Shurlee Swain

Single mothers and their children : disposal, punishment and survival in Australia

1. Introduction: To have an unlicensed child 2.The mothers: a perfectly nice girl - an ordinary girl, perhaps your own daughter 3. Breaking the news: what are you going to do about it? 4. Pregnancy and confinement: medicos, midwives and morals 5. Death: very army of murderesses within our midst 6. Separation: now put this thing that has happened to you away, forget about it, get on with the rest of your life 7. Surviving: you must maintain your own 8. Illegitimacy: to punish the innocent child 9. Empowerment and resistance: speaking out publicly.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves: child welfare records and the construction of identity among Australians who, as children, experienced out-of-home ‘care’

Recent parliamentary inquiries in Australia and elsewhere have highlighted the importance of records access in the process of identity construction amongst survivors of out-of-home ‘care’, many of whom go through their lives without the tangible links to the past and to identity, which most people take for granted. Changes in legislation to facilitate access to personal records can only partially remedy this deficiency, as significant restrictions remain. In addition official records are frequently sketchy and disjointed, providing at best only partial, and often quite damaging answers to such questions as: ‘why was I put into “care”’ ‘what happened to me while I was there’, and ‘why did “care” providers treat me in that way?’ This paper argues that archivists and historians have to move beyond their traditional roles, to work constructively with ‘care’-leavers to provide the contextual information needed to identify, access and understand the records that document their lives.

Women in conversation: a wartime social survey in Melbourne, Australia 1941-43

Abstract This article examines the gendered dimensions of relationships in the conduct of a major academic Australian social survey in Melbourne in the early years of the Second World War. Despite its grounding in methodology current in Britain at the time, its execution and outcomes mirrored the gendered and classed nature of the survey, with its male direction, middleclass female interviewers, and largely working-class respondents. The value of ‘womens conversations’ was reflected in the fullness of the findings that were made publicly available in subsequent years.