What price a child? Commodification and Australian adoption practice 1850–1950

The issue of premiums has always proved problematic for advocates of benevolent adoption for whom the involvement of money tainted an exchange that was meant to be grounded in love. This paper argues that the shifting relationship between supply and demand has meant that there has always been a market in children and that adoption was one of the more prominent mechanisms used to regulate that exchange. Drawing on a database of 25000 advertisements placed in Australian newspapers during the so-called century of the child, it analyses the ways in which children were rendered desirable in a competitive market. Analysing the more than 3000 advertisements in which it was made clear that money, known at the time as a premium, was to change hands, it casts new light on the commodification process involved in adoption, identifying a mismatch between the preferences of those seeking and those needing to dispose of children. It identifies a market that was highly responsive to the environment in which it was operating and proved remarkably resilient in the face of the increasing regulation of adoption. By viewing adoption through the lens of the market, it questions the notion that the ‘best interests of the child’ have always necessarily prevailed

A long history of faith-based welfare in Australia : Origins and impact

In a nation where governments and churches have collaborated in the delivery of welfare services since 1788, such faith-based welfare was seen as normative rather than problematic. Indeed most Australians would struggle to imagine a welfare system that was not built on such an arrangement. However, by the late twentieth century, the world views and ideologies of church leaders and politicians were no longer in alignment, creating tensions in the relationship. This article explores the origins and development of church–state collaboration in the delivery of welfare, and examines the impact this has had on both the shape of charity and the mission of the churches as faith-based agencies are increasingly challenged in an environment in which government funding is tied to policies that potentially transgress the principles of the gospels, and victims of past welfare practices demand reparation

Stakeholders as subjects: The role of historians in the develoment of Australia's Find and Connect web resource

This paper reflects on the methodological, academic, and ultimately personal challenges involved in constructing the Find & Connect web resource, a public history project funded by the Australian Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs in response to the 2009 apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants. Central to these challenges is the relationship between the researchers and the key stakeholders: the Care Leavers and the organizations that ran the institutions in which they spent their childhoods. The paper explores the use of collaborative history in negotiating the conflicting hopes and expectations of the various parties to the project

History of Australian inquiries reviewing institutions providing care for children

This paper documents Australian inquiries into institutions providing out-of-home care for children between 1852 and 2013. It identifies three categories of inquiries. The first, dating from 1852 through to the post-war period, was concerned with establishing and refining the child welfare system; the second, dating from the 1860s to the 1990s, convened in response to allegations of abuse. The third, dating from the 1990s to today, focuses on hearing survivor testimony. The paper argues that an inability or unwillingness to recognise abuse, and a tendency to individualise the problem where it could not be ignored, may well have served the interests of the government and non-government institutions that provided child welfare services, but did little to protect the children entrusted to the children’s ‘care’

Eyes of identification : challenges and opportunities in leveraging highly visible, multiple-level histories

Histories of out of home 'care' have traditionally fallen into four categories: in-house productions, commissioned histories; academic studies and survivor narratives. Each of these is problematic. A more inclusive approach, which encourages a close relationship between historian and those who lived the experience, is offered through projects arising from Australian government enquiries into indigenous, migrant and Australian-born children in care. These projects challenge historians on two main fronts: They defy historians' 'scholarly distance' and require them to embrace alternative, often competing and personally confronting, histories as they seek to incorporate care leavers' voices in published history. A greater challenge, though, is for historians to find effective ways to intersect public history with public policy so that the undesirable legacies of the past do not recur in the futures of the children who are in out of home care today

Submission in response to the Australian Government’s Consultation Paper on the Establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

A submission in response to the Australian Government\u27s Consultation Paper on the Establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Introduction We are a team of academics and researchers, from the disciplines of historical studies, social work and archival science, who have substantive years of experience working on projects exploring the legacy of Australia\u27s institutional \u27care\u27 of children. Our work in this space, particularly since the release of the Forgotten Australians report in 2004, has involved ongoing engagement with a broad range of stakeholders, including care leavers, support and advocacy groups, past and current providers of out-of-home care, state and federal government departments, and cultural institutions. We welcome the opportunity to make a submission in response to the Australian Government\u27s Consultation Paper on the Establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Our submission discusses the vital importance that records will play in this Royal Commission, with particular reference to records in the custody of past providers in religious, charitable and government sectors. We submit that records are a key issue for this Royal Commission

Equal subjects, unequal rights: Indigenous people in British settler colonies, 1830-1910

This book focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, commencing with the imperial policies of the 1830s and ending with the national political settlements in place by 1910. Drawing on a wide range of sources, its comparative approach provides an insight into the historical foundations of present-day controversies in these settler societies. The assertion of exclusive control over the land and the need to contain indigenous resistance meant that the governments preferred to grant citizenship rights to those indigenous peoples committed to individual property and a willingness to abandon indigenous status. However, particular historical circumstances in the new democracies resulted in very different outcomes. At one extreme Maori men and women in New Zealand had political rights similar to those of white colonists; at the other, the Australian parliament denied the vote to all Aborigines. Similarly, the new South African Government laid the foundations for apartheid, whilst Canada made enfranchisement conditional on assimilation. These differences are explored through the common themes of property rights, indigenous cultural and communal affiliations, demography and gender. This book is written in a clear readable style, accessible at all levels from first-year undergraduates to academic specialists in the fields of Imperial and Colonial History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies