Resistance, reclamation and repair: the Parragirls feminist archive and reparative media practices in the wake of institutional harm and media damage

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the creative strategies and media interventions of the Parragirls—a lose collective of women subject to punitive confinement and abuse as children in out-of-home “care” at the former Parramatta Girls Home—as a feminist archive of collective resistance, reclamation, and repair in the wake of institutional harm and media damage. We consider the Parragirls feminist archive in the context of a larger project analysing the role of media, journalism, and media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) (RCIRCSA). Drawing on Couldry’s theorisation of “media as practice,” we foreground the ways Parragirls have responded to media injustice and media damage. We analyse a range of Parragirls practices and interventions which, taken together, complicate one of key media narratives which emerged during the RCIRCSA public hearings about abuses at Parramatta Girls, namely that “providing evidence, while traumatic can be beneficial and worthwhile.” Our paper thus contributes to critical scholarship on news values as racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies of attention, and to feminist media scholarship that highlights resistant and transformative alternative visions for media practice. We ask: how might we imagine, or work towards a more reparative media?

KEYWORDS:

• Parragirls
• Parramatta Girls Home
• Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RCIRCSA)
• reparative media
• media interventions

Introduction

The Parramatta Female Factory Precinct (PFFP) is Australia’s “longest continually running institutional site” and its first officially recognised Site of Conscience (L. Steele, B. Djuric, L. Hibberd and F. Yeh 2020, 542). It is situated along a bend of the Parramatta River in western Sydney, on the traditional lands of the Burramattagal clan of the Darug Nation. This section of the river has long held significance for local Aboriginal clans as a place for gathering and trade, and as a sacred place for Darug women and children (Parragirls n.d.-c). According to artist Leanne Tobin, who descends from the Buruberong and Wumali clans of the Darug Nation, “women and children laid fish traps” and “not far from the banks are sites that are thought to contain birthing places” (Leanne Tobin in L. Hibberd and B. Djuric 2013, 69).

Since the early decades of colonial expansion in the 1820s—when the Parramatta Female Factory was first established for the imprisonment of convict women in the penal colony of New South Wales—the site has borne witness to a colonial-carceral continuum of punitive confinement, control, and coercive “care” of women and girls. Former uses of this institutional complex include a prison, workhouse, maternity ward, asylum, orphanage, reformatory school, girls’ home, and women’s detention centre (Parragirls, “Institutions”). E. Baldry and C. Cunneen (2014, 285) argue the changing uses of the site represent a continuum of punishment and control of females which “demonstrates patriarchal colonialism’s power to adapt and endure”.¹ Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women and girls were confined to these institutions based on “discriminatory and moralising attitudes to age, gender, class, physical, mental, and cognitive norms, and their intersections” (Naomi Toth and Hibberd 2021, 94). The PFFP site is thus foundational in the establishment and evolution of the out-of-home “care” (OOHC), welfare, and juvenile justice systems in Australia.

The Parramatta Girls Home (Parramatta Girls), located on the PFFP site, was first established in 1887 as the Parramatta Girls Industrial School in the former premises of the Roman Catholic Orphan School (adjacent to the Female Factory) and operated in various incarnations until its closure in 1974 (Parragirls “Institutions”). Parramatta Girls operated under the Child Welfare Act 1939 (NSW) and housed adolescent children classed as “uncontrollable” or “neglected” as well as convicted juvenile offenders. In the years Parramatta Girls was in operation, there were few other (if any) instances where the State placed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal girls together (C. Sullivan 2017, 90). Baldry and Cunneen (2014, 285) cite Parramatta Girls and the Hay Institution as examples of “patriarchal-colonial state control of females, Aboriginal women and girls in particular, via institutional means and the conflation of classism, racism and sexism”.

Since the early 2000s, a loose collective of “Parragirls” who were subject to punitive confinement and abuse as adolescent children at the Parramatta Girls Home have used creative strategies and media interventions to contest and re-story both institutional and media narratives about their experiences and shared history. Parragirls was first established in 2006 by former Parramatta Girls Home residents Bonney Djuric, Christina Green, and Lynette Aitken as a support network and contact register and has been key in establishing a continuous presence on the site (Steele et al. 2020, 534; Toth and Hibberd 2020, 96). Since then, Parragirls have forged connections with community-engaged artists, including Stolen Generation² artists, to create site-responsive artworks, group exhibitions, creative workshops, media-rich websites, verbatim theatre, documentary protest actions, children’s day and NAIDOC week activities,³ and polyvocal media installations that honour the histories and legacies of the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct (PFFP). Parragirls have created “autonomous creative projects” such as quilt making, poetry, and song (N. Toth and L. Hibberd 2021, 96). L. Hibberd and B. Djuric (2019, 149) write that despite being “historically an unnamed and invisible minority”, Aboriginal Parragirls, including Christina Green, Aunty Matilda House, Tony Nicholas and Gypsie Hayes, “have been very active in the public sphere, as well as producing visual art, writing, music and many other creative works”. Some of this work has been created as part of the Parragirls Memory Project, a contemporary art and social history project established by Parragirl co-founder Bonney Djuric and artist Lilly Hibberd in 2012 (Hibberd and Djuric 2019, 14). The Memory Project has transformed the PFFP site into a “place of witnessing and reckoning” (M. Tumarkin 2019, 17) and of creative reclamation and repair.

In this article, we approach the creative work of the Parragirls, and the gendered labour and activism of the Parragirls Memory Project more broadly, as a feminist archive of resistance, reclamation, and repair in the wake of both institutional harm and media damage. We build on a rich body of scholarship which documents the vital contributions of Parragirls and the Parragirls Memory Project from fields including art and social practice, critical legal studies, Australian studies, memory studies, and more (J. Bennett 2019; J. Bennett, L. Froggett and L. Muller 2019; F. Davis 2018; B. Djuric 2011, 2016; Hibberd and Djuric 2013, 2019; L. Hibberd, B. Djuric and N. Lewis 2020; Hibberd, Djuric, and Lewis 2020, Volker Kuchelmeister, Hibberd, and Davies 2018; Anna Reading 2019a, 2019b; Steele et al. 2020; Sullivan 2017; Toth and Hibberd 2021; Jacqueline J. Z. Wilson 2013).

While there has been a substantial body of work written about the collective work and activism of Parragirl survivors, and by Parragirls themselves, our analysis foregrounds “media interventions” (T. Dreher 2003, 2010) which seek to “alter or speak back to mainstream news media” (2010 86) and “media as practice” (N. Couldry 2004) for the very broad range of practices oriented towards media. We focus on the ways Parragirls have responded, directly and indirectly, to damaging news media frames, as well as the creative strategies Parragirls have used to re-claim agency over their stories and lives.

We locate our analysis of the Parragirls feminist archive in the context of a larger project Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission analysing the role of media, journalism, and media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) (RCIRCSA) (see K. Mc Callum, M. Chatskin, M. Deas, T. Dreher, K. Hess, E. John, S. Joseph et al. 2022). The Commission’s letters patent laid out its scope to investigate child sexual abuse across all societal institutions, scouts, schools, non-Christian churches, orphanages, state-run foster care, health, sporting and disability organisations. From the outset, however, Care Leaver advocates expressed concerns that the decision to focus only on child sexual abuse, rather than all forms of child abuse, and the decision to investigate both OOHC and “open” institutions such as churches and schools, would sideline key concerns underpinning their advocacy for a Royal Commission (F. Golding 2018). The Breaking Silences project examined the role of media in triggering, reporting on, and keeping alive the findings of the RCIRCSA.⁴

We develop the concept of reparative media practices to suggest the practices we identify in the Parragirls feminist archive foreground the limits of conventional news media while also offering a reparative frame for media interventions oriented towards justice beyond both individual therapy and transactional modes of redress. The broad range of Parragirls media practices are grounded in collective feminist care and repair, providing inspiration for reparative media that would seek to repair deep harms and to address systemic or institutional injustices, working beyond entrenched media logics to foreground the agency and lived expertise of survivors. Investigative journalism has been widely and quite rightly celebrated for a crucial role in sparking the RCIRCSA and in breaking public silences around child sexual abuse (L. Waller, T. Dreher, K. Hess, K. McCallum and E. Skogerbø 2019, 181; K. Wright and S. Swain 2018; Dennis; D. Muller 2017). However, in the Parragirls archive we find evidence of the costs and harms of news media attention and alternative practices that centre resistance, reclamation, and repair beyond conventional media logics. By focusing on the “open-ended range of practices focused directly or indirectly on media” (Couldry 2004, 118) in the Parragirls archive, we analyse a range of practices and interventions which, taken together, complicate one of the key media narratives which emerged from media monitoring company iSentia’s analysis of news coverage during the RCIRCSA public hearings about abuses at Parramatta Girls, namely that “while traumatic, providing evidence can be beneficial and worthwhile.” Our paper thus contributes to critical scholarship on news values as racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies of attention, and to feminist media scholarship that highlights resistant and transformative alternative visions for media practice.

We begin with an overview of the relationship between media and the RCIRCSA and the RCIRCSA’s focus on the Parramatta Girls Home as one of its case studies. Next, we examine the fraught relationship between media (news and current affairs in particular) and survivors of institutional abuse at Parramatta Girls Home, where news journalism has played a role in bringing abuses at Parramatta Girls Home to public attention but has also compounded existing stigma and shame for some Parragirls exposed to media scrutiny. Next, we foreground Parragirls media interventions which resist news media frames, reclaim narrative agency, and repair media damage in the wake of institutional harm. We conclude by taking lessons from the Parragirls archive on the need to move beyond a politics of media inclusion, diversity, or reform to argue for institutional transformation grounded in the work of collective feminist care and repair.

Media and the RCIRCSA: overshadowing, scandal, and stigma

The RCIRCSA was a years-long national media event during which the national public broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Australian Associated Press newswire covered every day of the 57 public hearings and the release of various reports. News media coverage of the RCIRCSA’s work was broadly supportive, in contrast to international inquiries which had been discredited in media reporting. Here, however, we look beyond the self-congratulatory media/journalism discourse on “breaking silences” and the value of media reporting, to highlight the ambivalence of media visibility, the harms that can be caused, and reparative media practices that seek to address or avoid those harms.

The overshadowing effect of “media hierarchies of attention” discussed in our previous baseline research (Waller et al. 2019) reflects the operations of entrenched news values. News values function to routinise and organise newsgathering and writing practice. Conventional news values are highly naturalised and normalised, serving to entrench H. Becker’s (1963) notion of a “social hierarchy of credibility” with the effect that credibility and the right to be heard are differently distributed in news (Simon Cottle 429–430).

The “event orientation” of news (S. Cottle 2000, 433) further tends to displace from view wider issues of social structure and professional norms of impartiality and objectivity can contribute to over-accessing of the news media by those in powerful and privileged institutional positions (S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts 1978, 58).

Routine news values shape the representation of Care Leavers and “care” institutions in news and current affairs. Tabloid coverage of child abuse and neglect tend to individualise issues at the expense of examining structural factors such as poverty and race (R. Lonne and K. Gillespie 2014). Lonne L. L. McCosker, K. Gillespie, G. Marston and G. Marston (2014) found that while the voices of young people with experience of care were often included in feature articles, they were usually used to give a personal, human interest angle to the story rather than to share their views on issues in the sector or what needed to change—a role that was reserved mostly for managers of private or community-based OOHC associations and support agencies. In other words, care leavers were not treated as the source of expert insights or possible alternatives or systemic transformations.

The relatively scant research on the representation of care leavers in mainstream media finds persistent class and social stigma (J. Z. Wilson and F. Golding 2015, 27; D. Michell 2015, D. Riggs, D. King, P. Delfabbro and M. Augoustinos (2009) examined representations of foster care in the Australian news media from the 19th through the 20th century and found that stigma, and particularly class stigma, was an enduring feature.

In the following sections we will see that gender is particularly salient when it comes to media reporting of the Parramatta Girls Home and its history of female incarceration and abuse. A feminist media lens contributes much to our understanding of how these intersecting media frames of class, race and gender stigma coalesce.

RCIRCSA and the Parramatta Girls Home case study

The Parramatta Girls Home (Parramatta Girls) and the Institution for Girls in Hay (the Hay Institution) were identified early on by the RCIRCSA as the focus of one of its 57 public case studies (Case Study No. 7), and one of 9 case studies focusing on historical residential institutions. Hearings for Case Study No. 7 were conducted between 26 February and March 3 2014. The RCIRCSA heard evidence from 16 former inmates of Parramatta Girls. Six identified as Aboriginal. Four of the witness also spent time at Hay Institution (RCIRCSA 2014, 32). The Hay Institution, a former colonial gaol in regional New South Wales west of Sydney, was a maximum-security annexe established in response to a series of riots at Parramatta Girls in 1960 and 1961 (Find & Connect 2011a, “Hay Institution for Girls”). Both institutions were subject to a cluster of sexual abuse and cover up allegations, with the RCIRCSA hearing evidence spanning more than two decades, from 1950 to 1974 (RCIRCSA 2014, 2).

The RCIRCSA’s focus on Parramatta Girls and the Hay Institution allowed it to consider systemic issues: the OOHC and juvenile justice systems; and redress schemes available for victims of child sexual abuse (RCIRCSA 2014, 2). Both the Bringing them Home National Inquiry (HREOC 1997) and the Forgotten Australians Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee 2004) had also heard testimonies of abuse at Parramatta Girls and the Hay Institution, making recommendations regarding child institutional abuse, including processes for redress, recognition, and reparation (RCIRCSA 2014, 13).

The Australian National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families noted in its Bringing them Home Report that the definition and interpretation of “uncontrollable” and “neglected” in the Child Welfare Act “impacted adversely on Indigenous families” (HREOC 1997, 40). Sullivan (2017, 90–91) highlights the “cultural violence” endured by Aboriginal children held at Parramatta Girls, including the deprivation of culture and language, the denigration of their Indigeneity, and racialised abuse (see also HREOC 1997; RCIRCSA 2017b). The RCIRCSA also found that “racism and lack of cultural safety also increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children’s vulnerability and prevent them from speaking out” (RCIRCSA 2017b, 1).

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivors told the RCIRCSA they had been forcibly removed from their families as children and sexually abused in institutions. The RCIRCSA heard in private sessions that for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivors, “the impact of institutional child sexual abuse was often compounded by the trauma of being forcibly removed from family, community, country and culture” (RCIRCSA 2017b, 9). Of those who gave evidence in private sessions, “three-quarters said they were sexually abused in out-of-home care,” the majority of whom were abused in an historical residential institution “such as a mission dormitory or children’s home” (RCIRCSA 2017d, 4). Aboriginal girls were at particular risk of being sent to Parramatta Girls (Davis 2018, 223) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children continue to be significantly over-represented in OOHC and youth detention (RCIRCSA 2017d, 1).

Media attention and the Parramatta Girls Home

Feminist activism and advocacy, including through media, have played a crucial role in raising public awareness of conditions at Parramatta Girls and the Hay Institution—before and during the RCIRCSA—and in “keeping alive” the RCIRCSA’s findings. Following “riots” at Parramatta Girls in 1961, the home was the focus of a sustained campaign of anti-carceral feminist protest actions, led by Bessie Guthrie, garnering some press attention (S. Bellamy 1996, [2006]; Find & Connect 2011b, “Parramatta Girls Training School”). In 1973, collective activism by the Women’s Liberation Movement again sparked media attention as well as parliamentary interest (Parragirls n.d.-b; RCIRCSA 2014, 13). The agenda-setting ABC television current affairs program This Day Tonight aired a program in July that year exposing the brutal conditions at both Parramatta Girls and Hay (RCIRCSA 2014, 7–8), with several former inmates speaking candidly about their abuse. Both institutions were closed the following year.

Survivor-led feminist activism in the early 2000s, along with Senate and National inquiries into OOHC sparked another wave of media attention. As Hibberd and Parragirl Bonney Djuric recount (2019, 7), Parragirls “sent out press releases and organised with journalist Sharon O’Neill to produce a series of reports on Parramatta Girls Home for ABC TV program Stateline in 2003” and 2004.

However, as Toth and Hibberd, Djuric, and Lewis (2020, 98) note, for some Parragirls, giving testimony—whether to government inquiries or speaking to the media—was “not straightforward” and “some were dubious about the outcomes of the process, given their past experience.” The process of attending the royal commission and giving testimony not only resurfaced memories of abuse for survivors but, as Hibberd and Djuric (2019, 61) note, also exposed them to unwanted, and sometimes damaging, media attention:

Journalists demanded that the women provide personal and sensational accounts of their past trauma, which placed their memories firmly in the public spotlight. And there was always one naive question that members of the public consistently posed: “What did you do to get put in here?” What people seemed not to understand is that this question conferred guilt and criminality on Parragirls, causing them renewed frustration and anger that they were the ones who had to explain that this was a falsehood.

A Factiva news database search for selected news coverage for the period of the Parramatta Girls hearings (26 Feb—March 3 2014) yielded 49 news reports, many with sensational headlines reporting on the most extreme aspects of the abuse. News media logics directed attention to the most shocking and graphic aspects of the public hearings, reproducing the most intimate details of Parragirls’ testimonies and somewhat overshadowing the systemic and systematic nature of the abuse. This pattern of media inattention and overshadowing has also been identified by Waller et al. (2019) across the broader media coverage of the RCIRCSA public hearings focused on institutional case studies. The RCIRCSA learned through Parragirls hearings that the “isolation of victims was central to their experience of abuse” (RCIRCSA 2017a, 90) and that segregation and solitary confinement were used as extreme forms of punishment for those deemed “bad” or “disobedient” (RCIRCSA 2014, 14). As feminist media scholarship reminds us, media visibility is a double-edged sword. Under the media’s scrutinizing gaze, Parragirls were both hyper-visible and invisible. Coverage that would have attended more carefully to systematic and systemic forces would widen the frame to interrogate state-sanctioned institutional abuse and unjust systems of “care” – as well as policy reform and institutional change. This media attention could also extend to the entrenched patterns of over-representation along lines of race, gender, class, disability and more. However, a lack of trauma-informed and nuanced reporting in mainstream coverage meant that female agency and collective struggle in the face of systemic abuse almost completely disappears from the media frame.

News reports did recount evidence given by Aboriginal survivors who had experienced abuse at Parramatta Girls and/or Hay, yet strikingly absent in mainstream reporting was the contemporary context of the continued over-representation of First Nations children in the contemporary OOHC system. This is despite OOHC being one of the systemic issues the RCIRCSA hoped to spotlight through the Parramatta Girls Home case study (c.f. T. Dreher and L. Waller 2022). In contrast, sustained attention to these issues by Indigenous media has prioritised First Nations expertise and Care Leaver voices to challenge the colonial-carceral “care” and “protection” of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (see L. Behrendt 2021; T.-R. Vanessa, M. Salter and B. J. Newton 2022; A. Whittaker and T. Libesman 2018).

The Parragirls feminist archive: resistance, reclamation, and repair

While current affairs journalism was one crucial avenue for breaking silences around institutional abuses at Parramatta Girls and the Hay Institution, the news media spotlight is not necessarily a safe space for those already marginalised and stigmatised. It is certainly “not geared up to the needs of the socially powerless,” as Cottle (2000, 434) reminds us. During the period of the RCIRCSA, several Parragirls were engaged in a range of creative and artistic practices “beyond the boundaries of news” (Dreher 2003) which provided alternative genres of testimony to both news media reporting and government inquiries. In this section we focus our analysis on some of the creative strategies and media interventions employed by Parragirls during this period—within and beyond the RCIRCSA, in formal and informal ways, and in big and small acts which restore dignity—to highlight practices found in the Parragirls archive, yet sorely lacking in news and current affairs, and from conventional news values more broadly. We focus specifically on The Public Secret as an example of resisting media frames, The Parragirls Memory Project as an example of reclaiming narrative agency, and Parragirls Past, Present as an example of repairing media damage.

Resisting news media frames

The Public Secret (2017) is a three-channel video installation co-created by Parragirls Bonney Djuric and Jenny McNally, and artist Libby Hibberd. In one section of the work, images of tabloid headlines during public hearings on Parramatta Girls are juxtaposed with on-screen text in which Djuric asks: “why are we depicted in a sensationalist way?”; “are these stories meant to diminish us?”; and “how do these stories help turn our lives and this place around for something good?” (2:20 mins). The use of text rather than spoken voice to “speak” has both aesthetic and political effect. Crucially, these vital questions are posed without exposing female bodies to scrutiny, instead sheltering them from further harm by removing them from the frame—a feature also of Parragirls Past, Present (2017). Reflecting on her experience at Parramatta Girls, Bonney Djuric (in Hibberd and Djuric 2013, 70) has written “it was always driven home to us that our ‘female-ness’ was the source of our rottenness”. The creative choices allow Parragirls to resist damaging media frames while also demanding more of the media.

Later, the work also raises questions about the limits of the RCIRCSA Terms of Reference, with on-screen text in which McNally asks: “why is the scope of the Royal Commission narrowly defined as sexual abuse?”; “why couldn’t its terms be about all of the abuse … punitive labour, beatings, solitary confinement and fear?”; “or does this obsession with our bodies maintain the early control of female power and sexuality in this country?” (5:55 mins). While these questions were also raised by Care Leaver Advocacy Network (CLAN) (see Golding 2018), Parragirls interventions contrast with CLAN’s media advocacy approach by creating their own channels of communication. Of central importance is feminist collective agency to determine how Parragirls appear (or don’t appear) in media. A second example within the larger Parragirls archive can be found within RCRICSA public hearings, in a small moment during one Parramatta Girls Home survivor’s testimony in which they sought to address historical media damage. Former Parramatta Girls Home resident and witness Wendy Patton spoke to the harms of media in her evidence to the RCIRCSA. As part of her testimony, Patton also submitted into evidence a bundle of photocopied newspaper clippings (exhibits 7–8; see RCIRCSA 2017c) reporting on a series of riots at Parramatta Girls Home in 1961 where several girls, including Patton, collectively protested their confinement and abuse. The reporting conformed to what Danielle D. K. Brown and S. Harlow (2019) term the “protest paradigm” which demonises and marginalises the voices of protesters, and specifically the “riot frame” (S. Harlow, D. K. Brown, R. Salaverría and V. García-Perdomo 2020, 1591), through which protesters are portrayed as “deviant” by focusing on “the violence of […] rioting, looting, or causing damage to public property or society”. Some of the articles in the bundle of news clippings report of growing pressure for an inquiry into Child Welfare and the conditions at the institution; yet none of them detail the reasons for the girls’ uprising. Rather than reframing “delinquent girls” as activists with agency (J. Z. Wilson and B. Carlton 2022), news reports reproduced deficit narratives of deviance—depicting them as “hard-core delinquents” (The Sun Herald, March 1961), or “wild”, “screaming”, “swearing” and “abusive”.

Patton resisted these criminalising riot frames. In giving her evidence, Patton drew particular attention to one image reproduced in a news clipping captioned “A policeman grabs a wooden rake from two girls who climbed onto Parramatta Girls Home yesterday” (EXH.007.008.0008). On the photocopied clipping, Patton has annotated the image with an arrow which points to one of the figures on the roof with the word “ME,” in capital letters, handwritten underneath one of the figures, with “WENDY” written above.

Patton recounted her actions on the roof to the RCIRCSA, and of her attempts to communicate to media beyond the institution’s walls: When I was on the roof, I saw television reporters on the other side of the wall.

When I was on the roof, I saw television reporters on the other side of the wall. I started yelling out to them, “We’re being raped. We're being tortured. There are girls in here that are pregnant that have never been outside the walls”. I started screaming it. When I did that other girls came up on to the roof. I had a broom that I pulled them up with. I remember one reporter yelled at me and said, “Is it over food?”I replied, “No, it’s about rapes and girls being tortured”. (Transcript ofWendy Patton’s evidence, given at RCIRCSA public hearing 26 February 2014)

We highlight Patton’s testimony here because it is exemplary of the reparative media practices found in the Parragirls archive more broadly: it powerfully speaks back to damaging media frames which positioned the girls as deserving of their abuse at the time of the “riots”; it is also a moment where Patton re-asserts her agency and, holds media to account by putting her “insider activism” (Wilson and Carlton 2022) on the public record in a small but vital act of dignity and repair. Where a reporter trivialises the girls’ activism by asking whether they are protesting over food, Patton insists on foregrounding the systemic nature of institutional violence and abuse.

Reclaiming narrative agency

For as long as the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct has been a site of punitive confinement, patriarchal control, and gendered violence, it has also been a site of anti-carceral resistance, intersectional feminist solidarities, and women’s collective action (see Hibberd and Djuric 2013, 70). The Parragirls Memory Project seeks to reclaim narrative agency over marginalised women’s histories in the context of “a transformational justice-centred approach that empowers former residents as creative authors in the documentation and interpretation of their institutional experiences” (Parragirls, n.d.-a). Parragirls creative interventions have transformed stories of stigma and shame into something more restorative and future-focused; focusing not only on stories of trauma, abuse, and suffering, but of collective grief and healing (Djuric 2016; Hibberd and Djuric 2019; Toth and Hibberd 2020).

Much of the work created through the Parragirls Memory Project has been collective and/or collaborative in nature, with recurring practices and themes such as feminist organising and advocacy, collective care, situated testimony, intersectional solidarities, and self-determined creative agency. This stands in contrast to the atomising focus on individual testimonies in the RCIRCSA and subsequent media reporting. Well before the RCIRCSA handed down its findings, Djuric (2016, 166) raised the question “the Royal Commission has made and will continue to make recommendations, but what happens afterwards?.” The Parragirls Memory project has created a feminist archive of remembering and transformation which responds to this question of aftermath. While mainstream news media has largely “moved on,” the on-going labour of the Parragirls Memory Project keeps alive the findings of the RCIRCSA.

Parragirls have drawn on—and drawn strength from—these histories of gendered labour, reclaiming feminised traditions of “women’s work”. Djuric (in Hibberd and Djuric 2019, 71) highlights how the Parragirls Memory Project has re-claimed the “so-called ‘industrial arts’” (sewing, weaving, embroidery and so forth) undertaken by females in the former Parramatta Girls Industrial School to create commemorative quilts, textiles, and installations. Here, the work of mending—a feminised form of repair—finds material and political expression. Repair as in mending is not to “fix” or “correct” something broken; rather, it suggests a different reparative impulse. Reclaiming care as repair from the violence of institutional/state “care”. Close attention to the Parragirls archive highlights a consistent orientation towards such reparative acts which restore dignity and collectively work to re-build worlds and selves in the wake of institutional harm and media damage.

Repairing media damage

Parragirls Past, Present: Unlocking memories of institutional “care” (2017)⁵ is a 23-minute immersive multimedia work narrated through the living memory of five former Parramatta Girls Home survivors and co-creators—Bonney Djuric, Gypsie Hayes, Lynne Edmondson Paskovski, Jenny McNally, and Tony Nicholas. It takes viewers through a virtual rendering of the PFFP site as Parragirls speak from lived experience, moving through different spaces and buildings on the site. The work highlights practices which feature in many of the Parragirl Memory Project interventions: they are collective and collaborative; they foreground Parragirls’ collective care and agency as well as collective struggle; and they built conditions in which to speak beyond the boundaries of news media and the RCIRCSA.

Bennett, Froggett, and Muller (2019, 186) describe Parragirls Past, Present (2017) as “a reparative project” which plays a different reparative role to the royal commission, while also reclaiming agency over the narrative. Toth and Hibberd (2021, 94) similarly suggest the work is a form “creative reparation” which both supplements and critiques official inquiry—and by extension, the media—posing questions about what constitutes reparation beyond institutional redress:

Such practices may be understood both complementary to and critical of the form of witnessing admitted in the official inquiries as well as the justice system. As alternative forms of testimony, these accounts relate individual and collective trauma that could not find expression in the framework of government enquiries or the legal system, and pose the question of what exactly constitutes reparation.

Significant to our analysis are the specific conditions of listening and being heard which the work created, and the relational modes of narration, witness and sense-making which offered Parragirls alternative registers through which to speak. Parragirls Past, Present was commissioned for the 2017 Big Anxiety mental health arts and science festival in Sydney and premiered in the months prior to the RCIRCSA handing down its Final Report. Founded in 2016, the Big Anxiety festival includes partners from across the “cultural, education and health sectors” (The Big Anxiety n.d.). Premiering Parragirls Past, Present in a forum already attuned to creative arts-and-health approaches to “supporting emotional distress [and] trauma recovery” (ibid) sets up a deliberate and intimate “listening public” (Kate Lacey, 2013). These conditions speak back to the harmful effects of extractive news media and speak to possibilities for more reparative media practices.

Parragirls Past, Present presents an “alternative form of testimony” (Toth and Hibberd 2020, 94) which allows for sensory, embodied, and situated memories to surface in relation to shared, yet distinct, experiences in the former Parramatta Girls Home. We might understand this as a relational mode of narrative account in which the co-presence and collective voice of Parragirls are prioritised over a singular, individual story. At the same time, it holds space for listening across difference (T. Dreher 2009) so that the distinct experiences of each Parragirl are co-present, rather than collapsed. Further, their accounts are not confined to the RCIRCSA’s focus on sexual abuse; they tell also of strategies of survival, moments of humour and escape—however brief, and acts of defiance and solidarity. As Hibberd and Djuric (2019, 182) have written, the film offers Parragirls “a position of authority, in contrast to the victim’s identity as a powerless dependent of the state.” Conventional news media finds it difficult to hear complex accounts of collective and institutional trauma without recourse to narrative tropes of individual deficit and deviance or the perpetuation of female victimisation.

While viewers hear the voices of five Parragirls in Parragirls Past, Present, their bodies do not appear on screen (Toth and Hibberd 2020, 100). This suggests an act of feminist care which affords a mode of situated, sonic testimony which shelters their bodies from public and media scrutiny and refuses its voyeuristic gaze. Instead, viewers are immersed into a virtual environment which renders the former Parramatta Girls Home as an unsettling and all-encompassing carceral institution as Parragirls narrate their experiences in voice-over (see Toth and Hibberd 2020, 101 for more on this aspect of the film).

The creative strategies and media interventions of the Parragirls shift responsibility for individual suffering and shame—amplified for some by the experience of testifying to the RCIRCSA—back onto institutions of power, while also connecting their experiences to longer histories of institutional abuse at the site. One such moment comes towards the end of the film, when state institutions of power, including the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS), are held to account. Bennett (2019, 86), a co-producer on the film, notes how the screening was used to broker subsequent dialogues between Parragirls and FaCS leadership, as well as other political and community leaders:

None of these goals is an end in itself; they express a principle behind the collaboration, which is to ask, “who needs to see and hear this?” […] and then to facilitate viewing and listening in mutually beneficial settings.

To restore and return, towards reparative media practices

The RCIRCSA (2017a, 14) final report noted that few survivors of child sexual abuse in historical residential institutions found institutional redress schemes “satisfying, respectful or supportive”. Reclaiming access to the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, the Parragirls network and Memory Project, and its recognition as a Site of Conscience have all been vital to building infrastructures of collective care and support that centres Parragirls’ agency, autonomy, and makes space for reparative work—well beyond institutional modes of redress. Parragirls have employed communicative, cultural, and creative channels to mend some of the deep harms of child sexual abuse. Much of this has been undertaken outside media logics.

Attention to the Parragirls feminist archive demonstrates how both media conventions and commissions of inquiry share intersecting logics which can be deeply problematic and violent for victim-survivors of child sexual abuse. The narrative imperative of both institutions, the demand for a coherent story of “trauma,” “victimhood” or even “survival,” narrows the frame through which victim-survivors of institutional child sexual abuse can be heard. The media narrative which emerged through Isentia’s media monitoring—that while traumatic, testifying to the RCIRCSA can be beneficial or worthwhile—perhaps more accurately reflects a hopeful belief in the “healing power of testimony” that commissions of inquiry claim to provide for survivors (see Jill Stauffer 2015, 53), letting media off the hook when it comes to reproducing harm. The Parragirls feminist archive alerts us to parallel, complementary, and alternative genres of testimonial practice and witnessing that prioritise survivor-led meaning-making, memorialisation, and creative action and connects to longer traditions of collective feminist struggle against gendered regimes of confinement and abuse (see L. Guenther 2022; B. Carlton and E. Russell 2018).

Investigative journalism and news media attention has undoubtably been of strategic value at key points in the history of Parragirls’ struggles for justice and to be heard—in garnering support to close Parramatta Girls Home and the Hay Institution; “breaking silences” around institutional child abuse at both institutions; and in triggering the RCIRCSA more broadly (Waller et al. 2019; Golding 2018). However, as we’ve demonstrated, and as the Parragirls feminist archive reveals, news media by and large falls short when it comes to its role in repairing deep harms and addressing institutional injustice, when news media—as an institution—is also implicated.

Reading (2019b, 237) suggests the Parragirls Memory Project is “transformative justice in practice,” moving beyond judicial and transitional justice-based forms of institutional restitution to embrace self-organised symbolic and affective modes of reparation. If the Parragirls Memory Project “puts into action” the redress and reparative goals of the RCIRCSA, as Hibberd and Djuric (2019, 211) write, then the reparative media practices we find in the Parragirls archive tell us something vital about the care and care-full labour needed to create and re-imagine more just (media) futures.

Conclusion

In a call to recentre media and communication studies around alternative media, N. Couldry (2002) argues that alternative media practices are significant not primarily for their direct impact on dominant media forms, but rather for holding open the realm of possibilities and imagination as to what media might be. In this vein, we argue that the media practices of the Parragirls collective are significant for feminist media studies research and practice as these creative strategies and media interventions demonstrate practices of resistance, reclamation, and repair in the wake of both institutional harm and media damage. This work both highlights the harmful effects of extractive news media and speaks to possibilities for more reparative media practices led by, and accountable to, the communities most impacted. In contrast to deeply entrenched news values that frame complex accounts of institutional abuse through media frames of individual deficit and deviance, the PFFP projects foreground Parragirls as authoritative and often defiant. While mainstream media has largely “moved on” from the story of the RCIRCSA, Parragirls collective and collaborative work emphasizes ongoing repair, recovery, and resistance.

This work is a vital contribution to our thinking about media’s role, in advancing—or hindering—the reparative needs and desires of marginalised subjects or groups. The Parragirls archive suggests that reparative media must work beyond a politics of reform or inclusion in regard to conventional media logics and news values, instead foregrounding transformative processes and outcomes well beyond news representation. Attention to the Parragirls feminist archive prompts the crucial questions: how might we imagine, or work towards a more reparative media? What might a reparative media be? While we do not claim to provide a simple answer to these questions, we argue that the feminist media practices of the Parragirls present vital resources for both imagination and work.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Bonney Djuric, Linda Steele, and Maria Rae for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and to Alanna Myers for a literature review on media and Care Leavers for the Breaking Silences Project. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council DP190101282.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP190101282]

Notes on contributors

Poppy de Souza

Poppyde Souza (she/her) is Bridging Hope Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Big Anxiety Research Centre, University of New South Wales (UNSW), and previously a Research Fellow on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission’. Poppy’s work critically examines the politics of voice and listening in conditions of injustice and inequality; the relationship between sound, race, and listening; and listening in response to mediated accounts of carceral violence/resistance, and racialised border regimes.

Tanja Dreher

TanjaDreher (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Media and Co-Director of the Media Futures Hub at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission’. Tanja’s interdisciplinary research foregrounds media and social justice through the conceptual lens of the politics of listening in the context of settler colonialism, Indigenous sovereignties, intersectionality, and anti-racism.

Notes

1. The Parramatta Native Institution (1815–1820), which pre-dates the Parramatta Female Factory by five years, is believed to be the first case of institutional child removal of Aboriginal children from their families (Sullivan 2017, 86; see also J. Brook and J. Kohen 1991; Andrew and Hibberd 2022).

2. The term “Stolen Generations” is used to refer to the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families and kin and placed in state- and church-run institutions, foster care, or adopted by non-Indigenous families. This was enabled through a suite of laws, practices, and policies of state, territory, and federal Australian governments up until the 1970s (See HREOC 1997).

3. NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. Its history is traced to Aboriginal groups in the 1920s who fought to raise awareness in the wider community of the status and treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

4. More details on the Breaking Silences project can be found at: https://breakingsilences.net/

5. A 2D rendering can be viewed here: https://www.parragirlsorg.au/copy-of-audio-tour.