Once My Mother is a film by Sophia Turkiewicz from 2014. In the film, Sophia explores her troubled relationship with her mother, Helen. Sophia spent ‘two bewildering years’ at an orphanage in Adelaide until Helen was able to bring Sophie to a new home, with her new husband. In this film, Sophia looks back on her childhood and tries to learn more about Helen’s life, while her mother battles dementia.
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A memorial dedicated to children who were in institutional ‘care’ has recently been installed on the Geelong foreshore in Victoria. The hand-carved limestone couch (by local artist Jacinta Leitch) was officially launched in July 2015.
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Yesterday we became aware of an issue with the Search facility on our website. Search is not working if you use older versions of the Internet Explorer (IE) browser (versions 9.0 and earlier).
We are working to rectify this issue and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
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In April 2015, there was a change in policy on public access to the Commonwealth electoral roll. The final report on the 2013 Federal Election by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters stated that ‘public access to the electoral roll should be unfettered’.
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Earlier this month, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) delivered its final report, including 94 ‘calls to action’. Two of these refer to Aboriginal peoples’ ‘inalienable right to know the truth about what happened and why, with regard to human rights violations committed against them in the residential schools’. What is this right to know the truth?
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Our readers might be interested in a book by Tanya Evans – Fractured Families: life on the margins in colonial New South Wales (2015, UNSW Press). Launched last week at the State Library of New South Wales, the book draws on the archives of The Benevolent Society (founded in 1813) to tell the stories of the ‘ordinary as well as the extraordinary’ people who lived and worked in colonial Sydney.
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Photographs play an important role in everyone’s life – they connect us to our past, they remind us of people, places, feelings, and stories. They can help us to know who we are. For people who grew up in children’s institutions, photographs are especially important – sadly, this is because for so many people, the photographs most of us take for granted, don’t exist.
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A project based at Macquarie University is seeking former residents willing to share their recollections of life at Weroona Home.
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Recently I’ve been working on an article about children’s institutions in Victoria in the early 1950s. This work saw me actually get up from my desk and leave the office to do some research – at Public Record Office Victoria, the State Library of Victoria and at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. These days, there is so much digitised historical material to access via desk-based research that a historian can get lazy …
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Next month, on 17 June 2015, a memorial to children who died in state care in South Australia will be unveiled at the West Terrace Cemetery in Adelaide.
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May 3, 2024
Apr 24, 2024
