Activism and institutional care: history, heritage and social memory

ABSTRACT

The activist movement led by adults who experienced welfare-based ‘care’ as children is now several decades old, and has been through a succession of evolutionary ‘waves’ to the present. In this themed edition of International Journal of Heritage Studies, the history, diverse methodologies and outcomes of that movement are discussed and analysed. From grass-roots ‘kitchen-table’ beginnings, through increasingly public lobbying of policy-makers, to major inquiries leading to both material advances and continued frustrations – leading to further activism – the role of activists is in many ways bound up in heritage-related issues. The physical and emotional environments in which they were immersed as children now stand for many as signifiers of identity, while also exemplifying ‘difficult’ heritage, and as such form key aspects of the movement’s history, while providing focus for continued activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• institution
• Care leaver
• heritage
• social memory

This special edition of the International Journal of Heritage Studies brings together two strands of contemporary scholarship: analytical studies of Care-leaver activism, and survivor-centred critiques of the recognition, preservation and contextualisation of heritage sites and artefacts. The term Care-leaver has come into international usage over the past two decades to describe adults who survived the systemic abuses rife in so-called child welfare systems which rendered children and young people vulnerable by separating them from their families and devalued their rights as compared to other children in the wider population (Golding 2022; Sköld 2013). Care-leaver is a contested term. The word ‘care’ is considered inappropriate by many because there was very little that was actually caring about the institutions and foster homes in which children were placed. There are also other sources of dispute over the term, including whether it truly represents all people who grew up in out-of-home ‘care’ or whether it has come to be associated with specific generations of survivors and particular forms of institutionalisation; some people prefer to describe themselves using terms such as Care Experienced, and others have questioned whether their childhoods should continue to define them throughout their lifetimes (More Than Our Childhoods 2024a).

Despite the debate about terminology, there is an active survivor community seeking recognition and restorative justice for the harms inflicted upon them by historical child welfare systems. Australia, the geographical focus for most of the articles in this special issue, has been one of the most active hubs of survivor activism, evidenced not only through its early adoption of survivor-centred national inquiries into historical child welfare, but also by the impact of survivor-scholars on the field (Golding and Wilson 2019; Michell 2020; Sheedy, Selakovic, and Golding 2017; Sköld 2013; Swain, Wright, and Sköld 2018). Care-leaver survivor activism has been dynamic for decades, yet it is only now being properly historicised. Indeed, this special issue has arisen from a research project producing the first history of Care-leaver survivor-activism in Australia, work which has identified deep roots that go much further back in time than the (apparently) sudden emergence of Care-leaver voices on the national stage in the late 1990s (More Then Our Childhoods 2024b).

Historians of activist movements concerned with human rights violations or periods of mass oppression often describe them in terms of ‘waves’, to which are ascribed numbers – a phenomenon which has perhaps been most widely inscribed and theorised in relation to feminism (Weldon et al. 2023). The ‘first’ wave of a movement is often that in which an issue or cause is initially brought to light to those outside its community, often framing its demands in terms of concrete responses to specific problems impacting the lives of its activists. It typically meets resistance, in the form of denial or deflection, from official quarters, popular sentiment, and even scholars. Through the persistence of those dedicated to the cause, the movement gradually gains ground. Such grassroots activism rarely vanishes, but its visibility to those outside the cause can wax and wane. The notion of waves can obscure this persistence, but it also helps explain how and why activists’ approaches can shift over time. In the case of Care-leaver survivor-activism, its ‘second wave’, coincided with what has been variously termed the ‘age of apology’ and the ‘age of testimony’ (McGinniss, Reeves, and Golding 2024; Sköld and Swain 2015). As has also been true for many other movements which have responded to the failures of the modern welfare state in the aftermath of the Second World War (Olick 2007), Care-leaver activism’s ‘second wave’ capitalised on the age’s openness to survivor voices to shift popular perceptions of them as a stigmatised group. Public revelatory processes are key to countering official resistance. There is not one linear narrative, even within the story of Care-leaver activism, but often media investigations have prompted judicial inquiries, and such inquiries then spawn successive ones, and so on. The ‘second wave’ reaches a peak as national, even international, audiences engage with the questions of such inquiries: What happened, and why? What is needed to prevent it from happening again? What, if anything, can be done for those who suffered and are perhaps still suffering? What do the survivors need to happen? From there, as arguably the ‘third’ wave, comes the unrelenting activism of survivors who bear the burden of fighting for the meaningful implementation and review of the promises made by governments and other responsible bodies.

It is not for us here to attempt to discern exactly when the successive waves of Care-leaver activism began and ended – such quantification tends to be debatable and imprecise – but it is worth keeping the schema in mind as a broad conceptual hook when viewing the historical progress (and setbacks) of the movement, from its ‘kitchen-table’ beginnings three and more decades ago, to the present. What can be said, fairly definitely, is that in the terms defined above, we are today in the ‘third wave’, given the multi-stranded concerns regarding the ways in which the questions enumerated above may be addressed – and in this special issue we ask what role heritage can play in that process.

The (SCARC 2004) report of Australia’s national inquiry into people who experience out-of-home ‘care’ between 1920 and 1990 recognised the significance of heritage sites, particularly locations of former institutions, to the survivor community. Since 2004, scholarly conversations about the intersections between Care-leaver memory and heritage work have flourished with critical attention being given to both how this history should be inscribed on sites of former institutions, and how digital history, artefacts, and objects can be used in heritage work for survivors who cannot (or do not wish to) return to physical sites of incarceration (Hayes et al. 2020). This heritage in turn has been informed by the ideas and speaking positions which have been the hard-won results of Care-leaver survivor activism, yet only recently have scholarly publications started explicitly bringing together these two concepts (Hibberd and With Djuric 2019; McLay, Parkin, and McGinniss 2020; Wilson and Golding 2018). Such works connect the ways in which survivor activists have had to actively subvert established heritage systems, asserting their own right to be recognised as the ‘experts’ best placed to decide what matters from a heritage and preservation perspective. As Jacqueline Wilson’s article (Wilson 2024) in this issue demonstrates, Care-leavers have been determined and ingenious in finding ways of doing heritage work on their own terms, but mainstream museums can still shy away from the complex and difficult histories which must be represented to meet the needs of survivor communities. The emerging work uniting heritage and Care-leaver activism, therefore, is an important intervention aiming to provide motivation and momentum for current and future efforts to reclaim heritage from survivor communities’ perspectives. The articles in this edition offer an important expansion to this growing field of inquiry seeking to examine the history of Care-leaver activism’s connections to the real-world environments in which that activism was forged. Some of the authors write from the position of lived experience; others bring deep theoretical understanding to their work. All approach the subject from positions of long and committed involvement, in the process demonstrating the value of collaborative partnerships between scholars and ‘insider’ researchers.

Few societies in the world more prominently exemplify the need for, and significance of, activism in regard to the exposure of institutional abuse than Ireland. In ‘Redress, Memorials and Activism: Can Heritage Be Activism?’, Patricia Lundy examines the intimate connection between the regimes of abuse that prevailed and the former establishment that underpinned them, which has given rise to an ongoing tension between two concepts of heritage-based memorialisation: a ‘bottom-up’, activist-led movement based on survivors’ participation and narratives, and a state-sponsored model based on the ‘authorised heritage discourse’. Lundy proposes a novel concept, ‘activist heritage’, aimed at ensuring that the narratives of survivors are foregrounded and hence remembered, rather than the quiet ‘forgetting’ preferred by state and church.

In ‘The Australian Orphanage Museum: Heritage and Activism’, Jacqueline Wilson recounts the development of Care-leaver activism in Australia from the late twentieth century to the present, identifying key challenges and achievements culminating in the recent advent of the Australian Orphanage Museum in Geelong, Victoria. Wilson, herself a Care-leaver long involved with various activist groups, discusses the significance of the Museum – itself a product of activism – and in particular its capacity to represent and commemorate the emotionally confronting and complex subjects traditional museums find problematic. She also discusses the ‘Loud Fence’ campaign as an example of prominent and effective ‘grass-roots’ activism, and the less-than successful efforts to preserve the former Ballarat Orphanage.

In ‘Heritage, Resistance and Dissonance: Reconstructing Pentridge in a Prison Tourism Theme Park’, Bree Carlton examines the career trajectory of Pentridge Prison, which for 150 years, until 1999, was Melbourne’s main high-security prison, and a site of endless, mass trauma. Since its closure and sale to private developers, it has become a hybrid of residential redevelopment and prison tourism, with neither approach paying due regard to the site’s legacy as an edifice of social memory – as a setting of colonialist oppression, and as a venue of banal brutality. Carlton uses an auto-ethnographic approach to describe and analyse the modes of (mis)representation in current curatorial approaches used to render the former prison as an entertaining tourist site – a prison ‘theme park’. She concludes that such an approach amounts to mis-information and mis-education regarding the true nature of Pentridge in particular and, by extension, incarceration in general.

The Old Melbourne Gaol, a prison museum located in the Melbourne CBD, and therefore as conveniently-situated a sightseeing destination as any tourist board could wish for, receives well over 100,000 visitors a year. In ‘Closing the Cell Door: Where are the Histories of Care-leavers at the Old Melbourne Gaol?’, Nell Musgrove and Laura Saxton cast a critical eye on the various ‘dark tourism’-oriented exhibitions and tours to identify an implied ‘chasm’ between the historical attitudes that spawned a myriad of atrocities and the supposedly enlightened and humane paradigm of today from which we are encouraged to view institutional violence as a thing of the past. Musgrove and Saxton focus on the significant number of inmates of the Gaol with connections to the child welfare system of the day to argue that the museum’s implied narrative of moral progress encourages an erroneous disconnect between the nineteenth-century origins of carceral welfare and twentieth-century practices that have led to multiple official inquiries.

An abiding theme of discourse around heritage, activism and the experiences of former inmates of welfare institutions is the place those institutions hold, or fail to hold, in the social memory. In ‘Disability Activism and Institutional Heritage’, Phillippa Carnemolla and Linda Steele focus on processes of deinstitutionalisation of significant populations of people with various types of disability, and the all-too-common subsequent redevelopment and/or repurposing of the institutions such that the experiences of the former residents are effectively negated and hence erased from the social memory. Carnemolla and Steele argue that reparations for disabled people who were maltreated in institutions have tended to be de-prioritised behind more recognisable oppressed minorities and that disability-impelled activism is crucial for the situation to be remedied. The article examines the salutary case of the former institution on Peat Island, New South Wales, where the site’s institutional history, and stakeholders in that history, were ignored both in government rezoning proposals and in the eventual transfer of the land to the local First Nations people. Carnemolla and Steele note that the disposal of the site does not absolve the government from responsibility for the abuses suffered by disabled inmates and that reparations are still owed.

In an analysis that complements Jacqueline Wilson’s article, in ‘Local Australian Memory Activism and the Fast and Slow Violence of Institutional Abuse’, Dave McDonald also focuses on the Loud Fence movement and the Australian Orphanage Museum. But he examines these two examples via the theoretical lens of ‘memory activism’, locating them within a broad historical arc that dates back into the nineteenth century. He discusses the systemic, institutional ‘slow violence’ intrinsic to the corrupted and neglectful paradigm of ‘care’ as it has come down to us, which fosters the ‘fast violence’ that so terrorised inmates of the system. The key aim of such discussion is to elucidate potential modes of activism by which the ‘collective memory’ can embrace the deeply problematic histories uncovered by successive inquiries and preserved in material form in activist venues such as museums and public displays.

In ‘Whose Pain? Whose Shame? Integrating Heritage and Histories in Ballarat, Australia’, David McGinniss, Keir Reeves and Frank Golding seek to invert conventional notions of responsibility for the painful legacies of institutional histories. Through discussion of the regional Australian city of Ballarat, they invite historians and leaders to look beyond well-worn stories of civic and philanthropic benevolence to seriously encounter the profound moral failures of ‘establishment’ institutions, and their modern inheritors. To address the tensions inherent in this fundamental civic characteristic – the ‘liminal space between cover-up and common knowledge’, as they describe it – McGinniss, Reeves and Golding outline an ‘integrated’ approach to heritage, and how this might help organisations and communities to move beyond comfortable historical narratives.

Read as a collection, the overall message of the articles in this special issue are clear: survivor voices must be at the heart of socially meaningful heritage work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has authored over fifty scholarly publications, including Prison: Cultural Memory and Dark Tourism (2008) which was the first national study of prison heritage sites, and she is the lead editor for The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism (2017). Jacqueline is currently a chief investigator on several collaborative research projects and her work is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Awards. She is a former ward of the State of Victoria and an activist and advocate for Care Leavers in Australia. This underpins much of her research which is concerned with historical justice, national memory, heritage and experiences of State care and harmful welfare systems.

Nell Musgrove

Nell Musgrove is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts and Humanities at Australian Catholic University. Her work examines the history of children and children’s institutions across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her two monographs, The Scars Remain (2013) and The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia (2018) provide the first national histories of the two major forms of placements for children under government control: carceral institutions and foster care.

David McGinniss

Dr David McGinniss has completed a PhD on Histories of the Ballarat District Orphan Asylum, Ballarat Orphanage and Ballarat Children’s Home, 1866-1983. He is Partnerships Coordinator for the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme ‘Care Leaver Activism and Advocacy’ Project.