Remembering Bradshaw House
It’s Heritage Week in Central Australia, from 11 to 19 April 2014! On Saturday 12 April, the Heritage Festival in Alice Springs will feature an Open House event, “Remembering Bradshaw House”.
Bradshaw House was the first government receiving home in Central Australia. On Saturday, former residents, workers, visitors and interested others are invited to visit Bradshaw House, to share its hidden history.
Bradshaw House was a short-term facility for children, run by the NT government from 1966 to 1976 (formerly, it was the Receiving Home, Alice Springs). Although it was not designed to provide long-term ‘care’ for children, clearly many children were at Bradshaw House for extended periods of a number of years. Megg Kelham, Gary George and Karen George’s entry on Find & Connect states that Bradshaw House was often described as ‘quite unsuitable and inadequate’. ‘As well as being understaffed, it was often overcrowded and the building itself was old and run-down’.
You can find out more on the Find & Connect website, which includes a link to a digitised file held by the National Archives of Australia. This document includes information about Bradshaw House and other children’s institutions in Alice Springs. This file records how some children were placed in an institution that was no place for a child, the Alice Springs Gaol.
One of our Find & Connect historians, the intrepid Megg Kelham, will be on hand to answer your questions about Bradshaw House and other children’s institutions in Central Australia.
Where: 3 Warburton Street, Eastside (Alice Springs)
When: 2PM to 4PM, Saturday 12 April, 2014
For more information, contact the National Trust of Australia (NT) on 08 8952 4516 or email: mcds@ntnt@internode.on.net