AUSTRALIA
Care Leavers Australia Network
Too many ready to call it a day
Before the day starts
Stan Cullimore, Paul Heaton, Ted Key, ‘Flag Day’, 1985
In 2004, at the official hearings of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee as part of the Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Leonie Sheedy, co-founder of the Care Leavers of Australia Network, demanded that there be space made available for an exhibition about the experiences of children who grew up in orphanages: ‘Get the dinosaurs out of the Australian museum, for once, and dedicate it to orphanages and children. Let our histories be visible’
Sheedy’s plea, directed at the Australian Museum, Sydney, can be interpreted as a simple preference for social over natural history museums. The National Museum of Australia arguably fulfilled Sheedy’s prescription with the exhibition Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions, on display in Canberra from November 2011 until February 2012. Sheedy’s proposal to get rid of dinosaur skeletons can also be taken as a criticism of ‘dinosaur’ practices in museums. As this paper will show, there seemed to be an initial reluctance on the part of the National Museum to create an exhibition about Forgotten Australians, and the scope, positioning and temporary nature of the exhibition reflect this. Why this unwillingness? Is the National Museum guilty of a ‘dinosaur’ mentality? Is there a museology that counters this reluctance?
The background to Inside
The federal Senate inquiry into the Forgotten Australians marked the last of a trilogy of reports into Australian twentieth-century institutional ‘care’ for children. The first was the Bringing Them Home report published in 1997, the inquiry into the historical removal of Aboriginal children, now known as the Stolen Generations, from their families. In August 2001 a Senate committee published its report, Lost Innocents, about the consequences for child migrants of the agreement between the British and Australian governments that resulted in the migration of British and Maltese children from the 1920s until 1970. In 2003 the Senate decided that the largest group of Australian children in institutionalised care, the ‘Forgotten Australians’, deserved recognition equal to members of the Stolen Generations and to the group known as ‘Former Child Migrants’.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.