Find & Connect Web Resource
Professor Shurlee Swain
Funded by the Commonwealth Department of Social Services, this project, a collaboration with the e-Scholarship Centre at the University of Melbourne, involves the further development of a web resource for former child migrants and Forgotten Australians, documenting the history of child welfare is Australia. Associated scholarly outputs address the issues raised by the apology and reparation process in relation to abusive practices in welfare institutions in the past and current debates around institutional responses to child sexual abuse.
http://www.findandconnect.gov.au/
History of Adoption in Australia
Professor Shurlee Swain
Following from an ARC project conducted in collaboration with Monash University, this research uses a database of more than 20,000 adoption advertisements that appeared in Australian newspapers between 1850 and 1954 to explore the notion of adoption as an expression of a market in children that waxed and waned over time.
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/historyofadoption/
A Long History of Foster Care in Australia: Hidden Stories of Growing up in Foster Care in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Dr Nell Musgrove, and Dr Dee Michell (University of Adelaide)
(Australian Research Council Discovery Grant funded project 2013-2015)
Foster care has been the most widely used means to provide for vulnerable children in Australia and yet little is known about the practice. This project will make a significant contribution toward shaping the future of out-of-home care in Australia, and involve both archival and oral history research into past policies and practices which have had a significant impact on the lives of many thousands of Australians.
The project continues Dr Musgrove's association with the Federal Government's Find and Connect Web Resource, a website which brings together histories of out-of-home 'care' and archival holdings to help support Former Child Migrants, Forgotten Australians, their families, and all people with an interest in this part of Australia's history.
A Survey of Child Labour in Australian Social Welfare History
Dr Nell Musgrove
(ACU Research Funded Project 2014-2015)
This pilot study aims to extend understandings of the ways in which Australian laws and policies relating to child labour, education and child welfare have intersected. It will provide the basis of a larger future social history of child labour within government-sanctioned child welfare systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Transnational Women's Movements and Social Policy Debate
Dr Ellen Warne
This project examines the leading role that transnational women's organisations played by initiating campaigns to introduce drug and alcohol control (temperance); prevent venereal disease through public education; regulate new technologies and introduce censorship; find ways to engage and channel adolescent girls; and develop leadership among women both at a local, national and transnational level. The project will explore the tensions inherent in working transnationally as the political atmosphere became increasingly tense in the lead-up to, and aftermath of, World War II.
Grounds for Justice: Accounting for Australia's Social Welfare Past
Dr Fiona Davis
(ACU Research Funded Project 2014-2016)
The project explores the question of evidence in social welfare inquiries, past and present, with a focus on delivering greater social justice to the victims of past practices.