The Hon Jennifer Coate AO, a distinguished former Royal Commissioner, whose career encompasses many roles: Magistrate, Judge, President of the Children’ Court, State Coroner (among other roles) launched my book on Tuesday 16 April 2024.
Almost 100 people from a wide spectrum of the child welfare sector attended. golding-invite-v1
Justice Coate gave an excellent analysis of the book:
This book is multi layered in what issues are identified and sadly, a number of those issues remain relevant today. The need to understand intergenerational trauma passed down in families, the horrors of war and the damage done to those have been sent into battlefields and the spiralling effect of that damage on the families that they are part of, the difficulty in accessing records, the accuracy of the records that have been kept, the impact of all forms of violence and abuse on children, the need to give children a voice in their own lives, the terrible suffering of women brutally mistreated inside their own homes and need for support rather than punishment and judgment for families that are struggling ….and so much more.
(Photos Ron Smith OAM)
In my own speech I highlighted the ways in which the system itself produces and reproduces children in ‘care’. I quoted from Jacinta Allen, the Victorian Premier, who said in her speech in Parliament on 8 March 2024, that bureaucrats could “with the stroke of a pen … change the course of someone’s life forever” This resonated with my own remark that we need to ask not only what the system does for children, but also what the system does to children.
Ask your local bookshop and/or library to order in a copy or go direct to the publisher