The Victorian Department of Health and Human Services has just completed its biggest ever records management project. Finding Records is a new website that allows users to find, read, download and print detailed guides to the collections of historical paper-based records related to former Victorian wards of the state and care leavers.
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Last year’s conference of the Australian Society of Archivists featured a plenary session: Towards a National Summit – Setting the Records Straight for the Rights of the Child. One of the presentations from this session is now available as a youtube video – Frank Golding’s ‘The Care Leavers’ Perspective’.
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The Senate report, Betrayal of Trust and the Royal Commission have all made recommendations about the need to provide external oversight to ensure that claims made against institutions, via civil litigation for abuse, are transparent and nonāadversarial.
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New resources and information are continually coming to light around the historical institutions that provided care for children. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is one of the ways that significant amounts of knowledge is being shared with the broader community.
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Nearly two years ago, toward the end of Blogjune 2014, I wrote a post about a visit to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, Canada, and the overwhelming feeling that stories about the residential school system were eerily similar to those I knew from working on the Find & Connect web resource.
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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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This past week, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has resumed its hearing for the Case Study into the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat. Cardinal George Pell’s testimony from Rome lasted four days and was a pivotal moment in the eyes of Ballarat survivors of child sexual abuse.
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It’s a sad fact that many people who were in care do not know what they looked like as children. When I was the Find & Connect Client Liaison Officer I received many emails from people desperately searching for photographs and video footage of themselves and their relatives.
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Some of our readers might be interested in a recent publication, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the unveiling of the memorial to Victorian Forgotten Australians.
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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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