articles/lectures, documents, film, Forgotten Australians, memories, photos

‘Sins of a Child’

by Rosie Klohs (guest author) on 18 July, 2011

‘No longer a number – my name is Rosie’. Rosie grew up as number 20280. Her experience as a state ward left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s now in recovery and a Remembered Australian and made a short film about her experiences.

Rosie Klohs’ film, Sins of a Child, was published on the Moving Minds page on the Mental Illness Education ACT website.

Child Migrants, film

Oranges and Sunshine #2

by Adele Chynoweth on 9 May, 2011

You can access the preview to Oranges and Sunshine, the forthcoming movie about the establishment of the Child Migrants Trust on YouTube.

You can view the clip here. You can also view an interview with the real-life Margaret Humphreys here.  Subsequent to this interview, in 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced £6 million family restoration fund so that former Child Migrants could re-unite with their families. More information about the Family Restoration Fund may be found on the Child Migrants Trust website.

film, Forgotten Australians, memories, Stolen Generations

Is justice yet to come?

by Rhonda Trivett (guest author) on 2 March, 2011

In these videos, Rhonda Trivett details some of her experiences from the age of 13, from 1974 – 1981, when she was interned in the maximum security adult ward (Osler House), in Wolston Park Hospital and her call for current reforms.

Part 2 contains explicit descriptions of abuse, therefore we have not uploaded it onto the website. However, if you wish you can view part 2 below:

art, film, Forgotten Australians, memories, photos

In the Shadow of Eden

by Rachael Romero (guest author) on 10 February, 2011

In her short film In the Shadow of Eden, filmmaker Rachael Romero comes to grips with the physical, sexual and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her religion-fixated father while growing up in rural South Australia. The film includes Romero’s memories of her time in the Good Shepherd Sisters’ laundry at The Pines in Plympton, Adelaide.

In the Shadow of Eden premiered at the Yale Center for British Art in September 2003 where it won a Short Film Prize from Film Fest New Haven. Since then it has screened at the Cleveland International Film Festival, the Santa Fe Film Festival, Moondance (where it won the Spirit Award for short documentary) Boulder, Colorado and The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina where, with the help of The New York Times and a board that includes Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ken Burns, and Barbara Kopple it was among six shorts chosen from over 100 ground-breaking documentaries available now on DVD – Full Frame Documentary Shorts, Volume 4, the best of the festival.

Ironically, given all these accolades in the United States, In the Shadow of Eden has been rejected for inclusion in the the Sydney, Adelaide and Victoria Film Festivals.

View In the Shadow of Eden on YouTube.

Child Migrants, film, memories

Oranges and Sunshine

by Adele on 17 January, 2011

Emily Watson, Oranges and Sunshine

Oranges and Sunshine, a film produced in 2010 and directed by Jim Loach, tells the story of Margaret Humphreys who brought public awareness to the British child migration scheme and who later established the Child Migrants Trust.

Director Jim Loach and lead actor Emily Watson talk about their involvement in the film:

film, Forgotten Australians, memories, poetry

I’ll be your mate

by Garry Shooks (guest author) on 10 January, 2011

Garry Shooks writes about visiting day at Royalstone Boys’ Home in Glebe, Sydney.

I’ll be your mate

Its Sunday the bell rings, we all take our positions on our lines.
They are numbered the lines,
It is the same lines you stand on for lunch or when ever the bell tolls,
But its visitors as you know that today at 10am hey give it a blast so they can read out the visitors list,
Every Sunday I’d line up for months that ran into years, but only ever once did my name get on that list.
See I say to the others I do have a mum or I do have a dad and they are coming to see me.
All the other Sundays your name never got read out so you were dismissed to go back to what ever you were doing but all the while hoping that the ones or one name that was read out was your mate, course he would come back into the yard from up the top house with his lollies or a toy he was aloud to have.
All the kids would gather round hoping and reminding them that there your mate and can ya have a lolie or play with em so maybe you get a lolie.
Yeah well after forever my name was read out and I ran up to be showered and put on the suit that we all had to wear from that huge cupboard of suits, the long wait out the front sitting on the bench out side the superintendence office, me feet could not reach the floor so I’d swing em back and forward just looking out the closed 6 foot gate,
A long time I sat there like that till the super came out and said I’m sorry Garry your visitor is not coming today,
The shame, they were ya lolies, you have not got a mother or father have ya or they would have come, true, I’d say to myself but out a loud I’d yell I have but they got lost and they be here next week you see,
In all my years I think I got one visitor from me dad but he was turned back at the gate because he was drunk,
Ha who wants a visitor I know I got a mum and dad and one day they come get me,
The weeks turned into months and then years, I never got a visitor, but I did have me a couple of mates, they were true blue, gave me lolie or two and we were the best of mates all those years.

film, Forgotten Australians, memories

At the memorial

by Adele on 16 December, 2010

On Friday 10th December the memorial to Western Australian Forgotten Australians was unveiled on the grassed area in front of the Western Australian Museum’s Jubilee Building, Perth Cultural Centre, James Street, Perth. A Forgotten Australian pauses at the memorial to share her memories.

I was once a street kid, a unwanted child who became one of the “Forgotten Australian’s”. On the streets of Perth I found shelter in a tree and changed my name to Victoria, so I could hide my true feelings of hopelessness, and despair.
Child Migrants, film, Forgotten Australians, memories

The first anniversary

by Adele on 16 November, 2010

The National Museum of Australia honours the first anniversary of the National Apology to Forgotten Australians and former Child Migrants by sharing a series of video interviews recorded at Parliament House, Canberra on Monday 16 November 2009:

Child Migrants, film, Forgotten Australians, memories, Stolen Generations

The Making of Modern Australia

by Adele on 28 July, 2010

The first episode of the ABC-TV series The Making of Modern Australia dealt with Australian children.

The programme includes the accounts of a former Child Migrant and a member of the Stolen Generation but doesn’t represent the experiences of a large number of children who were wards of the state and also placed in Children’s Homes.

It is interesting to note, too, that former Child Migrant, Rose Kruger’s account of being “ruled by the strap” in a Sisters of Mercy Home, is followed by a comment on the historical use of corporal punishment in all schools. Was the treatment of all children in schools at that time equivalent to the abuse reported by Forgotten Australians in Homes?

Your thoughts?

documents, film, Forgotten Australians

We were Burnie kids

by Cath on 28 July, 2010

Below we present a silent film produced by Burnside Homes in the 1920s to promote the work of the Homes and to raise funds. The footage shows the Homes’ association with the Presbyterian Church and how some children from poor families in the inner suburbs of Sydney were taken to Burnside Homes.

The recent preservation of this footage was the result of a partnership between UnitingCare Burnside, Parramatta Heritage Centre and Anne Matthews. The film is an hour long.

[2020 note] This 12:46 of film footage was shown in the Inside exhibition.

This film has no audio.
articles/lectures, film, Forgotten Australians, memories, Stolen Generations

Video: Wake-up call from the stolen and forgotten

by Rhonda Trivett (guest author) on 28 May, 2010

Rhonda Trivett, at the age of 13, from 1974 – 1981, was locked in the maximum security adult ward (Osler House), in Wolston Park Hospital, Brisbane. In her video, Rhonda talks about her experiences and the need for redress.

Wakeup call from the stolen and forgotten
art, film, Forgotten Australians, memories, music, painting, photography

Asylum

by Bonney Djuric (guest author) on 4 May, 2010

 

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct: Girls Industrial School Gate 3

Bonney discusses the historical background to her film and the notion of “asylum”:

The Female Factory was built in 1818 adjacent to the Colonial Government domain on land bounded to the south by a curve in the Parramatta River. It was a large site over a number of hectares and had been previously owned by Bligh and Marsden. The Factory was the brainchild of Governor Macquarie who in his concerns for the safety of the women and children of the colony recommended that a place be built to provide safe refuge for them. It was not long until the idealised safe refuge of Macquarie’s vision changed into a place of detention, incarceration and punishment.

Macquarie’s Female Factory building was partly demolished in 1885, some of its structure was incorporated into the now Institute of Psychiatry building at Cumberland Hospital. The main area where it once stood is now called the Deadyard an area of land bounded by the high stone walls of the Factory. By 1848 the Factory had been declared a place for paupers and lunatics.

In 1841 an orphanage was built on the drying grounds adjacent to the Factory, in an attempt to provide safe accommodation for the factory women’s children. It became known as the Roman Catholic Orphan School (RCOS).The premises of the Roman Catholic Orphan School were resumed by the NSW Government in 1886 and it ceased to function as an orphanage. Theories emerging from the Industrial Revolution shaped attitudes of the day which lead to the establishment of a Training and Industrial School on the site.

Between 1886 and 1983 it would go through many name changes each reflecting the social policy and attitudes of the day. What did not change over this ninety seven year period was the day to day life experienced by the inmates of the institution. In 1980 management of a section of the site was transferred to the Department of Corrective Services and it continues to operate as the Norma Parker Correctional Centre for Women.

Born as a disciplinary society, Australia was colonized during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It was a place of banishment for the displaced population of an English revolution that was fought not by using the gun or guillotine, but the more insidious instrument of control, reason and its progeny, science, in the interests of economy, made animate through morality and exercised by the judiciary.

It was within this climate that Governor Macquarie commissioned Francis Greenway to build Australia’s first institution of confinement the Female Factory at Parramatta in1821. In Macquarie’s correspondence1 we can read of his genuine concern for the welfare of the women and children of the settlement and of his ambition to create a place of safety where women would not have to prostitute themselves in order to get food and a roof over their head.

The Female Factory was Australia’s first social experiment to create a self contained, self supporting institution where the values of hard work would be rewarded with liberation from penal servitude to that of social respectability. As the stone walls surrounding the site grew in height so did the attitudes to its occupants, now inmates, change. They became woman who no longer needed protection but the depraved that the emerging free settler society had to protect themselves from.  It became a place where idleness would not be tolerated. Its purpose had been endowed by the history of the institution of confinement to house the poor, unemployed, idle, criminal and mad women of the colony – a place that would shape Australian attitudes towards women as either damned whores or God’s police.

It was upon this site that the system of rewards and punishment of the institutions of confinement of the early 19th century would remain un-challenged until the early 1980’s and from where, in the Australian thought-system, cultural images and conceptions of ‘rottenness and taint’ would be associated with particular groups.

Although few remnants of the original Factory building exist, its legacy lives on in the lives of people who have experienced the so called ‘care’ of the institution. The experiences of these people, the Forgotten Australians, can be traced back to 17th century Europe, to the establishment of the Hopital General in Paris and to the workhouses of Great Britain.

From 1821 to the present day every type of institution of confinement has been located on the Factory site; an orphanage, a training school, a psychiatric hospital and a prison.

Perhaps in our current political climate, where the meaning of asylum has shifted emphasis to that of the refugee, the asylum seeker, we will come to realize that their experience of the institution of confinement- the detention centres – are no different to that of those in other institutions established to provide a place of so called sanctuary in both contemporary and historical terms.  Attention to their plight may present an opportunity to question where our attitudes and beliefs about those who we place in such institutions actually originated from and more importantly bring about a change in our thinking.

“Life is more important than art. That’s what makes art so important”.    – John Malpede.


1 Macquarie colonial papers State Library of NSW.

Further information about the site featured in the film can be found here.