Recently at Lotus Place we have noticed a flurry of interest in service records, particularly from World War Two. Overwhelmingly these relate to fathers / grandfathers / brothers / uncles but there are also a number of mothers / grandmothers / sisters / aunts who enlisted. People find a range of benefits when they access a service record.
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New resources and information are continually coming to light around the historical institutions that provided care for children. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is one of the ways that significant amounts of knowledge is being shared with the broader community.
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Nearly two years ago, toward the end of Blogjune 2014, I wrote a post about a visit to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, Canada, and the overwhelming feeling that stories about the residential school system were eerily similar to those I knew from working on the Find & Connect web resource.
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Eight years ago on 17 June 2008 the Premier of South Australia the Hon M.D. Rann moved a motion in Parliament for an apology to the South Australian child victims of abuse while in State Care. Two years later four giant steel daisies bloomed in Peace Park, Adelaide with the unveiling of a Memorial honouring these children.
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Care Leavers share with me their shock at some of what we find in our records. The language hits us between the eyes. Our counterparts in the nineteenth century were tagged by a battalion of adjectives: criminal or neglected, destitute, abandoned, deserted, unkempt, illegitimate, wayward, slovenly, deserving or undeserving.
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We all know how beneficial reading to children is. Studies also tell us that family storytelling – reminiscences about our own childhood, family stories going back through the generations – is linked to a range of benefits, beyond literacy and communication skills.
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Wattle Place hosts a regular interagency meeting of services in the Sydney area who hold care records. At one of our recent meetings we invited Barbara Reed of Recordkeeping Innovation to speak about her work with the Department of Social Services and the creation of the Access to Records by Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants
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Usage of the web resource continues to grow, with stats gathered from Google analytics showing a steady increase in page views and visitors over the period from 1 Jan – 30 May. This is remarkable given that in the last 6 months of last year our stats were showing a downward trend.
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Although we’re hearing a lot about the economy, asylum seekers, “jobs & growth”, climate change, negative gearing, health and education during this looooong federal election campaign, it is heartening to see that out-of-home care and supporting young people leaving care are emerging as issues.
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Today is International Archives Day, a day to acknowledge and promote the work of archivists and archives. You might not know that the Find & Connect web resource relies heavily on archivists and the records held within archives to create the website you see today.
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May 3, 2024
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