 That's probably enough, probably more than enough from me, but I do welcome seeing so many of you taking an active interest in this, this afternoon. Our first speaker is Adele, she knows where, if I'm not horribly mispronouncing her name, who we're very, very pleased to welcome from the Center for Heritage and Museum Studies in the Australian National University. Seeing one of our colleagues from Australia here this afternoon really shows the benefit of this connected world and the use of Zoom that it gives us the privilege of hearing someone who's done a fantastic amount of work in the areas of museum heritage presentation of these sorts of issues. One of the team who created the Memory Museum at the ANU. Adele started out in theatre direction at Flinders University, completed her PhD there, and has subsequently had a really interesting career at the intersections of a number of areas we're interested in this afternoon. It's great pleasure indeed to welcome her to give her paper on The Good Girls, A History of Children in a Queensland Mental Asylum. Over to you. Thank you so much, Martin. And as they say in the classics, I'll share my screen. Okay. And okay. If I asked you who the Forgotten Australians are, could you answer? And how are the Forgotten Australians connected with the living history of a group of women known as the Goodner Girls? What does the living history of the Goodner Girls and the Forgotten Australians tell us about the legacies of colonialism and empire? First, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians on the land of which I am speaking tonight. I pay my respect to their aboriginal elders both past and present. I acknowledge that the land on which I speak is stolen land, the sovereignty was never given over, and the treaties are yet to be negotiated. As a unionist, I pledge my solidarity with the traditional owners and all aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander's peoples in their struggles for justice, sovereignty and historical truth. I thank you to the Society of Antiquaries of London for the opportunity to speak and to Dr Linda Grant and Daniel Wilson Higgins and Martin Millet for their generous and collegial support. It's such a privilege to share a program with such a group of esteemed presenters. And I ask without presumption if you might forgive me if I don't stay the distance tonight it's very late here I'm not at all complaining I'm so happy to be here. I'm thrilled to be part of this seminar and I really look forward to catching up on the YouTube presentations. Thank you so much. So, who are the forgotten Australians. The term forgotten Australians comes from the title of the 2004 Senate report. It was referred in a trilogy of reports following federal government inquiries into Australia's out of home care system in the 20th century. Prior to the forgotten Australians report there was the bringing them home report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families, approximately 50,000 children. Then there was the last innocence report writing the record on child migration. This concerned former child migrants from Britain or Malta, approximately 7,000 children. In addition, 88% of children who were either institutionalized or placed in foster care in the 20th century were non indigenous domestic Australian children. These are the forgotten Australians also known as care leavers, at least 440,000 children. How did this particular cohort of Australian children end up in out of home care. Some were removed from their parents and made state wards and or placed in state care because the state considered their parents unfit or the children at risk. Some had parents who were dead in prison, missing or otherwise unable to care for them. Others were placed by their parents because the parents could not provide for them. Sometimes these parents had to work and use the home as a form of long term childcare. If they could, they paid maintenance to those running the institutions. Many children were in home simply by reason of poverty in an era of almost no community or government support for families in crisis or need. Many children had fathers and mothers who had returned traumatized from war service. Some children were placed in institutions simply because their parents had separated or divorced. The inquiry that preceded the forgotten Australians report was inundated with testimonies of horrific neglect and abuse experienced by non indigenous Australian children more often than not victims of poverty. Many children placed in care suffered long lasting separation from their siblings. Many children were falsely told that their parents were deceased or did not love them. Despite failed attempts by parents to visit their children, physical deprivation, hunger and inadequate dental care were common. Some children were the subjects of medical testing. Others were victims of sustained brutality, including solitary confinement, cruel beatings and humiliation, a large number of children experienced sexual abuse. Children generally did not receive an adequate education and instead were forced to work on farms or in laundries. Many had their names and identities changed by institutional staff. In Australia, there were over 900 orphanages and institutions for children in the 20th century. Some children who were wards of the state were sent to orphanages to other institutions such as juvenile delinquents or psychiatric facilities. In the 20th century in Australia, children could be incarcerated even if they did not commit a crime. They were locked up for status offenses such as running away or other behaviors which led those in authority to label the children as uncontrollable. The testimonies in my book, Goodner Girls, exemplify this policy and associated practice. These women, when they were children, have been incarcerated in Queensland's oldest and largest mental health facility, Walston Park Hospital, also known as Goodner, because of the hospital's previous name, Goodner Asylum. It is now known as the Park Centre for Mental Health. These children did not have a mental illness. So why were they sent there? In 1959, the Queensland government had decided to apply a medical model to respond to so-called juvenile delinquents. This went right on through to the 1980s. Most of these children had run away from abuse in orphanages or in foster care, and for running away, they were locked up. In 1998, the Queensland government established the Commission of Inquiry into abuse of children in Queensland institutions known as the Ford Inquiry. But the terms of that inquiry excluded those cases where children had been sent to adult facilities such as Walston Park Hospital. So this group of survivors did not have access to the financial redress scheme that came out of the Ford Inquiry. But in 2010, the Queensland government apologized to former children under state care who had been placed in adult mental hospitals, but did not it fulfill its promise to hold reconciliation talks with survivors. In 2012, I began working with this group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous survivors in order to lobby the Queensland government to grant them much-needed excursion payments. In February 2017, the Queensland Department of Health announced a formal reconciliation process for those who, as children, were in the care of the state and inappropriately placed in Queensland adult mental health facilities. In October 2017, each of the survivors who had participated in the reconciliation process received letters from the Queensland government that detailed a list of reparations including excursion payments. It had taken over five years of campaigning and the women had finally won. My book, Goodner Girls, discusses that campaign, the history of government policies, the socio-political context and, importantly, the experiences of four of the women survivors and three staff members. What does this particular chapter of living history tell us about the legacy of colonialism and empire? Firstly, the institutionalisation of children is part of a wider institutionalised welfare policies and practices that emerged during the 19th century in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and Britain. The Industrial Revolution saw masses of people relocate to areas that grew into large cities. The growth of a pauper class prompted the formation of charitable organisations and new practices of state monitoring and attempt to control individuals and community through social welfare agencies. The Australian Senate's Lost Innocence report notes that child migration policy in the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th century was informed by the philanthropic desire to rescue poor and abandoned children from destitution and neglect in Britain, giving them to a better life and the healthy, rural lifestyle of the underpopulated colonies. Child migration was also seen as beneficial to the receiving countries because child migrants were regarded as potential members of a healthy and productive white workforce. But none of the Goodner girls were child migrants from Britain and Malta. And so we cannot analyse the history of the institutionalisation of children solely through the lens of colonial child migration. Charlene Robinson and Jessica Patton in their article The Question of Genocide note that the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their family groups was not confined to the 20th century. The earlier colonial period in Australia from 1788 to 1901 saw generations of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their Aboriginal family groups. The attempted genocide of the 20th century efforts were informed by eugenics, a desire to breed out a group of offensively labelled Australia's half-caste population. I note in my book Goodner Girls that the theory of eugenics was first developed in England during the Victorian era by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that heredity had had more influence on individual characteristics than environment. He advocated for the collection and publication of eugenics data and the discouragement of procreation among those considered unfit. The important thing to note here that those who were considered unfit were not only Indigenous peoples and certain ethnic minorities, but anyone who was deemed as mental or physical defectives. In addition, the notion of the deviant meant that homeless youth or other young people who gained negative attention from the public or police were also the target of removal and institutionalisation. By contrast to eugenics, euthenics is the theory that environmental factors can temper hereditary predispositions. Historian Stephen Garten maintains that in Australia social problems were perceived to be the result of both hereditary and environmental factors which influenced the mental hygiene movement. It was this preoccupation with mental hygiene that prompted a medical response to so-called juvenile delinquents and the incarceration of children in psychiatric facilities. So what are all the implications of this, the forgotten Australians generally and the Goodner Girls specifically, what are the implication in relation to the legacies of colonialism and empire? I suggest that viewing this chapter in Australian living history solely in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples limits our understanding of how widespread the policy and practicing of warehousing children in Australia was. We need a revised historiography. In Australia, we have to stop implying in our work, research, teaching, museum exhibitions that the history of the institutionalisation of children in Australia is confined to the stolen generations and or to a narrative of migration. We need to acknowledge the wider systemic discourses that informed the policies of institutionalising children, both through time and across identity groups. This is a social justice issue with significant implications for many vulnerable people in Australia. If you ask an Australian who the forgotten Australians are, it is highly likely that they will not know. And there are published surveys that substantiate this observation. Forgotten Australians currently report being traumatised when they have to explain to service providers how they were institutionalised when they were children, even though they aren't Indigenous. Forgotten Australians end up having to give informal history lessons to disbelieving health and social service professionals. There are many sectors that are that are implicated in this lack of recognition of the forgotten Australians and the museum sector in Australia is one of them. There is no ongoing representation of the forgotten Australians in the galleries of mainstream city-based publicly funded museums in Australia. And the peak body of the Australian museum sector, the Australian Museums and Galleries Association won't support any form of public discussion about this. I suggest that this refusal may be explained by the tactics of divide and rule by Western colonialists. And I'm indebted to John Murray for this observation. John Murray is a Forgotten Australian, a former government adviser and a recipient of the Human Rights Commission Award in Australia. These are the four tactics of divide and rule. And I respect and appreciate that this is discussed in a range of publications. But I'll just pause for a moment so you can just see those. So for the National Museum of Australia to maintain ongoing representation of the stolen generations, that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were separated from their family groups in the 20th century. For the National Museum of Australia to maintain ongoing representation of the stolen generations, while at the same time insist on an absence of representation of former child migrants and the forgotten Australians, I suggest is an example of a divide and rule tactic. Aboriginal children, child migrants from Britain and Malta and non indigenous domestic children who were taken from their families grew up together in orphanages and other institutions, but later were categorised and divided into subgroups by scholars and government policies. The stolen generations is the group of institutionalised children that have the most visibility and recognition in Australia. When non indigenous survivors of institutionalised child abuse seek recognition, representation and resources, they are sometimes often deemed by the elite as being racist as guilty of some perverse white backlash. Not only is this divisive, it's traumatising. The refusal of mainstream museums in Australia to represent the forgotten Australians is a cruel public history policy and practice, and sadly to that practice is echoed in our curricula. In 2011, Australia's then Federal Education Minister Peter Garrett dismissed former Senator Andrew Murray's recommendation that the topic of forgotten Australians be mandated in the Australian curriculum in history. My book, Goodner Girls, comprises the living history of both indigenous and non indigenous women who were sent together to an adult psychiatric facility when they were children. These are the survey, this is the example of the survey findings which found that most Australians do not know who forgotten Australians are. The testimony of children who were sent to adult psychiatric facilities, their testimonies were excluded from the Ford inquiry in 1998. Their pleas for recognition and redress were not heeded until 20 years later. The narratives of the Goodner Girls and the wider living history of the stolen generations, the forgotten Australians and former child migrants remind us to be vigilant about how we frame references, terms of references to human rights inquiries, how we scope our scholarly research, how we determine what is collected and exhibited in our museums. And indeed, we need to recognise that many of those same organisations that ran abusive institutions for children in the past are still being funded today as part of the outsourcing of child protection services. In Australia today there are 45,000 children and out of home care. We need to keep watch of the current child welfare system and we need to be mindful of our discourses in our research. Because when we, in positions of influence, divide marginalised groups according to whom we deem the most grief worthy, whom we deem the most deserving of representation in our own scholarship, then we may well be perpetuating a contemporary echo of the colonial practice of divide and rule. I hold on to the last words of my book Goodner Girls, but they're not my words. They are the words of a former child inmate from Walston Park Hospital. These are the words she spoke to the Queensland Minister for Communities, Women and Youth in her office. These are the words that remind me to heed the voices of those who are left behind, those who fall through the cracks of constructed hierarchies of history that we compartmentalise. And it is with the courageous words of that survivor that I will end today. In 2017, she sat in front of the minister in her office. She looked her in the eye and said, you have inherited writing the wrongs of a past that both sides of government knew about and were complicit in. It's cruel what happened to us, but it's also cruel what you're doing to us now making us fight for so long. It is time to finish it. Adele, thank you so much for that. That was very moving and really important for us to hear that. I haven't got any questions in the chat coming yet. I would just like to ask you, given your experience in this. What advice would you give other people setting out to try and look at excluded groups? What's the thing that you've learned most from this fantastic piece of work? Two things shut up and listen and the other one is none, not one research project that I have done on this, not one was initiated by me. It was these people coming to me asking for help. The only thing, one project that was done was the Rudd government when Kevin Rudd was prime minister. He commissioned the National Museum of Australia to create an exhibition on the experience of institutionalized children to widen the scope from just the stolen generation. But that came from people lobbying, those forgotten Australians lobbying the government. So, rather than set out, I think it's about listening and hearing what marginalized people want and working to support them on their terms, not coming in like a do-gooder. Sure. I've got now a couple of questions, but now beginning to pop in. What age range are you talking about coming from Heather? This is someone whose uncle was sent out when he was under 16. What age range are we talking about with these kids? So the forgotten Australians are those who are institutionalized in the 20th century. So, and that is up until say, you know, the 1980s and 1990s. So if you can imagine children being institutionalized at that age. But I suppose there'd be some forgotten Australians who would be reticent to give an age range because some want to see themselves as separate from current children and out of home care. Someone to see it, want people to be reminded that this is a through line. So we're probably looking, probably the youngest would be in their 40s, say, that in terms of the 20th century, but it's an ongoing history. And we've then got a question from Willa Richala on how museum professionals that responded to this work on underrepresentation of marginalized groups. So I was employed as a curator on the exhibition that Kevin Rudd commissioned. It was a recommendation 35 of the Senate report, it was meant to be an ongoing representation exhibition. The National Museum did not do that. The rhetoric they use is we don't have no exhibition is permanent because of conservation, you've got to rotate objects. They've got 65 objects, they could rotate and have ongoing representation. It was funded to tour. Not many museums took up that exhibition, even though they were funded to host it. I think there is a real sense with mainstream museum professionals in Australia. That if you start looking at the white cohort that were institutionalized, you're somehow eclipsing the very important push of indigenous rights. And I'm suggesting that if that is our attitude to reconciliation, then that's weak. Surely we can extend a hand to another and not at all dilute the crucial reconciliation process with indigenous people by also acknowledging the non-indigenous kid that was in the dormitory bed next to them. And there's one here from Debbie Chalice saying that the role of eugenics is so important and asking what role will be in others' ideas around attachment and against institutions playing recognized in the cruelty of these systems. Thank you so much for that question. This notion of looking at the scientific theories at the time. All I would say is that that's a fantastic research question. I have not undertaken that research question. I don't want to answer something where I haven't done the research. And I'm so sorry if that's an inadequate answer. I would just like to acknowledge how much more research needs to be done and what a great threat of research that would be. Adele, we're more or less out of time. Can I just express our very deep thanks to you for sharing this with us and doing it in such an open and engaging way that I'm sure has made many others including me think very carefully about these things. I wanted to be involved. Thank you, Martin, so much and to everyone for your insightful questions. I'm very grateful. Thank you. Thanks a lot.