Care Leavers’ records: a case for a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model

Abstract

The historical records created by Australian child welfare agencies were never intended to be released to the children after they left ‘care’. They were administrative records that were compiled for the agencies’ own use, not to meet the needs of the children or their adult selves. What happened after records were released to Care Leavers and reused by them is not what the agencies intended to happen. The author argues that this cannot be adequately mapped onto the Records Continuum Model and proposes a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model to represent the processes involved when Care Leavers are attempting to access their records.

Keywords:

• Records Continuum Model
• Care Leavers
• access
• agency
• repurposed archive

Introduction

The present article applies the Records Continuum Model¹ developed by Frank Upward in the 1990s to the analysis of the processes involved when people who have spent time in the child welfare system in Australia in the twentieth century want to access the records about their time in ‘care’.² Continuum thinking recognises that records mean different things to different people in different contexts and can accommodate different interpretations of the same records to represent the perspectives of all the actors with an interest in the records. Records are fixed in content and structure, but ‘always in a process of becoming’.³ The records that were created about children who grew up in orphanages, in children’s homes, in foster care and in other forms of out-of-home care have the potential to be used by the subjects of those records after they leave care to reconnect with their families, to reconstruct their identity, and as evidence in their fight for redress. However, enabling them to be used for those purposes implies a rethinking of the role of the archives that hold them.

The article starts with a brief explanation of the Records Continuum Model and of the methodology used by the author. It then describes the multiple problems faced by Care Leavers⁴ who want to access their records to make sense of their time spent in care and to reconstruct their identity. Through mapping onto the Records Continuum Model the records created in the Australian child welfare system in the twentieth century, it shows some limitations of the Records Continuum in representing the special processes that must be applied to Care Leavers’ records. The author, therefore, proposes the inclusion of an additional dimension between the third and the fourth dimensions of the Records Continuum to better represent the special processes that take place when Care Leavers want to access the records about their time in care. The last section of the article discusses the advantages of a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model as a tool that enables us to explain how Care Leavers’ records differ from other types of organisational records and, consequently, to justify the adoption of special provisions for the management of these records.

Methodology

The author uses the Records Continuum as a diagnostic tool to discuss the processes that apply to the release of Care Leavers’ records. The Records Continuum Model was developed at Monash University in the 1990s by Frank Upward and his colleagues Sue McKemmish, Barbara Reed and Livia Iacovino in an effort to represent onto one diagram the complex contexts in which records are created and managed.⁵ The model challenged the definition of archives as records that have been selected for permanent preservation, and emphasised instead the continuity between records and archives. In Continuum thinking, archives are perceived as archives from the moment of their creation,⁶ and recordkeeping (in one word) includes both the making and the management of records and archives.⁷ The Records Continuum Model highlights the evidential, transactional and contextual nature of records and represents the multiple interrelated domains in which access and use can occur.⁸ Records are ‘always in a process of becoming’ as their contexts and use are always susceptible to change.⁹

The four dimensions of the Records Continuum Model are generally represented by four concentric circles. However, these dimensions co-exist in and through time, they are not stages through which records must pass. In practice, records do not always follow a linear progression through them. The Records Continuum Model makes it possible to look at records from different perspectives and to represent the different perspectives from which a record can be seen and the different recordkeeping trails that it may follow onto one diagram. In the first dimension, Create, actions take place, leaving a trace that something has happened, which is recorded in documents. In the second dimension, Capture, these documents are captured in a recordkeeping system and become records when the necessary metadata is added to enable them to act as evidence of transactions. In the third dimension, Organise, the records are absorbed into a recordkeeping system at the organisation level and become evidence of the functions accomplished by the organisation. In the fourth dimension, Pluralise, the records are released outside the boundaries of the organisation that produced them so that they can contribute to the social memory of the broader community and can be reused in multiple ways and forms. The four axes of the Records Continuum Model map the records that are created on the recordkeeping containers axis, the actors who are involved in the recordkeeping processes on the identity axis, the actions that take place on the transactional axis and their evidential qualities on the evidential axis.¹⁰

The Records Continuum Model is the best known, but, over the years, other Continuum models have been developed. Frank Upward has proposed several other models, including an Information Continuum Model, an Information System Continuum Model, a Publishing Continuum Model and a Cultural Heritage Continuum Model.¹¹ Current Continuum research is leading to the development of participatory models that rename the first dimension Co-Create to reflect the multiple actors with rights in the records that are created.¹² At Monash University, Greg Rolan has developed a Participatory Recordkeeping Model and Leisa Gibbons a Mediated Recordkeeping Model.¹³ The use of different models makes it possible to represent the processes that apply to different types of information resources in different circumstances and to account for cases when these processes do not easily fit onto the original version of the Records Continuum Model.

In this article, the author begins by mapping the context of the records created in the child welfare system in Australia in the twentieth century (Care Leavers’ records) onto the Records Continuum Model; and in doing so, shows that some of the processes that need to be applied to the records before they can be released to Care Leavers cannot be adequately mapped onto the Records Continuum Model. The author proposes an alternative model, a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model, focused on Care Leavers’ records, and discusses the advantages of the model as a tool to highlight where special processes should take place. By proposing an alternative Continuum model, the author also aims to contribute to the development of Continuum theory. In the same way that records are ‘always becoming’,¹⁴ Continuum theory itself is evolving, expanding and ‘always becoming’. The strength of Continuum thinking is that it can result in different models and enable different perspectives of records to be explored by using the Records Continuum Model or one of its variants.

Access to Care Leavers’ records

Over the past three decades, a series of inquiries¹⁵ has brought to light the plight of children who grew up in the child welfare system in Australia in the twentieth century and led to National Apologies to the Stolen Generations on 13 February 2008, to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants on 16 November 2009 and for Forced Adoptions on 21 March 2013.¹⁶ The 2003 Senate Inquiry on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, or Forgotten Australians, estimated that more than half a million people had experienced some form of institutional care in Australia in the twentieth century in orphanages, children’s homes or foster care.¹⁷ The records about their time in care are dispersed among a wide range of institutions.¹⁸ Poor original recordkeeping, poor subsequent records management and poor archival documentation and control have resulted in many problems for those among them who want to access their records.¹⁹ At many institutions, recordkeeping was minimal.²⁰ In many cases, records have been lost or destroyed. The surviving records are scattered and have rarely been subject to professional or consistent archiving, making them difficult to find.²¹ Moreover, the quality of the material that has been preserved varies widely.²² In addition, the lack of uniform, cross-jurisdictional and cross-sectoral access frameworks has resulted in a multitude of barriers to accessing the records that have survived.²³

Care Leavers want to access the records relating to their time in institutional care for three main reasons: to reconnect with their family, to help reconstruct their identity and to get evidence in their search for delayed justice.²⁴ Many are seeking to obtain key personal information, such as their birth certificate, or are looking for information about their parents and siblings. Accessing their records can be a way of making sense of their childhood and (re)constructing the story of their lives.²⁵ For Care Leavers, the records represent a ‘repository of hope’ where they can look for answers to questions that have nagged at them all their lives.²⁶ For people who grew up without knowing their family, ‘without the kind of information a family can provide about the sad and happy memories, special occasions and activities and daily life, and without an understanding of the circumstances which led to [them] being separated from their families’,²⁷ records are essential to enable them to establish a functional identity. Records can provide an ‘irrefutable affirmation, after decades of self-doubt’.²⁸

However, the surviving records are ‘frequently sketchy and disjointed, providing at best only partial, and often quite damaging answers’ to their questions.²⁹ Whole childhoods may be contained within one or two sheets of paper.³⁰ Some records only include names, date of birth and parents’ names.³¹ There are often large gaps in the children’s stories, which make it difficult to tell a coherent story of their childhood.³² Moreover, the very information that they are looking for is often redacted in order to protect the privacy of third parties.³³ Redactions are a major problem for Care Leavers who are seeking information about their families. In addition, the language used in the files can be both mystifying and distressing for people who read their files. Records are often entirely negative.³⁴ They are full of personal judgements, biases and subjective assessments.³⁵ Many Care Leavers are shocked and distressed when they read what was recorded about them.³⁶ Reading their records can ‘inflict on the subject Care-leaver emotional responses virtually indistinguishable from the sensations experienced decades earlier, during their childhood under the hostile scrutiny of the workers’.³⁷ The files have the capacity to re-traumatise when read decades later without appropriate explanations and support.³⁸

Application of the Records Continuum Model to the records of Care Leavers

Welfare organisations responsible for child welfare in Australia kept administrative records for their own purposes. They saw the records as their own records, meeting their own administrative needs, and never thought that the children they took care of would one day come and ask for their records. They kept those records as evidence that the children were present in the institutions and that the institutions accomplished their role of looking after them.

If we apply the Records Continuum Model to the case of child welfare records (see Figure 1), we can say that in the Create dimension, the various public and private organisations that took care of children created various records in the context of doing their work. They produced administrative records that recorded the work that they were doing, such as keeping entry and exit books and keeping track of their expenses.³⁹ The agents were the welfare organisations’ staff. The archival documents created were the administrative documents that were produced in the context of doing the work of caring for children. The transactions were administrative transactions, such as recording the admission and discharge of children. The traces that these transactions left were that the children were present in the organisations, and not much more. The children’s milestones were not recorded because the welfare agencies were not required to record them.⁴⁰ Similarly, the inspection reports kept by the government departments responsible for child welfare were concerned with standards of hygiene, but only recorded sketchy information about the particular children cared for in the buildings they inspected.⁴¹

Figure 1. Organisational records for child welfare.

The documents created were captured in the organisations’ recordkeeping systems to be kept as evidence that the organisations were doing the job they were funded for. In the Capture dimension, the work units involved were the welfare organisations’ administration staff; the activities consisted of keeping records of their administrative activities; the records captured were administrative records, which were evidence that the organisations were doing their job of caring for children.

Together with the records documenting their other activities, these records came to constitute the archives of the welfare organisations. In the Organise dimension, the organisations involved were the various welfare organisations and the government departments responsible for child welfare in each State. The archives were the organisations’ and government departments’ archives. These archives accounted for the accomplishment of the function of child welfare and they were kept as evidence that the welfare organisations were performing their mandate of looking after children.

In the Pluralise dimension, those among the records created by the organisations and government departments which were deemed of lasting value might be transferred to public archives to be kept as historical evidence of the functioning of the child welfare system in Australia at the time they were created. The intended purpose of the records once they would be released in the Pluralise dimension would be to enable historians to write the history of child welfare in Australia, not to meet the needs of Care Leavers (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Intended Pluralise dimension for child welfare records.

Some institutional records have been transferred to public repositories,⁴² but for the most part, case files are closed for 99 or 100 years.⁴³ The official child welfare histories that were written on the basis of the records produced by those organisations rarely mention the abuse to which many children were subjected.⁴⁴ Although they are intended to be read outside of the organisations, those official histories do not really belong to the Pluralise dimension. They are based on the records that the organisations chose to make available and, for the most part, they still represent the organisations’ point of view. To be truly pluralised, they need to include other voices, in particular those of the Care Leavers, whose stories they claim to tell.

Towards a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model

It is clear that the records created by child welfare agencies were never intended to be released to the children after they left care.⁴⁵ They were administrative records that were compiled for the agencies’ use, to preserve the forms and documents necessary to ensure the efficient functioning of the organisations, not to meet the needs of the children who were taken care of or their adult selves by attempting to tell the story of their lives.⁴⁶ In many cases, the records were only released in the Pluralise dimension following pressures from Care Leavers advocacy groups.⁴⁷ Releasing them to Care Leavers who can then reuse and reinterpret them constitutes a repurpose of the archive. This is different from ordinary curatorial processes that take place in archives. The author proposes to add an extra dimension to the Records Continuum between Organise and Pluralise to represent the time/space in which these processes are taking place. The key element in this additional dimension is the pressures from the Care Leavers, an outside intervention, which leads to a repurpose of the archive. Although it requires the assistance of people inside the organisations, the impetus for change comes from the outside. The processes are driven by the Care Leavers who are reclaiming the records as their own. For this reason, the author labelled this additional dimension ‘Reclaim’ (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Repurposed Archive Continuum Model.

The additional Reclaim dimension is where the processes brought about by Care Leavers’ pressures are taking place. Care Leavers went back to the welfare organisations searching for records to support their identity and memory needs and requested their records with various degrees of success. Their pressing needs for their records led to some organisations searching and reinterpreting the records that had survived. Records that had been kept for administrative purposes came to take a different meaning as they were put to different uses. Care Leavers looked in them for details that could help them to figure out who they were and to find evidence that could support their claims for redress. They started reinterpreting the records as evidence of child abuse. In this way, they transformed the records into the opposite of what they had been created for. Instead of being evidence that the organisations did their jobs well, the records became evidence that the welfare agencies did not look after the children who were entrusted to them as they should have done.

These processes imply a change of agency, with the Care Leavers who have been disempowered in the past claiming ownership of all the records about them and becoming the owners of the (limited number of) records or copies of records released to them,⁴⁸ and the records (or copies of records) released to them becoming their records to be managed by them.

The processes that occur in the Reclaim dimension do not just amount to curation because they necessitate a radical reinterpretation of the purpose of the archive and a change of agency.⁴⁹ The processes that need to take place are fundamentally different from ordinary curatorial processes and from the technology-driven processes that Gibbons accommodates in the Curate dimension of her Mediated Recordkeeping Model.⁵⁰ The organisational archive continues to survive and to be used in the ways it was intended to, but it is mostly the Care Leavers’ pressures that result in the records being released in the Pluralise dimension, not the organisations’ decisions. Pressures coming from the outside impact on how the records are managed and accessed and on the information that comes out from the organisations. The original archive still exists in its original context and structure. It is still managed by the organisation that created the records or its successor, although it has been impacted by outside pressures. This is to be contrasted with appropriated archives, which no longer exist in their original forms after they have been appropriated or misappropriated by other institutions.⁵¹

In the Pluralise dimension, the repurposed archive of Care Leavers’ records exists in parallel with the records that have been released to public archival collections in the traditional way. The two types of records co-exist and have intertwined relationships with each other. This is represented in Figure 4 in one diagram that combines Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 4. Records Continuum Model for Care Leavers’ records.

Some of the records have been released to State archives or sent to cultural archives collections by the organisations and agencies responsible for child welfare, whereas others have been released directly to Care Leavers who requested them. The Care Leavers now keep the records released to them as their own records, but they can also apply to access some of the records that are kept as State archives. Records in the care of State archives and cultural institutions and records in the care of Care Leavers co-exist. Both types of records can be used to write the history of child welfare in Australia or be used as evidence of child abuse, and both types of records can be used for memory, identity and redress purposes in some ways. In parallel with this, Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN) is encouraging the creation of a counter-narrative by Care Leavers that is richer and more helpful to the Care Leavers and offers a more balanced view of history for the benefit of the Australian community.⁵² Care Leavers want to tell their stories and they want to be believed.⁵³

Discussion

The Repurposed Archive Continuum Model presented in the previous section enables us to look at Care Leavers’ records in a new light. The addition of an extra dimension between the Organise and Pluralise dimensions of the Records Continuum Model brings attention to the fact that the processes that Care Leavers’ records must go through are not the same as those that apply to other organisational records. The processes that take place in the Reclaim dimension result from the fact that the records organisations created to document their welfare activities were never intended to be released to Care Leavers. They were not written for them and they were not kept for them. That is why many records were not created in the first place, many have been lost or destroyed and those that have survived do not contain the type of information that Care Leavers would like to find in them.

Although the Records Continuum enables us to some extent to explain the processes that occur between Organise and Pluralise, the addition of an extra dimension brings the focus on the special processes that occur in the case of Care Leavers’ records, for example when searching for records about Care Leavers among the organisational records and when releasing records to them. Records-holding organisations need to be aware that the processes that they should apply when addressing Care Leavers’ requests should be different from the processes that they apply to other types of records. The fact that the records were not intended to be used by Care Leavers means that they often need to be explained to Care Leavers and that Care Leavers need to be offered support when accessing their records.

The records need to be reinterpreted because they were written for a different audience ‘with minimal regard for what are today regarded as appropriate moral or ethical standards’.⁵⁴ They recorded the views of the organisations and left no space for the voices of the children to be heard.⁵⁵ They present a very different view from what Care Leavers remember of their time in those institutions.⁵⁶ Often, the only things recorded were negative incidents,⁵⁷ the problems rather than the normal behaviours.⁵⁸ The records contain inaccurate and misleading statements and leave large gaps in the children’s stories, which make it difficult to tell a coherent story of their childhood.⁵⁹ They had never been envisaged as an important resource that could enable the children to later reconnect with their families.⁶⁰ Care Leavers do not see what is recorded in them as their story, but as someone else’s interpretation of what they were doing at the time.⁶¹ Wilson and Golding argue that by including many judgemental and hostile comments in the files, those who created them misappropriated the subjects’ narratives and they were never made accountable for it.⁶²

In the Organise dimension, records are embedded in an organisational context and reflect the social and cultural norms of the time. In order to enable them to be used by Care Leavers as instruments for remembering and rebuilding their identity and as evidence of abuse, processes of description, explanation and reinterpretation of the records must take place to assist that transformation. The Reclaim dimension is the place where the gap between how records holders see ‘their processes of providing former residents with supported access to their records, and the way they are perceived by those outside the organisation’⁶³ comes to the fore.

Whereas past care providers and the government departments responsible for child protection see the historical child welfare records as their organisational records to be kept and managed in order to meet their organisational needs, Care Leavers believe that those records should be held in archives principally to help the subjects of the records to understand the circumstances of their childhood, to reconnect with their families and to seek redress for the abuse and neglect that they suffered.⁶⁴ The CLAN Charter of Rights in Childhood Records posits that records holders have a duty to assist the Care Leavers to interpret the records by explaining to them the historical context and the terminology used and to inform them of their right to challenge the records.⁶⁵ Moreover, it asserts that they also have a duty to ‘search for and identify other archived records that are relevant to the person’s childhood experience to assist in providing a more complete narrative’.⁶⁶ Records holders should be aware that information useful to Care Leavers can also be found in other types of records such as administrative and staff records.⁶⁷ For example, the United Protestant Association (UPA) has discovered that the minutes of the UPA’s district council meetings include information about ‘admissions, discharges, parents, relocating children, court appearances, health issues, child welfare department issues and many other items relating to UPA’s homes/children’.⁶⁸ They also hold monthly matron’s reports that include useful information about the children’s health and behaviour.⁶⁹ Not all organisations holding these types of records understand their value.⁷⁰

Records holders need to be aware of the importance that these records hold for Care Leavers.⁷¹ They need to be trauma-informed and Care Leaver-informed.⁷² They should allocate resources to find and classify relevant records, and they should offer supported release services.⁷³ Frank Golding has suggested that if past care providers cannot find any records, they should at least put together a story that explains the context of the care experience at the time.⁷⁴ Records-holding organisations should understand that releasing records to Care Leavers is a sensitive matter that requires specific skills.⁷⁵ They should help to interpret the records and assist people to make sense of the emotions that the information in the records evokes for them.⁷⁶ They should also understand that all the people involved in the processes of managing and releasing care records significantly shape the meaning of the records, as well as their impact on users outside of the organisation, and that records take on a different meaning if they are released personally rather than sent by mail.⁷⁷ They should explain the historical context, all the codes and abbreviations used in the records and the reasons for redactions when releasing records to Care Leavers.⁷⁸ They should also be aware of the power differential between the organisations’ staff and the Care Leavers and be mindful that many Care Leavers ‘mistrust authority figures, have low literacy levels, lack confidence and self-esteem, and will experience great apprehension when approaching a service provider’.⁷⁹

Examples of the impact that historical records continue to have on Care Leavers under the current access regimes were raised at the National Summit on Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child, held in Melbourne on 8–9 May 2017.⁸⁰ In many cases, comments written in the records are still being used against Care Leavers many years after they left care.⁸¹

Problems are happening now because the needs of all stakeholders and the design of recordkeeping systems that would meet the needs of all the people with an interest in the records had not been thought about when the records were created. Care Leavers have been advocating for their ownership of the records that were created about them and the right to decide who can access those records.⁸² However, the recognition of the rights of the creators of the records over the management and access to the records necessitates a radical redesign of the existing recordkeeping frameworks, processes, systems and technologies.⁸³ The Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative has highlighted the needs for new systems. Its submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse suggests that in order to address the issue of misuse of Care Leavers’ records and the impact of this misuse on their lives, the use of these records should be governed by an independent archival regime and subject to disclosure and consent processes administered within that regime.⁸⁴ In order to achieve historical justice, organisations that hold records must recognise Care Leavers’ rights over their records and take action to enact these rights.⁸⁵ Some of the suggestions to further historical justice made by the Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative include endorsing and implementing the Access Principles and Best Practice Guidelines for access to the records of Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants published in 2015 by the Department of Social Services,⁸⁶ using administrative discretion to release as many records as possible, releasing full unredacted records unless it is clearly unlawful to do so, supporting the annotation of official records and the inclusion of the Care Leavers’ version of their story, and encouraging and supporting initiatives that enable Care Leavers to tell their stories of care experiences.⁸⁷

Conclusion

Using the Repurposed Archive Continuum Model as a diagnostic tool to unravel the processes that apply to Care Leavers’ records makes it easier to explain the special processes that must be applied to these records. The Reclaim dimension is the space/time dimension where those processes take place. It is the dimension where special care must be taken to locate Care Leavers’ records and to contextualise them so that they can be used by Care Leavers. It is also the dimension where contested views of the rights on these records may clash, with records holders asserting their rights on all their organisational records and Care Leavers claiming their moral rights on records about them.

The case study presented in this article illustrates how Continuum models can be used as a tool to assess and understand recordkeeping and to improve it.⁸⁸ Applied to the records of Care Leavers, the Repurposed Archive Continuum Model shows where recordkeeping problems are most evident and need to be addressed. It highlights some fundamental shortcomings in recordkeeping processes designed around the requirements and demands of government agencies without taking account of the needs of the subjects of the records.⁸⁹ As Barbara Reed has asserted, the Continuum ‘is a vibrant and dynamic tool and method of thinking that challenges all archivists to engage on a broad, social canvas’.⁹⁰ By proposing an alternative model which better represents the context of Care Leavers’ records, this article also illustrates that Continuum theory itself is evolving, expanding and ‘always becoming’,⁹¹ and therefore open to the development of new models to represent new social concerns.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Viviane Frings-Hessami is a lecturer in the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics at Monash University. Over the past three years, she has been teaching the Archives and Recordkeeping units and redeveloping the curriculum for the Information and Knowledge Management specialisation. She also participated in the organisation of the Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child National Summit, which was held in Melbourne on 8 and 9 May 2017. She obtained her PhD in Political Science from Monash University in 2000.

Notes

1. On the Records Continuum Model, see F Upward, ‘Structuring the Records Continuum: Part One’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 2, 1996, pp. 268–85, and ‘Structuring the Records Continuum Part Two: Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 25, no. 1, 1997, pp. 10–35; S McKemmish, FH Upward and B Reed, ‘Records Continuum Model’, in MJ Bates and M Niles-Maack (eds), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd edn, Taylor & Francis, New York, 2010, pp. 4447–59; and S McKemmish, ‘Recordkeeping in the Continuum: An Australian Tradition’, in AJ Gilliland, S McKemmish and AJ Lau (eds), Research in the Archival Multiverse, Monash University Publishing, Clayton, 2017, pp. 122–60.

2. The word care is used in quotation marks to reflect the fact that many Care Leavers do not believe that the treatment they received in the child welfare system amounted to a form of care. In accordance with journal style, after the first usage quotation marks are no longer used, however the problematic and contested nature of the term ‘care’ in the context of this discussion is acknowledged throughout this article. See for example F Golding, ‘The Care Leaver’s Perspective’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 44, no. 3, 2016, pp. 161–4.

3. S McKemmish, ‘Are Records Ever Actual?’, in S McKemmish and M Piggott (eds), The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years, Ancora Press, Clayton, 1994, p. 200.

4. The term Care Leaver with capital letters is used in this article to refer to ‘any person who was in institutional care or other form of out-of-home “care”, including foster “care”, as a child or youth, or both, at some time during the 20th century’, Department of Social Services [DSS], ‘Access to Records by Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants. Access Principles for Records Holders, Best Practice Guidelines in providing access to records’, 2015, p. 13, available at <https://www.dss.gov.au/families-and-children/programmes-services/family-relationships/find-and-connect-services-and-projects/access-to-records-by-forgotten-australians-and-former-child-migrants-access-principles-for-records-holders-best-practice-guidelines-in-providing-access>, accessed 20 August 2017. It is a contested term, with many Care Leavers feeling that what they experienced during their time in the child welfare system cannot be adequately described as ‘care’.

5. Upward, ‘Structuring the Records Continuum: Part One’, and ‘Structuring the Records Continuum Part Two’; McKemmish, ‘Recordkeeping in the Continuum’.

6. McKemmish, Upward and Reed.

7. McKemmish, ‘Recordkeeping in the Continuum’.

8. ibid.

9. McKemmish, ‘Are Records Ever Actual?’, p. 200.

10. McKemmish, Upward and Reed.

11. F Upward, ‘Modelling the Continuum as Paradigm Shift in Recordkeeping and Archiving Processes, and Beyond – A Personal Reflection’, Records Management Journal, vol. 10, no. 3, 2000, pp. 115–39; F Upward, ‘Continuum Mechanics and Memory Banks Part 1: Multi-Polarity’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 84–109; and ‘Continuum Mechanics and Memory Banks Part 2: The Making of Culture’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 33, no. 2, 2005, pp. 18–51.

12. J Evans, S McKemmish and G Rolan, ‘Critical Archiving and Recordkeeping Research and Practice in the Continuum’, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, no. 2, 2017, available at <http://libraryjuicepress.com/journals/index.php/jclis/article/view/35>, accessed 1 September 2017.

13. G Rolan, ‘Agency in the Archive: A Model for Participatory Recordkeeping’, Archival Science, vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, pp. 195–225; L Gibbons, ‘Culture in the Continuum: YouTube, small stories and memory-making’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2015.

14. Evans, McKemmish and Rolan, p. 9.

15. The three key inquiries were: the 1995–97 Inquiry by the Australian Human Rights Commission into the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People affected by forced removal from their families, known as Stolen Generations, see Australian Human Rights Commission, ‘Bringing Them Home Report’, 1997, available at <https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-report-1997>, accessed 30 August 2017; the 2000–01 Senate Inquiry into Child Migration Schemes, see Senate of Australia, Community Affairs Reference Committee, ‘Lost Innocents: Righting the Record – Report on Child Migration’, 30 August 2001, available at <http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Completed_inquiries/1999–02/child_migrat/report/index>, accessed 30 August 2017; and the 2003–04 Senate Inquiry into Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, see Senate of Australia, Community Affairs Reference Committee, ‘Forgotten Australians: A Report on Australians Who Experienced Institutional or Out-of-Home Care as Children’, 30 August 2004, available at <http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Completed_inquiries/2004–07/inst_care/report/index>, accessed 30 August 2017. For a list of the other inquiries, see Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, ‘Inquiries and Reports Relevant to the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse’, available at <http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/documents/8–1-previous-inquiries-in-tor-new-logo.pdf>, accessed 30 August 2017; and S Swain, ‘History of Australian Inquiries Reviewing Institutions Providing Care for Children’, Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Sydney, 2014, available at <https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/8aafa21e-36e0–41c2–8760-b17662fb774f/History-of-Australian-inquiries-reviewing-institut>, accessed 30 August 2017.

16. See Find & Connect, ‘Child Welfare Timeline’, available at <https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/featured-stories/timeline-interactive/>, accessed 30 August 2017; and Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative, ‘Past Inquiries’, available at <https://rights-records.it.monash.edu/past-inquiries/>, accessed 30 August 2017.

17. Community Affairs Reference Committee, ‘Forgotten Australians’.

18. M Kertesz, C Humphreys and C Carnovale, ‘Reformulating Current Recordkeeping Practices in Out-of-Home Care: Recognizing the Centrality of the Archive’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 42–53.

19. J Evans, S McKemmish, E Daniels and G McCarthy, ‘Self-Determination and Archival Autonomy: Advocating Activism’, Archival Science, vol. 15, no. 4, 2015, pp. 337–68; S Swain, ‘Traces in the Archives: Evidence of Institutional Abuse in Surviving Child Welfare Records’, Children Australia, vol. 32, no. 1, 2007, pp. 24–31.

20. S Swain and N Musgrove, ‘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”’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 4–14.

21. S Murray, J Murphy, B Branigan and J Malone, After the Orphanage: Life Beyond the Children’s Home, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2009.

22. S Swain, ‘Stakeholders as Subjects: The Role of Historians in the Development of Australia’s Find & Connect Web Resource’, The Public Historian, vol. 36, no. 4, 2014, p. 46.

23. Evans et al., p. 338.

24. F Golding, ‘Telling Stories: Accessing Personal Records’, in R Hil and E Branigan (eds), Surviving Care: Achieving Justice and Healing for the Forgotten Australians, Bond University Press, Robina, 2010, pp. 79–99; JZ Wilson and F Golding, ‘Latent Scrutiny: Personal Archives as Perpetual Mementos of Official Gaze’, Archival Science, vol. 16, 2016, p. 96.

25. Murray et al.; S Murray, J Malone and J Glare, ‘Building a Life Story: Providing Records and Support to Former Residents of Children’s Homes’, Australian Social Work, vol. 61, no. 3, September 2008, pp. 239–55.

26. Golding, ‘The Care Leaver’s Perspective’, p. 161. See also Swain and Musgrove; C Horrocks and J Goddard, ‘Adults Who Grew up in Care: Constructing the Self and Accessing Care Files’, Child and Family Social Work, vol. 11, no. 3, 2006, pp. 264–72.

27. Kertesz, Humphreys and Carnovale, p. 45.

28. Wilson and Golding, p. 99.

29. Swain and Musgrove, p. 9.

30. ibid.

31. Golding, ‘The Care Leaver’s Perspective’.

32. ibid.

33. DSS.

34. Golding, ‘The Care Leaver’s Perspective’; S Murray and C Humphreys, ‘“My Life’s Been a Total Disaster But I Feel Privileged”: Care-Leavers’ Access to Personal Records and Their Implications for Social Work Practice’, Child and Family Social Work, vol. 19, no. 2, 2014, pp. 215–24.

35. Wilson and Golding.

36. Golding, ‘Telling Stories’; Wilson and Golding; V Selakovic, ‘Opening Presentation’, presented at Archiving: Moving Forward as a Community Workshop, Victorian Archives Centre, North Melbourne, 15 April 2010, p. 4, available at <https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/ref/vic/objects/D00000344.htm>, accessed 9 August 2017; Murray and Humphreys.

37. Wilson and Golding, p. 96.

38. ibid.

39. C O’Neill, V Selakovic and R Tropea, ‘Access to Records for People Who Were in Out-of-Home Care: Moving Beyond ‘Third Dimension’ Archival Practice’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 29–41.

40. ibid.

41. Murray et al.

42. Swain, ‘Stakeholders as Subjects’.

43. Case files are closed for 99 years in Victoria, 100 years in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, and for the lifetime of the person at the Commonwealth level. See Public Record Office Victoria, ‘PROS11/10 Access FS1 Fact Sheet: Closure of Public Records Under Section 9 of the Public Records Act 1973’, available at <https://www.prov.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2016–05/1110fs1–20130731.pdf>, accessed 20 August 2017; State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales, ‘Records for Care Leavers’, available at <https://www.records.nsw.gov.au/archives/collections-and-research/guides-and-indexes/care-leavers-guide>, accessed 20 August 2017; State Records Office of Western Australia, ‘Restricted Access Decisions’, available at <http://www.sro.wa.gov.au/archive-collection/accessing-restricted-records/restricted-access-decisions>, accessed 20 August 2017; State Records of South Australia, ‘How Can I Access Records of Children in Care?’, available at <https://www.archives.sa.gov.au/content/frequently-asked-questions-faqs#I>, accessed 20 August 2017; National Archives of Australia, ‘Access to Records Under the Archives Act – Fact Sheet 10’, available at <http://naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs10.aspx>, accessed 20 August 2017.

44. Swain, ‘Traces in the Archives’.

45. O’Neill, Selakovic and Tropea.

46. Swain and Musgrove, p. 7; DSS.

47. Evans, McKemmish and Rolan; Swain, ‘Stakeholders as Subjects’.

48. F Golding, ‘A Charter of Rights to Childhood Records’, 2015, available at <http://frankgolding.com/a-charter-of-rights-to-childhood-records>, accessed 27 August 2017; Alliance for Forgotten Australians, ‘AFAs Response to Royal Commission’s Consultation Paper on Records and Access’, 14 October 2016, available at <http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/907d4c40–302d-48d7–8a4a-2d69e64bb7a3/Alliance-for-Forgotten-Australians>, accessed 30 August 2017.

49. Recognising the agency of Care Leavers brings a participatory element into the Repurposed Archive Continuum Model. However, since this model is used as a descriptive tool to explain a problematic historical situation, it differs radically from participatory models that have been proposed as aspirational models, such as in Evans, McKemmish and Rolan, and in Rolan, which advocate for the agency of the subjects of the records right from the Create dimension.

50. Gibbons.

51. See the Appropriated Archive Continuum Model developed by the author around Khmer Rouge archives: V Frings-Hessami, ‘Looking at Khmer Rouge Archives Through the Lens of the Records Continuum Model: Towards an Appropriated Archive Continuum Model’, Information Research, vol. 22, no. 4, December 2017, available at <http://InformationR.net/ir/22–4/paper771.html>.

52. Golding, ‘The Care Leavers’ Perspective’, p. 162.

53. Swain, ‘Stakeholders as Subjects’.

54. Wilson and Golding, p. 106.

55. Swain and Musgrove.

56. Swain, ‘Stakeholders as Subjects’.

57. ibid.

58. DSS.

59. Golding, ‘The Care Leavers’ Perspective’.

60. ibid., p. 106.

61. Selakovic, p. 3.

62. Wilson and Golding, p. 98; see also Golding, ‘The Care Leavers’ Perspective’, p. 106.

63. O’Neill, Selakovic and Tropea, p. 31.

64. Golding, ‘A Charter of Rights’, principle 1; DSS.

65. Golding, ‘A Charter of Rights’, principles 5–6.

66. ibid., principle 4.

67. Find & Connect Web Resource Project, ‘Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Issue Paper 4: “Preventing Sexual Abuse of Children in Out of Home Care”, Submission from Find & Connect Web Resource Project, 8 November 2013’, available at <http://childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/1acebf7e-a8e8–448e-a506–23efca729725/21-Find-and-Connect-Web-Resource-Project>, accessed 13 August 2017.

68. ibid., p. 6.

69. ibid.

70. ibid.

71. Murray, Malone and Glare.

72. See M Jones, ‘What Would Trauma-Informed Archival Access Look Like?’, 4 November 2014, available at <http://www.mikejonesonline.com/contextjunky/2014/11/04/trauma-informed-archives/>, accessed 30 August 2017; B Reed, V Hessami and J Evans, ‘Summit Report: Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child 8–9 May 2017’, 2017, available at <https://rights-records.it.monash.edu/summit/summit-outcomes/>, accessed 14 February 2018.

73. DSS; Murray, Malone and Glare; Murray and Humphreys.

74. Australian Society of Archivists, ‘Towards a National Summit: Setting the Records Straight for the Rights of the Child’, Australian Society of Archivists’ National Conference, Parramatta, 17–21 October 2016, available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuAiJQL5YsQ>, accessed 9 August 2017. See also Murray, Malone and Glare.

75. G Pugh and G Schofield, ‘Unlocking the Past: The Experience of Gaining Access to Barnardo’s Records’, Adoption & Fostering, vol. 23, no. 2, 1999, p. 17. For the skills required, see DSS, pp. 55–6.

76. Murray, Malone and Glare, p. 250.

77. O’Neill, Selakovic and Tropea, p. 34.

78. ibid.; G McCarthy and J Evans, ‘Principles for Archival Information Services in the Public Domain’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 54–67; DSS.

79. O’Neill, Selakovic and Tropea, p. 31.

80. The Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative has been established by Monash University’s Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics in partnership with the Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN), the Child Migrants Trust, Connecting Home, the CREATE Foundation, Federation University’s Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History, and the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre. See <https://rights-records.it.monash.edu/>.

81. Reed, Hessami and Evans.

82. Wilson and Golding, p. 107; Golding, ‘A Charter of Rights’; Reed, Hessami and Evans.

83. Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative, ‘Submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse’, 2017, available at <http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/c893fec1–9366-4a5f-ab4f-adcc0cf08189/Setting-the-Record-Straight-For-the-Rights-of-(1)>, accessed 9 August 2017.

84. ibid., p. 4.

85. ibid.

86. DSS.

87. Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative, ‘Submission’, pp. 5–6.

88. K Cumming, ‘Ways of Seeing: Contextualising the Continuum’, Records Management Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, 2010, p. 48.

89. Evans, McKemmish and Rolan, p. 3.

90. B Reed, ‘Reading the Records Continuum: Interpretations and Explorations’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, p. 41.

91. Evans, McKemmish and Rolan, p. 9.