Author, Researcher, Historian
Senator Derryn Hinch was a member of the Senate Committee examining the Bill before the Parliament on a national redress scheme. The Senator demonstrated that not all politicians come to meetings like this one with a closed mind. A few days after the hearing, he posted the following part of his diary on Crikey.com. These […]
Formal Apologies: What do they mean? Do they matter? The Prime Minister has set up a committee to provide advice on a proposed national apology to Australians who were sexually abused as children. (See more here.) There are many things we’ve learned from past apologies. Care Leavers and survivors of child abuse have inspired […]
Lost and found: counter-narratives of dis/located families This is the Abstract for a paper presented at a symposium of the Dis/located Children’s Network in Adelaide on 16 December by Frank Golding in collaboration with Associate Professor Jacqueline Z Wilson of Federation University Australia Conventional histories of children in institutional care are dominated by the voices […]
This is a piece I wrote for the Melbourne Herald-Sun nearly a decade ago. It was published on 4 September 2008 in time for Father’s Day. The editor cut it back a bit to fit the space he was allowing. It’s a bit dated in the detail, as you will see, but the sentiment still […]
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]