‘Your mum wrote every week’

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 The records held by past providers are vitally important to Care Leavers seeking to understand their own past, and are potential evidence for individual legal action and enquiries such as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Access to records is a key step to restorative justice, and organisations can show their commitment by being transparent about the records they hold.
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Our side of the story

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 Care Leavers share with me their shock at some of what we find in our records. The language hits us between the eyes. Our counterparts in the nineteenth century were tagged by a battalion of adjectives: criminal or neglected, destitute, abandoned, deserted, unkempt, illegitimate, wayward, slovenly, deserving or undeserving.
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Family Storytelling

Sally Sara's story includes excerpts from files at State Records of South Australia. We all know how beneficial reading to children is. Studies also tell us that family storytelling – reminiscences about our own childhood, family stories going back through the generations – is linked to a range of benefits, beyond literacy and communication skills.
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Happy International Archives Day

Compactus-Cake Today is International Archives Day, a day to acknowledge and promote the work of archivists and archives. You might not know that the Find & Connect web resource relies heavily on archivists and the records held within archives to create the website you see today.
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Emotional labour in the archives

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 The wonderful world of Twitter makes it possible to follow what’s happening at various conferences and events around the world, for those of us who can’t travel. The Association of Canadian Archivists has just had its annual conference, this year in Montreal, and following the #ACA2016 tweets has been fascinating.
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New Principles for Access to Records

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 The Department of Social Services (DSS) recently released a new publication: Access to Records by Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants: access principles for records holders, best practice guidelines in providing access to records. This document is a landmark step in the ongoing implementation of the recommendations made in the Senate’s 2004 ‘Forgotten Australians’ report.
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Provenance journal – new issue

tn_jigsawmotifcrop3 Provenance is the journal of Public Record Office Victoria, the archives of the State Government of Victoria. Hot off the (digital) presses, its 2015 issue features an article written by Find & Connect’s editor, Cate O’Neill. Cate writes about the tragic story of ‘Jill’, a state ward who was in ‘care’ from 1952 until her death in 1955.
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Filling in the blanks…

Red Cross Poster Finding information about a childhood spent in institutional ‘care’ is not easy. Even when records are found and released, decisions affecting individual lives may not be clearly explained in case files.
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