Decommissioned Institutions: How Will they Be Remembered?

The author, incarcerated in his childhood in a local orphanage, returns to the site – now a private school – hoping to stage a function there. He then books a room at a former Babies Home – converted to a bed-and-breakfast motel no more than 500 metres away. At the other end of town, he spends a short week at a posh holiday resort on the site of a former Catholic orphanage. The experiences at all three sites reanimate disturbing memories and narratives of childhoods marred by appalling abuse and neglect. Insiders know these decommissioned institutions once provided as much coercion and punishment as care and protection. This paper explores the value of insider knowledge and memory activism in exposing the dark histories of what some call these places of ‘pain and shame’ and others ‘sites of conscience’. In the face of the competing commercial interests of new proprietors at all three sites, the paper contrasts the lack of apparent interest in memorialisation at two sites with a strong campaign led by former residents at the third site that has led to modest, but belated, success.