Author, Researcher, Historian
Caring about language, knowledge, rights and identity: Discourse analysis and framing the problem: a paper for the National Aged & Community Care Roundtable for Forgotten Australians Frank Golding, On line 8 February 2023 Over the past decade or two I’ve been doing a lot of research and advocacy on Care Leaver voice and agency. My PhD […]
Opportunity for Care Leavers and others with direct experience of institutions and social work The British Journal of Social Work (BJSW) is inviting submissions to a special issue which will be written by people with lived experience to be published in Spring 2023. Context Harnessing the knowledge and expertise of people with lived experience is […]
My PhD thesis from Federation University Australia is now available on line. This is a very brief summary: Australia has a long history of removing children from their families when they are deemed to be neglected or ‘in moral danger’. Placed in orphanages, children’s Homes and foster ‘care’ out of the public gaze, these children […]
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 […]