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 of officials, administrators and agencies, in many cases justifying the existence of a coercive welfare system and its regime of institutions which separated impoverished children from their families and community, rendered them invisible to the public and silenced their voices.

However, energised by the rights movement and a chain of formal inquiries, survivors of institutionalised childhoods produced an outpouring of testimony about atrocious child abuse and neglect, ushering in a national sentiment of regret and apologies.

In this context and with the advent of rights-to-information legislation, many survivors of institutional “care” became determined to better understand the story of why they were in “care” and to reconnect with lost or fragmented families.

Many imagined the child welfare archives as storehouses of hope, but it was soon revealed that many personal records had been lost or destroyed, and those that were located were woefully inadequate, often inaccurate, and lacking basic information.

Worse, many files were painful to read because of the recurring negativity about children and the disparaging slander of their parents.

Confident in the conviction that everyone has the right to define their experiences in their own words and terms, care-leavers are now asserting a developing counter-narrative in which their voices challenge the dominant narrative of previous eras.

This paper summarises a case study in which the authors go beyond traditional welfare archives and uncover a hitherto unknown story of multi-generational custody in welfare facilities.

In doing so, they illustrate the historic ideology underpinning child welfare in Victoria.

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