Twice forgotten: assessing the scale and nature of foster care coverage in Australian historical newspapers

ABSTRACT

This article uses a combination of discursive and quantitative big data analysis of digitised historical newspapers to present new findings about the representation of foster care in the Australian press from 1865 through 1954. It argues that despite child welfare more broadly rating as a significant social issue in Australian historical newspapers of this period, the topic of foster care itself was much neglected. This is particularly important to understand at a time when historians are being called upon to create histories that respond to the questions and experiences of survivors of out-of-home care, because it helps explain why foster care has been underrepresented in these histories as compared to children’s institutions – that is, the discursive muting of foster care has a long history. The article engages with some of the practical and theoretical challenges of doing digital history, and concludes that for studies which seek to trace the usage and evolution of a concept over time, an approach which combines close and distant reading can produce useful results. In this case, the big data analysis reveals the low profile of foster care in the press, and a closer reading of a sample of these articles demonstrates that the nature of this coverage was largely negative – another important factor in understanding how public perceptions of foster care have been shaped over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Foster care
• historical newspapers
• digital history
• child welfare history
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The use of the word ‘care’ within terminology describing provisions for children separated from their families is contested, because many people who grew up in these systems argue that they experienced little that was genuinely caring. The term foster care is used in this article, but with acknowledgement of its conflicted implications.

Additional information

Funding

This work was made possible by the Australian Research Council [DP130104578].