two brothers and I then bounced around between three foster mothers, back to the Boy’s Depot at Royal Park, the Andrew Kerr Memorial Home at Mornington and finally a long stay in the Ballarat Orphanage. Our parents had a volatile relationship but when they finally settled down—and they certainly did when our father gave up the grog—they begged the Department for the return of their boys; but that was refused until we were old enough to go to work.
This is a typical story of fragmented families. Thousands of parents seeking the return of their institutionalised children were refused on the grounds that they were not suitable or adequate parents. And countless children were separated from their brothers and sisters in the out-of-home ‘care’ system—many never saw them or their parents again.
I was lucky to be with my two older brothers for most of my time in ‘care’. But I was deeply distressed by the bewildering separation from my parents which no one ever explained to me. Not once in all those years from age 2 to 15 did any social worker or ‘carer’ ever sit me down and explain to me why I was in an orphanage when I had perfectly healthy parents who told us they were trying to get us out of there. I lived with that perplexity for decades.
Mine is just one of countless stories of an Australian childhoods. Some 500,000 children were in ‘care’ in Australia in the period 1930-80. In that time, there were some 2000 institutions—orphanages, family group homes, missions and reserves, youth detention centres, other residential out-of-home ‘care’ facilities—not to forget countless foster care providers.
Understanding what happened and why
This is not just an historical issue. While the era of the large institutions is over, there are record numbers of children in ‘care’ in contemporary Australia. Some 46,000 children will not sleep in their family home tonight, and disgracefully, a hugely disproportionate number of these are Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander children.
And, while we talk glibly about lived experience as if it’s all in the past, thousands of children left the ‘care system’ carrying great damage which they are living with still. It is difficult to over-estimate the enduring impact of being dislocated from family to be raised by strangers on the grounds that it was in the child’s best interests—only to find they were worse off than before.
The 2004 Senate Inquiry accurately reported the “litany of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, often criminal … assault, neglect, humiliation and deprivation of food, education and healthcare…” The scars of that ultimate betrayal don’t heal.
Many children who were dislocated from their families never knew why they were not living with their families. So many children had to live with perplexity as children. For decades well into mature adulthood, they hungered to understand what happened to them and why it happened the way it did.
Making meaning through records
As adults, Care Leavers have learned that records were made about them, and that under FOI legislation they have entitlements to access them. Care Leavers who know about the legislation—and not all do know—approach agencies that hold these records expecting to find answers to the many questions they have as they make the journey of self-discovery, to authenticate their childhood memories and to reunite with fragmented families if that’s still possible.
Some Care Leavers also look to the records when seeking justice in the form of prosecution of offenders, civil litigation against institutions, or other forms of redress.
It’s an understatement to say that gaining access to their records has not been easy for Care Leavers. Many Homes have long since closed. Some organisations that ran them are no longer in existence. Children were shunted around multiple institutions and foster homes and records did not track with them.
Many Care Leavers were heart-broken to learn that their files can’t be found: some have been lost or destroyed. Some children had been Wards of the State and others were not. This made a difference to what was recorded and archived. Some non-government organisations did not feel that FOI legislation applied to records they held.
Many Care Leavers were disillusioned by finding incorrect dates, misspelled names, large gaps in their life story when nothing was recorded, and shallowness. Some expected to see basic information like family medical history, school reports or a birth certificate, but were profoundly disappointed that such information was never recorded. One Care Leaver told the Senate Inquiry:
I get two sheets of paper with about 9 or 12 lines on it, I look at these two sheets and I am devastated, 18 years of my life on two sheets of paper (Senate Community Affairs References Committee 2004, Confidential Submission 3).
Others have found their files run to hundreds of pages but struggle to make sense of them.
Redactions in files cause great distress. Names and identifying details of other people mentioned in Care Leavers’ files were censored—even when the ‘third party’ was a close relative. Information about my parents and brothers, for example, was censored when it was critical to understanding my case.
Rare photographs, highly valued by Care Leavers, were released with faces blurred or heads cut out in a crude attempt to protect the privacy of ‘third parties’ taking no account of the emotional impact this would have on the person whose face was allowed to be seen.
Many Care Leavers were angry with what they found: “… insulting and defamatory comments and hurtful gossip about themselves or their parents.” Above all, they were resentful that their personal files were so negative – the child and their parents as problems. Nothing about personal achievements.
“If only they’d kept proper records”: A Care Leaver’s lament
These personal files do not tell us much about the child’s experience of growing up in ‘care’. For a start, records were written for other adults. Never intended to be read by the adult the child would become. The voice of the child—and the voice of the parents—were never heard.
Nevertheless, personal case files are important documents that must be preserved—along with administrative records: correspondence, superintendents’ diaries, punishment books, minutes of meetings, and so on. In many cases they are the only means they have to begin to piece together a lost childhood. The national Find and Connect web resource serves an important role in identifying where these records are, who controls them, and who to contact to get access to them. But they remain scattered in a hybrid ‘system’.
Other more illuminating records exist: Care Leavers expressing voice through counter narratives
- Personal testimony
There have been inquiries and commissions at the national level, also most states have held their own inquiries into aspects of the ‘care’ systems in their jurisdictions.
There is a torrent of personal testimony and submissions to these inquiries – I calculate some 5,400 individual survivors have presented to these national inquiries.
This body of evidence serves to make experiences known and generates a collective history that challenges the one-sided and often self-congratulatory histories produced by government departments and agencies. That body of testimony must be preserved and made more accessible.
- Oral history and memoirs
Beyond this bank of formal testimony, Care Leaver advocates and activists have been generating what amounts to a counter history of OOHC. I mention just some components of this emerging body of work.
Oral history and published memoirs oral history and other personal accounts challenge the dominant story found in official accounts of child welfare. In 2010-12, with extra Commonwealth Funding, the National Library of Australia, conducted a relatively small number of professional oral interviews with Care Leavers including Child Migrants. That was a one-off project led superbly by Joanna Sassoon. At that time, also, the National Library reported that it held about 70 published memoirs written by Care Leavers.
Yet, we know there are many, many more than that. Hundreds of Care Leavers have produced oral history and written memoirs and personal accounts. These burgeoning care-leaver narratives are found in diverse places such as the CLAN Newsletter and website, and the wonderful CLAN Library. CLAN’s Library has an extensive catalogue far exceeding that of the National Library. Many are self-published books targeted at family members and other Care Leavers. Others, an increasing number, are aimed at the general public, and find commercial publishers.
This body of work can be likened to a new form of “history from below”—personal histories located in the context of created from memory of direct experience and often residual fragments of family anecdotes. This work must be encouraged but the question remains about how best it might be preserved. Many Care Leavers are not aware of their legal obligations to deposit copies of their publications in the National and State Libraries.
- Creative artefacts: poetry, art, music
Historians, it is said and rightly so, sometimes rely too heavily on written documents. Moreover, the written word too often excludes and disenfranchises those who lack of formal education. Through no fault of their own, many Care Leavers did not complete basic schooling though they had the intelligence and desire to do so. It’s not surprising, then, to find many turning to non-literary creative forms of expression as a way of responding to childhood memories and the ever-present trauma of childhood abuse.
For example, as a response to the Royal Commission on Child Sexual Abuse, the then CLAN President Robert House curated a wonderful exhibition at the Ballarat Regional Art Gallery in May to August 2021. CLAN has been encouraging these creative endeavours for some years and is accumulating a collection at the Australian Orphanage Museum which I turn to now.
- Artefacts, memorabilia, memories and reflections
In 2004 the Senate Forgotten Australians report recommended the National Museum of Australia establish an exhibition, “preferably permanent”, related to the history and experiences of children in institutional care, with a capacity to tour the nation. It took 7 years for the Museum to mount a small-scale exhibition in Canberra, called Inside (irony not intended). It toured 3 States and then vanished.
CLAN has always considered that if anyone is going to memorialise the past the way it should be done it should be Care Leavers themselves. It has been collecting artefacts and memorabilia for over 20 years. In 2017, the Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Justice Peter McClellan, visited CLAN’s temporary museum site and commented that :
It’s a very significant Australian memorial, and I hope that you are able to keep it and maybe develop it in the years to come, because it marks out for all of you a very significant story in Australia’s history. (Royal Commission 2017f, Transcript, 31 March 2017)
In 2019 CLAN gained a Commonwealth grant to enable it to acquire a property in Geelong as a permanent home for an Australian Orphanage Museum. It should have been the historic Geelong Protestant Orphanage (pictured) but the modest grant funding did not allow it. The Museum is ready to open [it did on 1st April 2023]—with a permanent exhibition and a special exhibition mapped out—but there are further requirements imposed by the Geelong City Council that have to be met and further funding is required.
The special exhibition—Talking back to records—results from a project undertaken by CLAN with a grant from PROV and the professional support of Cate O’Neill, Abi Belfrage, and Michaela Hart. This is a project that gives Care Leavers an opportunity to respond to what they find in their childhood records—a kind of right of reply. I’m not at liberty to quote from the findings yet but I am confident that they will make salutary reading for anyone working in record-making today.
Heritage Sites
The final area I want to mention quickly is that of what is to become of the sites of former orphanages and children’s Homes? Many of the have been demolished already. Others, like the Geelong orphanage and my alma mater, the Ballarat Orphanage, have been sold off to private for-profit developers. Some remain in the hands of the agencies that ran them, but now serve as aged care facilities. Re-badged often but retaining the name or other remnants of an earlier chapter of their history.
Former residents, Care Leavers, have fought long and hard to have a say in how their childhood Homes should be conserved. Two contrasting examples are Ballarat and Parramatta.
In the case of Ballarat, the large two-storey building was demolished in 1965 and the remainder was subdivided and sold variously to a private school, residential developers, a child care business, and a supermarket chain. Despite all that, a number of former residents have never given up on the hope of salvaging something. Former residents have collaborated with authorities to design and install a series of creative memorials winding a pathway through a prominent section of the property.
By contrast, the Parragirls Memory Project at the long-neglected site of Parramatta Girls Home in Western Sydney began in 2012 working towards the preservation of significant historic buildings. The site was added to the National Heritage List in 2017—and World Heritage is a distinct possibility. This recent book shows how the art and activism of former residents can change places and perceptions about people in history.
In Summary: what should be kept for future generations?
Here’s my wish list:
- Personal files and administrative records
- Testimony
- Memoirs, oral histories, creative artefacts
- Historic artefacts and memorabilia – and their interpretations
- Heritage sites
A postscript:
I’ve been reminded of the existence of numerous historic films that were made by government departments, institutions, local television stations, and more recently by private filmmakers including (albeit rarely) former residents returning to the sites of their childhoods. The bulk of these films were made for public relations purposes including fund-raising and providing reassurance to government, institutional agencies and the community that these ‘unfortunate kiddies’ were being given the best possible care.
The children were almost never asked for their consent but were dressed up for the special occasion as charity-bait. Most were never given the opportunity to view a screening, but had they been given the chance, they might not have been surprised that the imagery and scripts created by the film producers were not always a faithful reflection of the way they experienced life on a day-to-day basis.
These films should be retained. I am pleased to know that a small-scale project is being developed by a researcher/filmmaker at LaTrobe University in Melbourne to create a critical catalogue of these films and to collaborate with Care leavers in their future use. This will be an invaluable additional resource for historians and Care leavers alike.