Whose history is it, anyway?

Dr Frank Golding OAM

This is a lightly edited version of the article which was published in IQ Magazine in September 2022 and was awarded RIMPA Global 2022 iQ Article of the Year Award (RIMPA is Records Information Managers Practitioners Alliance).

The codification of children’s rights extends back to the early decades of the 20^th century.[1] At the very time I was learning to read in a school enclosed within the Ballarat Orphanage, Australia was helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948. “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society,” it declared, “and is entitled to protection by society and the State”. When the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child came into being in 1989, I had long gone from out-of-home Care (OOHC) and had children of my own. Had they been placed in OOHC (heaven forbid), they would—in theory—have the right to maintain contact with their family, and the right to participate in decisions that affect them.

However, the OHHC sector in Australia has never sung in harmony with the lyrical discourse of children’s rights. In all my 4,397 days in OOHC, I was never once told why I was living in an orphanage even though I knew my parents were alive. I was told that if my father’s visits continued to upset me (which they never did), or if I misbehaved (which I mostly did not), that privilege could be withdrawn. There was no discussion. The idea of having rights never occurred to me or my mates at the time. You don’t really have rights if you don’t know you have them.

It is a truism that rights are not handed to you. You have to assert or seize them. Decades have passed since Australia ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the struggle for rights is far from over in OOHC. Those who ran institutions seem to have been oblivious to children having a right to participate in decisions that affect them. In the particular matter ofmaking, keeping, and accessing personal records, the idea that children—and the adults they have become—have rights is still not fully endorsed in the child welfare sector.

Thanks largely to the advocacy of Care leavers, however, a better understanding of rights is beginning to emerge in policy, though less so in practice. The peak advocacy body, Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN), has developed a Charter of Rights in Records. With an emphasis on participatory rights, the Charter asserts ten rights including

opportunities to challenge inaccurate childhood records and to complete inadequate records;
full and unredacted access to any records made about you or your family; and
control over who has access to your personal records.[2]

The CLAN Charter complements a set of national principles endorsed by governments around the nation, but they are not mandatory and practice is variable.[3] Care leavers were gratified to learn that in 2017 the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse endorsed a rights approach to records made about children in out-of-home ‘care’. The first principle was that making records is core business. Institutions take over the life of a child knowing that one day she will return to her family or go out into the wide world. How can they do this without owing a duty to make and keep records about her? Making records is not something that social workers or case managers should be doing as an afterthought on Friday afternoon. It’s an essential requirement of the job.

The Commission’s second principle was that, just as the decision to remove a child from her family is made in the best interests of the child, records should also be made with the same ethical frame of reference. ‘Best interests’ is a concept long promoted and marketed, but not always well applied. Records were (and are) often written for short-term operational or managerial purposes without thought for the best interests of the child in the longer term. They were written by police, court officials, clergy, social workers, case managers, child protection workers; and their readers were administrators, welfare officials, professional peers and colleagues—for use at a particular time for a particular purpose.

Record makers never thought of themselves as writing for a time when the children became adults and would read them in the years to come. It is not surprising, then, that many Care leavers find it shocking and painful to read what was recorded. The Royal Commission confirmed what Care leavers have learned: records “regularly contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and indeed on occasions absolute omissions.”[4]

One Care leaver commented: “Got my file, but that’s not me”. It can be something like an out-of-body experience to read a file about yourself as a child. You are not a child with needs, love, hope, growing in achievements—just a child as the problem.

In my 4,397 days and nights as a Ward of the State, I was never asked for my view or opinions on anything. Like many other Care leavers when I read what was recorded about me and my family, I deeply regret that I was never given the opportunity to give ‘our side of the story’. It is not just about the discrepancy between what was recorded in writing and what I remember about my childhood. I came to my records with so many ‘why’ questions:

Why was I separated from my family?
Why was I not allowed see my parents?
Why couldn’t I live in the same place as my brothers and sisters?
Why was I moved from one place to another so often?

Most Care leavers also want to see if there are any records of vaccinations, any photos of them, any school reports. Many ask: What was I like as a child? So often there are no answers in the records. This disparity is the nub of a major problem—and one that could have been avoided if children had been involved in helping make the records.

Care leavers were disappointed that the Royal Commission did not deal adequately with questions about the participation of children in making the records and the related issue of who owns the records. As indicated by the common use of the term ‘my file’, Care leavers often assume that the records are about them so they must belong to them. Unfortunately, this is not conceded by records holders—with a few notable exceptions.

Yet, it is now acknowledged, what was written about us all those years ago is far from being an ‘objective’ narrative of ‘what happened’ to children and their families. Why do agencies cling so possessively to their archives? In my own case, I left the OOHC system in 1953. I was 15 and now I’m in my 80s, I have never been able to get a coherent answer to the questions: Why do you still have a file about me as a child? What use is it to you? Why not just give it to me and you’ll be done with it? These are not just legal or even just practical questions. They are also questions about rights—and a bigger question: Who’s history is it, anyway?

Care leavers also find that many of the authorised histories and contemporary accounts constructed by welfare agencies are self-congratulatory spin. Punitive policies and brutal practices masquerade as benevolence. In 1944, the Victorian Commissioner of Police praised the Salvation Army’s work at Bayswater Boys Home as ‘a national service to the country’.[5]Yet sexual crimes were common knowledge: those in charge knew about it and so did the children. But the scandal was kept from the public in the interests of the organisation and its reputation. One former resident of Bayswater, now in his 70s, sleeps with an axe under his bed, vowing he will never be raped again as he and others had been in that notorious hellhole at Bayswater. His file contains nothing at all about his abuse.

Self-serving dishonesty was often amplified by an uncritical media. The Superintendent of my own Ballarat Orphanage, Bert Ludbrook, told a conference of the Victorian Children’s Welfare Association in 1944 that “Institutions had made such strides and progress in the last quarter of a century that their environment was equal to that in the average middle class home”.[6] That is a gross misrepresentation unless Ludbrook’s middle-class children were neglected, abused, used as unpaid workers, and lived in a state of extreme anxiety day and night. It is pleasing to note that the responsible agency (Cafs) has now removed the name Ludbrook from its headquarters building in Ballarat—and with the collaboration of former residents is constructing a truer history of life in ‘care’.

It is easy to understand why many Care leavers have no confidence in historic records and top-down constructions of welfare history. If the ultimate right is the right to the truth, it is unlikely to be established without amplifying the voices of those who experienced child welfare. We must bring insider testimony and memoire closer to the centre of child welfare histories.

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[1] For a discussion of the Declaration of Child Rights 1919 and the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924, see Ennew, J. (2000) The History of Children’s rights: Whose story? Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, 24(2).

[2] CLAN (2016) A Charter of Rights to Childhood Records. Sydney: CLAN. Available at https://clan.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CLAN-Charter-of-rights-to-childhood-records-6323.pdf

[3] Department of Social Security (2015), Access to Records by Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants: Access Principles for Records Holders, Best Practice Guidelines in providing access to records, June 2015 Commonwealth of Australia. Later work related to a Charter is found in: Frank Golding, Sue McKemmish & Barbara Reed (2021) Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping, Archives and Manuscripts, 49 (3); and Golding, F., Lewis, N., McKemmish, S., Rolan, G., & Thorpe, K. (2021). Rights in Records: A Charter of Lifelong Right in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out-of-home Care for Australian and Indigenous Australian Children and Care Leavers, The International Journal of Human Rights, 25 (9).