Forgotten Australians in the library: resources relating to Care Leavers in Australian libraries^*

* This paper has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Higher Education’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) requirements.

Abstract

Find & Connect (www.findandconnect.gov.au), funded by the Australian government, is a national website documenting the records relating to the history of child welfare in Australia and providing information for people who lived in orphanages about how to access these vital records about their childhood. This article provides an overview of the range of library resources documented in the Find & Connect web resource. Libraries have material in their custody that has the potential to improve the identity, health and well-being of Care Leavers, and this article seeks to raise awareness about the significance of records to Care Leavers so that libraries can improve service delivery to this community.

Keywords:

• Care Leavers
• Find & Connect web resource
• child welfare
• historic records
• orphanages

Introduction

We come together today to offer our nation’s apology. To say to you the Forgotten Australians, and those who were sent to our shores as children without your consent, that we are sorry (Rudd, 2009).

On 16 November 2009, the Australian government issued an apology to the estimated 500,000 people who grew up in children’s institutions in Australia in the twentieth century. The national apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants was an endorsement of Recommendation 1 of the report of the Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (2003–2004). This was the last instalment in a trilogy of inquiries into Australia’s past treatment of children: the first was the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1995–1997), which was followed by the Inquiry into Child Migration (2000–2001). These inquiries revealed to the Australian public for the first time the widespread abuse and neglect of children in institutions, as well as its aftermath for thousands of people. As a response to this historical injustice and its harmful legacy, the reports from each of the three inquiries contained recommendations relating to the management of records relating to ‘care’ and stressed the vital importance of providing Care Leavers with access to records. The inquiry recommendations, together with the ever-growing amount of testimony from Care Leavers, highlighted the urgent need for Care Leavers to have

access to trustworthy, reliable information to support the search for identity and memories, to find family members and to provide evidence for accountability purposes in seeking redress and compensation, asserting rights and pursuing action against perpetrators of abuse and the institutions that sheltered them (Evans, McKemmish, Daniels, & McCarthy, 2015, p. 344).

Following the 2009 Apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, the Australian government endorsed the recommendations from past Senate inquiries by announcing a suite of ‘Find and Connect’ services and projects to improve access to records, family tracing and support services for Care Leavers and their families. As part of this initiative, the Federal Government contracted the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) to produce the Find & Connect web resource, and the website was launched in November 2011 (www.findandconnect.gov.au). Find & Connect captures the history of children’s homes and orphanages in Australia and provides information to help Care Leavers locate and access the vital records about their childhood.

This article provides an overview of the Find & Connect web resource, with a focus on raising awareness about the range of significant material relating to the history of institutional ‘care’ that is held in Australian library collections. This material has the potential to improve the identity, health and well-being of Care Leavers. Libraries have an important role to play in facilitating access to these records and providing appropriate service delivery to this community.

Find & Connect

The Find & Connect web resource has information about the hundreds of distributed record collections held across Australia, within a contextual framework that maps the complex network of Australia’s child welfare systems, as they evolved over time. It is a ‘public knowledge space’, a term used by the ESRC to distinguish its public web-based information resources from the ‘transient and non-historical websites that dominate the internet’ (McCarthy & Evans, 2012, p. 55). Find & Connect was developed to be an authoritative and reliable source of information about the history of institutional ‘care’ in Australia, with content created by a team of historians and archivists, in close consultation with support services, record holding organisations and Care Leavers.

It comprises over 16,000 pages – Find & Connect has entries depicting organisations, institutions, legislation, events, places, glossary terms, as well as related archival records entities, publications and digital objects. The databases underpinning the website contain tens of thousands of relationships to interconnect these entities. Find & Connect aims to present all this information in a way that makes it easier for Care Leavers to access official records about their time in ‘care’, as well as to gain an understanding of the context of these records, to help them make sense of the past, and to discover where their personal or family story fits into a broader social and historical context.

In 2016, the Find & Connect web resource is a well-established, authoritative knowledge base. The website received 97,000 visits in the first 5 months of 2016, as well as a steady stream of emails from people seeking information and records, or trying to reconnect with family members (Tropea, 2016). Find & Connect is a fundamental tool for organisations providing support to Care Leavers, including the current Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The project has been discussed in a number of journal articles in Australia and internationally, and in 2015 was cited in two keynote addresses at international conferences.

Australian libraries are a key part of the network documented in Find & Connect. Public libraries in Australia provide a point of access to a wealth of contextual information that can help Care Leavers to understand their past. This information includes books (including histories of institutions or organisations, memoirs written by Care Leavers), periodicals (newspaper articles, annual reports, organisational journals and newsletters), photographs, oral history interviews (most notably, the NLA’s collections relating to the Stolen Generations, Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants), online genealogical resources, and material in local studies collections. In addition to this material, a significant proportion of the extant institutional archival records relating to children’s institutions can be found in the manuscript collections of Australian state libraries.

In December 2015, there were 40 libraries registered as organisational entities with the ‘Records Holder’ function in Find & Connect, and the data contained over 300 entities documenting archival material housed in state, national, municipal and university libraries around Australia. Given the significant range of highly relevant and valuable materials in Australian public libraries (not to mention the likelihood of local libraries being a first port of call for Care Leavers seeking information), it is surprising that libraries have to date played a relatively minor role in initiatives to improve access to information for Care Leavers. Rather, it is the archival and recordkeeping sector which has taken the lead in projects to address the information needs of people affected by a childhood in institutional ‘care’. These projects have largely been concerned with access to archival institutional records, created by care provider organisations in the government, church and charitable sectors.

The data in Find & Connect demonstrate that Australian libraries are an important part of the network of organisations holding records and information; library collections contain a wealth of primary and secondary sources relating to the history of ‘care’ in Australia. There are lessons for the library sector in the findings of past and present projects to improve access to records and service delivery to Care Leavers in the archival sector – such as the recently released access principles and best practice guidelines in providing access to records (Department of Social Services [DSS], 2015). Similarly, the literature around good practice in ‘supported release’ of records to Care Leavers (Murray, 2015) contains information that could potentially inform the professional development of librarians.

Sources in Australian libraries relating to Care Leavers

The material in Australian libraries was a vital resource for the team of state-based historians developing the content for the Find & Connect web resource. When the project began in 2011 with an intensive three-year phase of research and content development, the historians’ aim was to identify basic information (at least) about every children’s institution in each Australian state or territory, such as the name/s of the home, the organisation that ran the home, location/s of the home, its opening and closing dates, and details about the home’s major purpose and function. Since 1998, a number of directories or guides to records to help Care Leavers access information had been produced by state governments, as well as the Catholic and Anglican churches. The historians also benefited from the online compilation of information about homes and orphanages published by the Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN, a support and advocacy group founded in 2000). These resources provided a valuable starting point for the state-based historians working on Find & Connect; however, there were significant information gaps and inaccuracies in the existing knowledge base.

Fortunately, the Find & Connect project was developed ‘at an exciting time in the digital world’ (Swain, 2014, p. 43). The research phase of the project coincided with the launch of Trove, the NLA’s search engine, which made available a wealth of information for Find & Connect researchers. Digitised newspaper articles in Trove provided opening and closing dates for children’s homes, and other contextual information, such as alternative names and street addresses. In addition to Trove, the historians also had access to increasing amounts of online material from state and federal archival repositories, allowing for links to be made between these records and the context entities on Find & Connect.

The historians registered hundreds of hitherto-undocumented children’s homes in their databases (and in 2016, new homes continue to be discovered by the project team). Their research aimed not only to capture identifying information about each home and the surviving records. The project methodology, informed by the idea of ‘shared authority’, also involved presenting the history of an institution from a range of viewpoints (Swain, 2014). Until the 1990s, the history of child welfare in Australia was constructed from the perspective of those who ran the institutions. The historians strove to include other voices, particularly those of Care Leavers who had grown up in these institutions, to complicate and challenge the accepted narratives of child welfare in Australia. Testimony to the various inquiries, memoirs and the interviews collected by the NLA’s Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history project were vital resources for the historians.

The contextual information that the historians found in their research and captured in database entities in Find & Connect is just as valuable as the archival traces in institutional files. (Indeed, due to poor recordkeeping practices and even poorer retention of records, for a number of Care Leavers, contextual information is all that survives.) Registering institutions on a site such as Find & Connect serves a purpose that is both practical and symbolic: finding an entity about ‘their’ home makes it possible for a Care Leaver to validate childhood memories of ‘care’, find trustworthy information about themselves and their families and to have evidence for accountability purposes (such as seeking compensation or redress). For some people (particularly those used to not being believed when recounting their childhood experiences in institutions), the information on Find & Connect can also provide vindication (see Wilson & Golding, 2015).

Photographic records are particularly valuable resources for Care Leavers, as was acknowledged in the Senate’s Community Affairs Reference Committee (SCARC) Forgotten Australians report: ‘The lack of photographs and mementos is felt keenly by care leavers … Photographs are a tangible link to the past, to their lost childhood’ (SCARC, 2004a, p. 255). An image of the exterior of a building can be a powerful memory cue for people who spent time in that building, triggering childhood memories and opening up new personal stories (O’Neill, 2015). One submission to the 2004 Senate inquiry demonstrated the importance of photographs to one woman who grew up in ‘care’:

Years later I visited every home where I lived and took photos so that I could validate to myself that ‘yes, this place really does exist’ and I remembered what my life was like when I lived there (SCARC, 2004b, Submission 470).

Many of the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants who came to Canberra for the Apology in 2009 carried with them photographs. Some held photographs of loved ones who had not lived to hear the words of apology from the Australian government, others carried photographs of the institutions where they had been placed as children. In 2012, Swain and Musgrove observed that the digitised images on Find & Connect were ‘already beginning to function as a “family album” for those who have none’ (Swain & Musgrove, 2012, p. 11).

The historians were keen to source images for as many homes as possible in Find & Connect. Material in public libraries was again invaluable for this process. Find & Connect contains links to a number of local studies collections in municipal libraries containing significant material. For example, the Nedlands Library Local Studies Collection in Western Australia has a number of images related to homes run by the Salvation Army. The Canterbury City Council Library Local History Photograph Collection has a collection of images related to the New South Wales Protestant Federation Children’s Home. Initiatives such as Pictorial Canterbury (http://photosau.com.au/Canterbury/scripts/home.asp) make these photographic records more accessible and discoverable, and the links to these collections from the Find & Connect web resource add new context to the library’s materials.

The national apology in 2009 marked a profound shift in the way we understand Australia’s history of institutional ‘care’. The numerous historical sources in library collections take on new meaning and significance and are being used to rewrite personal, family and national histories. There has also been a shift in the collecting practices of libraries – today, the NLA collects ‘ephemera, self-published autobiographies, websites and manuscripts’ relating to Care Leavers (NLA, 2012, p. 52). This is a demonstration of the symbiotic process of change described by Barnwell, whereby collective memory and national collections are shaped by the emergence of stories, events and experiences that were previously censored or kept secret, and vice versa (2015, p. 108).

Libraries can further contribute to this process by identifying all relevant information in their collections and ensuring that the resources are registered in Find & Connect, and thus linked to relevant context entities. In this way, Find & Connect can document the history of Homes from a variety of viewpoints and Care Leavers will be able to locate information and records.

The importance of records to Care Leavers

For many people who grew up in orphanages and homes, accessing records can be ‘the key to starting to make sense of both their past and present’ (Pugh & Schofield, 1999, p. 11). Without ‘typical’ identity documents, photographs, mementoes and family stories, Care Leavers are reliant on ‘the fragmented and often formal records of others’ (Goddard, Feast, & Kirton, 2008, p. 50) to construct their identity and find answers to questions about their childhood and their families. Fahlberg (1991) asserted that ‘It is difficult to grow up as a psychologically healthy adult if one is denied access to one’s own history’ (p. 367).

Looking at it this way, it is not surprising that for so many Care Leavers, the loss of identity as a result of being in ‘care’ results in long-term emotional harm. Without access to information, and support to make sense of it, many Care Leavers struggle to construct a coherent life narrative. In her submission to the 2004 Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Leonie Sheedy wrote of her ‘genealogical bewilderment’ and her difficulty making sense of her childhood as a state ward in Victoria:

Being a parentless person is a most difficult thing. I feel like a second class member of the community. I feel different, I have no sense of belonging to a long line of extended relatives, no parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins. My loss is also my children’s loss as they have no extended relatives on their mother’s side either. I feel that I have no past, that my life only began at 3 years old. The documents and family photos of a normal family life are missing (SCARC, 2004b, Submission 33, p. 3).

It is important for reference librarians to be aware of emotions like these that Care Leavers may bring with them to a reading room. Etherton (2006, p. 236) describes the possible emotional state of Care Leavers approaching an institution for information about themselves: they may be feeling intimidated, embarrassed and have diminished trust due to their past experiences. Etherton also cautions information professionals from making the common assumption that family history research is merely a ‘leisure pursuit’.

It is also important to understand that Care Leavers and information professionals may understand concepts of ‘ownership’ quite differently: ‘Care Leavers often assume that the records about them, belong to them’ (DSS, 2015, p. 51). Emerging research in the field of archival science is exploring how record holders can manage their collections in a way that acknowledges the rights of those who are the subjects of records: concepts of participatory archives and shared stewardship acknowledge that multiple parties have rights in records (Evans et al., 2015; Gilliland & McKemmish, 2014). This literature can be valuable in helping reference staff in libraries to understand and respect the way that many Care Leavers relate to records in their custody. As Winter and Cohen (2005) observed, the importance of records to Care Leaver records ‘cannot be underestimated’ (p. 51).

Trauma-informed service delivery in libraries

The testimonies provided to government inquiries provide a clear demonstration of the trauma and abuse that so many people experienced as children in institutional ‘care’, and the direct and indirect impacts of this harm on thousands of people and families. Many Care Leavers experienced what is termed ‘complex trauma’ – repeated experience of neglect and abuse in childhood which can translate into a range of life-long social, emotional, behavioural and interpersonal difficulties for adults (Australians Surviving Child Abuse, 2012; McAloon, 2014). An understanding of complex trauma can help to explain why records are so important to Care Leavers and how accessing records can have a significant emotional impact.

These records can change lives. For many, the records are so tightly bound up with questions of identity and self, that gaining knowledge of the circumstances and events can provoke a range of complex emotions, including reopening of old wounds, and re-traumatisation (DSS, 2015, p. 16).

There are a number of useful resources to help librarians and other professionals understand the issues facing many Care Leavers in their daily lives and the emotions that may be triggered when they approach an organisation holding information about their time in ‘care’. One of these is Forgotten Australians: supporting survivors of institutional care in Australia, first published in 2008. This booklet outlines what many Forgotten Australians are likely to have experienced during their time in an institution, such as loss of family and identity, neglect, abuse, deception, poor health care and education. It also describes some of the ways that these experiences have long-term effects for many Care Leavers, resulting in issues including poor literacy and numeracy, a fear of authority, mental illness and a lack of communication or social skills (Alliance for Forgotten Australians, 2008, pp. 5–13). The best practice guidelines published by DSS in June 2015 contain a section relating to providing support to Care Leavers accessing records, which includes guidance about training requirements for staff providing services to Care Leavers (DSS, 2015, p. 56).

It is important for the library profession to be aware of the profound emotional impact that accessing records can have on Care Leavers. The ‘Forgotten Australians’ report (SCARC, 2004a) contains harrowing stories of Care Leavers who accessed their information without appropriate support. An example is the story of ‘Mim’, whose records were held by the State Library of Victoria after it acquired a number of significant manuscript collections from care provider organisations during the 1970s, including the Children’s Protection Society and the Melbourne Orphanage (SCARC, 2004a, p. 268). Records can be cruelly brief, like Mim’s, or they can be ‘voluminous’, like Frank Golding’s files (see Golding, 2010, p. 86). Today, Care Leavers are much more likely to have access to support and expertise when accessing their records: there is a network of Find and Connect support services funded by DSS, as well as a number of independent support organisations including CLAN and the Child Migrants Trust (CMT). However, finding, and not finding, records can still cause emotional pain (Evans et al., 2015, p. 337). Retraumatisation continues to be a very real risk for many Care Leavers, throughout the journey of searching for and accessing their information. Sensitive and appropriate service delivery, based on an awareness of the potential emotional impacts, can help to prevent Care Leavers suffering further harm.

There is a growing amount of literature about the potential ‘affective ramifications’ of accessing records, as well as guidance to help professionals to support Care Leavers through the process (e.g. Goddard et al., 2008; Golding, 2010; Wilson & Golding, 2015). Despite the fact that much of the literature providing guidance about good practice in ‘supported release’ is aimed at the social work profession, it contains valuable information for information professionals who have Care Leaver records in their custody (e.g. DSS, 2015; Feast, 2009; Murray, 2015; Murray & Humphreys, 2012).

At the time of writing, the library profession in Australia has taken some steps towards providing better access to information and more appropriate services for the Care Leaver community. The ‘Bringing them home’ and Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history projects delivered by the NLA captured the ‘care’ experiences of hundreds of people and have made an enormous contribution to the resources available to explore the history of child welfare. The State Library of Victoria has produced the ‘Adoption and Forgotten Australians’ research guide (http://guides.slv.vic.gov.au/adoption), with information and resources for Care Leavers and people affected by adoption. Australian libraries’ efforts since the 1990s to consult and engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to improve services, develop professional skills and cross-cultural awareness in library staff and to make libraries more welcoming and suitable for Indigenous peoples provide a good practice example that could be modified to suit the particular needs of the Care Leaver community. Memory institutions such as archives, libraries and museums can be highly intimidating spaces for some people – one submission to the 2004 Senate inquiry mentioned the person’s ‘fear of public places … I couldn’t go into a bank or a library’ (SCARC, 2004a, p. 161).

The paradigm of trauma-informed care and practice (Australians Surviving Child Abuse, 2012) has potential for improved models of service delivery in institutions holding records related to Care Leavers (Jones, 2014). A shift towards trauma-informed practice involves more than changing service provision. Discussions are also beginning to emerge about the ‘emotional and affective labour’ required by information professionals to manage records that relate to injustices, rights violations and traumatic events (Clyde, 2015; O’Neill, 2016). This work – which involves exposure to traumatic stories and images, and engagement with people who have experienced complex trauma – carries a risk of vicarious trauma (also known as secondary trauma) to librarians, archivists, historians and others. Trauma-informed practice also requires that institutions acknowledge the potential (and usually unexpected) emotional impact of exposure to trauma and provide support, supervision and training to address this risk and help staff safeguard themselves (Blue Knot Foundation, 2016). In recent years, the Find & Connect web resource project team has taken steps to be more ‘trauma informed’, which has included a focus on staff well-being, regular group supervision and undergoing training about vicarious trauma and trauma-informed practice.

Conclusion

The history of institutional ‘care’ in Australia is contested terrain, and it is a history that is currently being reassessed and reinterpreted, as is clearly demonstrated by events such as the national inquiries into Stolen Generations, Former Child Migrants and Forgotten Australians and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. These events have transformed the meaning and value of records from the past held in memory institutions, and are also contributing to new understandings of the roles and responsibilities of information professionals.

Research undertaken for the Find & Connect web resource project has identified a wide range of material within the collections of Australian libraries that is of immense significance to Care Leavers. The website connects these resources to Find & Connect’s contextual framework and to histories and stories that have until recently been hidden and silenced. Libraries are the custodians of information that is of huge importance to the Care Leaver community. By acknowledging the value of these resources and participating in initiatives to improve access and service delivery to this community, libraries can contribute to social justice for Care Leavers and help to address the harms and wrongs of the past.

Notes on contributor

Cate O’Neill is the National Editor and Research Coordinator of the Find & Connect web resource project. With an educational background in historical studies, Cate has also worked in archives, including at Public Record Office Victoria, where in 2005–2006 she was involved in a project aimed at improving access to records of the Stolen Generations. She is also Research Fellow on the ‘Routes to the past’ project, funded by the Melbourne Social Equity Institute Interdisciplinary Seed Funding Scheme (2015–2016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This paper has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Higher Education’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) requirements.