Experiencing institutional 'care' with Dr David McDonald

Barbara Lemon: Okay. Hello, good afternoon and welcome to the National Library of Australia here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. We acknowledge Australia's First Nations Peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land. I give my respect to elders past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  

My name is Barbara Lemon. I'm one of three directors of curatorial and collection research here at the Library, and I have responsibility for our commissioned collections, including our oral history collection. That collection is of particular relevance today in a presentation from Dr David McDonald experiencing institutional care. And Dr David McDonald is a 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow. For those who don't know, our distinguished fellowships program supports researchers to make intensive use of the Library's rich collections through residencies of three months. These fellowships are made possible by philanthropic donations. And we thank all our donors for their generous support.  

Dr McDonald is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Melbourne. His research investigates recent transformations in understandings of child sexual abuse and broader forms of abuse and cruelty in institutional contexts. His talk today is based on research examining the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history collection held here at the National Library, one of our largest and most important collections, and drawing on these recordings, he'll be reflecting on the lives of those who have experienced care in inverted commas, and considering what their oral histories tell us about the spectrum of harm children experienced in these settings.  

Please note that the talk will touch on subjects that may be distressing, including the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in institutional settings. If you or anyone you know needs crisis support, I believe we do have a list of contacts that we can provide up on the screen there. Please do reach out to one or more of the contacts provided or speak to one of the staff. And if you need to leave the theatre or the live stream at any time, we do of course understand.  

For my part, I'm always delighted to see research that draws upon the incredibly rich oral history program here at the National Library, which dates back nearly 70 years. I'm a great believer in the public benefit and importance of this work. So please join me in welcoming Dr David McDonald. 

David McDonald: Thank you very much. Thanks for the really generous introduction. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people as the traditional custodians of the land that we're meeting on today. I acknowledge that sovereignty was never seeded and pay my respects to elders past and present. I also acknowledge any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people who might be joining us here today. In the context of a talk like this, indigenous people have been profoundly impacted by the violences of institutionalisation. However, for reasons that I'll go on to talk about shortly, these experiences largely don't feature in the oral histories that I'll be discussing. They're part instead of a separate collection here at the National Library. Nonetheless, I'm cognizant that many of the experiences that I draw upon share features in common with those of First Nations communities.  

I'd like to thank the National Library for the honour of this fellowship and the privilege of being here for three months and the many, many staff who have supported me during my time here. The fellowship team have been really fantastic. Simone Lark, Sharon O'Brien and Kelly Torrens, thank you so much for all of the assistance you've given me. The Rights Management team have been facilitating my access to this collection since well before I arrived, really, the beginning of January I started working on the collection and submitting requests. And from that time right through to this week I've been so well served by the staff who have been facilitating these requests, who have been reaching out to interviewees. And so I'm really thankful for that, the patience, the remarkable efficiency. Everyone here has really been phenomenal.  

Thanks also to the very friendly fellows that I've met along the journey. I've loved hearing more about your own research and how you are drawing upon the incredible collections here at the Library. I've really felt part of a community while I've been here.  

I'm grateful also to former staff of the National Library who have worked on the collection, particularly Joanna Sasaun, who has provided really generous insight along the way. Throughout the process of listening to these interviews, I'm not sure if other people are having some sound issues. I see some movement up the back, so bear with us. But throughout the course of doing this research of listening to the interviews, I felt quite keenly that I've been the beneficiary of the rapport really that's been developed between the former staff, the interviewers, and those being interviewed. So thank you to each of those.  

Most importantly, I wanna acknowledge that the many people whose experiences comprise this collection, the Forgotten Australian and Former Child Migrant oral history project, I know some of you are listening online and others might be in the room. It has been such a privilege to have learnt from your experiences, and I've been moved by listening to them, moved by your courage and tenacity. I've still got a lot of work to do in terms of my engagement with the collection. I expect to be doing it really for some time to come. But I hope really that the work that comes out of that will be of interest to you.  

And I just wanna kind of emphasise that I've learned so much from those experiences. Alongside those whose interviews make up the collection, I've been so fortunate over the last few years to have been enriched by collaborations with care leavers, organisations like Clan, incredible mighty advocates like Leoni Shedi, Frank Golding, Jack Wilson, and many others. My interest in this particular project came out of these kind of these professional relationships. And I hope that this presentation and the future work that comes out of it will do some justice to your experiences.  

And then one final note before launching into the presentation, by necessity, I'll be dealing with a range of harms that children have experienced in institutional care. And I use the term care, like care leavers, I use that term in inverted comm. So this will include some discussion of sexual abuse, physical and emotional abuse, neglect and cruelty. I'll endeavour to deal as sensitively as possible with this, but I do wanna note it again at the outset. Sorry, I should have put that slide on before.  

My interest in, anyone would think I had no experience using a PowerPoint as an academic. My interest in the National Libraries Forgotten Australian and Former Child Migrant Oral History Project comes out of broader work that I've been doing for some time now on institutional abuse. This work has primarily focused on sexual abuse within the context of institutions. While there's nothing new about this kind of abuse in such contexts, over the last few decades we've nonetheless seen something of a transformation in how it's come to be understood, how it's come to be regarded as a widespread social problem.  

So across many institutions be that open or closed, it's now widely accepted that such abuse has been endemic. In the wake of this, the limitations of traditional legal responses have been particularly apparent. In response, considerable attention has been given to things like public inquiries, redress, official apologies. These have provided a really important function, particularly in enabling more kind of collective accounts of victimisation to be heard, certainly than would otherwise be heard through say, the individualistic nature of a criminal trial.  

In Australia these broader international developments have been reflected by what's known as the trilogy of public inquiries, that began in the 1990s with the human rights and equal opportunity commissions. Landmark inquiry into the fourth separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, which of course culminated in the Bringing Them Home report. An example, perhaps of what the Holocaust and post-colonial studies scholar Michael Rothberg calls multi-directional memory. That way that cross-referencing or borrowing in relation to collective memory enables the articulation of other stories are the histories to be made visible.  

The recognition that came to be given to the Stolen Generations, those experiences of institutionalisation and abuse became a kind of platform that contributed to the articulation of non-indigenous experiences to also be recognised. This can be seen first in relation to the 2001 Senate inquiry into Former Child Migrants. And next in 2004, in the form of what's known as the Forgotten Australians Inquiry. These inquiries established that throughout the 20th century, approximately 500,000 Australian children experienced out of home care throughout the 20th century. This trilogy of inquiries is obviously not where the story ends.  

In 2012, we saw the enactment of the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. Over five years that went on to be the longest, the largest, the most expensive Royal Commission in the country's history. These inquiries represent what we could call official state responses.  

And they've been the subject of really significant academic research and also widespread public interest. This research has tended to focus on the increasing prominence that public inquiries have placed upon survivor testimony, and it's focused on their procedural and restorative justice potential for those coming forward and giving evidence. Such official responses can be really important. After all, that's why they've been so strategically fought for by survivor communities.  

While deserving of a attention however, the fact remains that state responses like public inquiries exist among a broader array of truth telling practises, truth telling projects in which survivors seek to have their experiences heard or aired before public audiences. Similarly, while the role of testimony in relation to public inquiries has more recently been recognised, beyond its legal function in areas like courtrooms, testimony can also serve a wider social function.  

So motivated by this, my engagement with the National Library's collection of oral histories, it's collection of Forgotten Australian and Former Child Migrant Oral Histories forms part of a broader project I'm undertaking, which examines survivor testimony outside or beyond official domains like public inquiries. And in doing so, it seeks to decenter the state and state responses.  

It's not to suggest that state responses don't matter, but that there is some value to be gained in looking beyond the state, looking at broader forms of truth telling, those social and cultural domains in which survivor testimony has been publicly presented. In particular, if we look at the kind of historic trajectory that I've described, there's a kind of unevenness, I think, that underpins how institutional abuse has come to appear as a widespread social problem. Specifically an emphasis on sexual abuse has arguably obscured other forms of physical and emotional abuse, as well as those more ingrained forms of cruelty and neglect that many care leavers have described of institutional life.  

As the Australian care leaver and academic Joanne Penn Glaze has written, sexual abuse is always highlighted as if it's the worst abuse. This is an adult centred perspective focusing on the criminality and unnaturalness of the physical act itself. What gets lost here, she says, is that children were violated in every sense in an institution, and being used sexually was just one of those victimizations. So hopefully this gives a sense of how of the larger project and how you know, so across this larger project, I seek to engage with different forms, diverse forms of survivor testimonies, place sites including museums, monuments, memorials, artworks, film, and here in this context, oral histories.  

So in relation to this particular collection here at the National Library, I'm interested in how these oral histories illuminate first a range of harms that children have experienced in institutional contexts. And second, the degree to which the oral histories might contribute to what could be described as alternative justice. So these are questions that I'll unpack further as we go on.  

The collection itself mirrors the National Libraries Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, which as I've said, was established as an outcome of the Bringing Them Home report. In 2008, many of you will recall Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology delivered to indigenous people. The following year, he delivered an apology, a national apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants.  

And this collection at the National Library was established in that context. It consists of over 200 interviews. The overwhelming bulk of those are with people experiencing care and this is alongside some interviews with staff, administrators, policy makers, and advocates. The length of the interviews, I must say, so I'm a criminologist, and although I'm interested, my work is long drawn upon cultural storytelling. I've never before used oral histories and perhaps my naivety came through very early in this work. As I began, or let me say about the length of the collection. So the length typically ranges from about an hour or so, I'd say on average, or not on average, about an hour or so at the kind of minimum, although there are a couple of shorter examples. Though there’s the one interview that's over 20 hours in length. And from a quick crunch of the numbers I did the other day, I can tell you that of the 170 interviews where a time is available via the Library's catalogue, the average is about 3.6 hours in length, so 220 minutes.  

When it comes to listening to individual interviews, the act of transcribing, if not the whole interview, then certainly relevant content makes them considerably longer. So unfortunately, this has meant that my capacity to engage with the collection in its entirety has been limited. So I've been more selective or random, I guess I would say in those interviews that I've engaged with. And as I also said at the start, this work is continuing. This is really just a kind of sense of where I'm up to at this point.  

The interviews themselves have a range of access conditions determined by the interviewee. About half we could describe as open, so they can be publicly accessed in full. And then in relation to the other half or so, a range of access conditions apply. Some are closed entirely, others are closed for a period of time, and then and so forth. Undertaking this fellowship has meant that with the assistance of the National Library, I could apply to individual interviewees to be granted access. And to my surprise, the overwhelming bulk of interviewees or the overwhelming bulk of requests I should say, were approved. I don't have the numbers handy, but well and truly in excess of 90% of requests, I'd say around 95% if I was to guess. So I hope that this is indicative of level of interest amongst interviewees to have their experiences heard. And I'll expand shortly on what I think this requires of us collectively as a public to ensure that the archive doesn't simply gather dust.  

And again, while the work is ongoing, to date, I've engaged with a total of 27 interviews. These reflect diversity in terms of age, of gender, institutional context, state and territory, and so on. Only two of those interviews have been with Former Child Migrants. And that's something that I intend to address as the work continues. In relation to those restricted interviews then there's less, there's more limited information available via the Library's catalogue about the status of the interviewee. So that can make getting a sense of this prior to listening in difficult at times. But nonetheless, that's a bit of a kind of an explanation for where I'm at, at this point.  

So what do these interviews reveal? Before I work through some aspects of this, the booklet that's featured here, pictured here, provides a really, really useful overview to the collection. My focus today will be a little bit more specific, really as a criminologist, I'm interested in the criminological significance of the collection and how it relates to questions of justice. And this, again, will become clearer as I go on.  

The class dimensions of out-of-home care have generally been well recognised, and these factors are clearly conveyed in many of the interviews that I've engaged with to date. Things like unemployment, marriage breakdown, mental illness, addiction, have all had a profound impact on the wellbeing of families, particularly in the context of an absence of a social safety net. So this comes through clearly in many interviews.  

In general, it's also known that similar factors have informed or impacted former child migrants who were brought to Australia from the UK overwhelmingly, but also Malta under child migration schemes throughout the 20th century. Almost all of these children are known to have come from disadvantaged backgrounds. And like other Australian children in care, few were in fact orphans.  

While I didn't set out to ask how these children came into care, how they came to be placed in care, it was nonetheless striking in listening to these interviews how this manifested. For some interviewees, life was marked by clear adversity and emotional deprivation. For others, however, despite the difficult experiences a family may have endured, they were nonetheless, they've nonetheless offered rich accounts of deep love.  

So let me play a clip here from of the interviewees who I'm calling Deirdre. Deirdre leading up to this clip, has described her father's alcohol addiction, the tumultuousness of her parents marriage, the breakdown of that marriage. Nevertheless, she also describes her happy memories from the time she and her sister lived in a flat with her father after her mother had left the home. 

[Recording starts] 

Deirdre: Amtraks, and our other happy memories, we were very close to the beach and dad in summer, he'd get us up early and we'd walk down to the beach. There were baths there, sea baths, and he'd take us swimming and it was just such a happy time. It's just a really strong memory of playing with dad. And he'd put us on his back and sort of be a porpoise or something. And it was just a very happy memory that summer that we'd walk down and have this lovely time and walk back, and then he'd go off and we'd go to school.  

I mean, for those days it was incredibly unconventional that a man would have two little children and look after them. He was just a wonderful man. And we'd go to school and he'd come home at lunchtime and make us a cake. And that's incredible 'cause it's before the days of packaged cakes, and he'd bake us a cake. And so we'd come home from school and there was just always a cake on the table. And it's just a really strong memory. 

 [Recording ends] 

David McDonald: So I'm really struck from accounts such as this, both of the deep love and affection that comes through many interviews, as well as the fact that such accounts implicitly highlight what an injustice it is to think of such circumstances in relation to personal or family deficiency. In this way, I'm reminded of disability studies and the critique of what's known as the deficit model. This model has perceived disability through a prism of medicine whereby impairment is understood as an individual deficit. And it's come to be roundly criticised on the basis that it pathologizes disadvantage and that it obscures social or structural dimensions.  

In the case of children being removed, being placed in care, the risk of a deficit logic is that it obscures the social context of impairment. Worse still by pathologizing experiences of disadvantage, there's a danger that this legitimises removal of such children, rather than seeing this disadvantage as a symptom of the social context in which it exists. Returning to the clip then, one of the most instructive things to emerge through interviews such as this, was how these family experiences were often sources of significant love.  

This wasn't always the case. There were experiences of abuse within family context that I'll come back to shortly. But I present this here because it offers, I think, an important corrective to the idea that children came into care because of some kind of deficit. While disadvantage was common, this shouldn't be taken to be synonymous with a lack of care or affection.  

In coming to this work, I was interested in the picture of institutional life, the interviews conveyed, and how this provided insight into the range of harms implicit within this. What I hadn't expected was such a strong emphasis on the sensory dimensions of the experience. Well, this again, may have been naive on my part, ultimately, it's one of the things that I found so rich about this collection.  

Across so many interviews and really in an abundance of ways, the kind of texture of daily life is conveyed through the senses, how life felt inside the rules that structured day-to-day existence, the regimes of discipline, the degradations all are powerfully on display and overwhelmingly articulated in sensory terms. You know, things like the biting cold or the oppressive stifling heat, the bland monotony of the food, the sounds of children wailing, of bare skin being struck, the bells that ring to signal mealtime, the waft of urine from scared children who wet the bed, the pungent chemicals that are used to clean, the scouring of children's bodies at shower time, the physicality of hunger, the pain of corporeal punishment. These are all experiences that are parlayed in really high, in highly tactile terms. The clips I could play to demonstrate this really are bound, but I'll provide two examples and I'll expand on why I think they're important in a moment. First, let's have a listen to the first. 

 [Recording starts] 

Robert: I do remember every night. And this may be wrong, but the way I remember it, it was every night without fail was tomato soup for dinner. And that kind of powdered tomato soup, because I know the taste as I later on when I look back, I realised that that's what it was. And I couldn't eat it for 20 years. I couldn't look at tomato soup for 20 years after that. But it was every night, which, you know, nutritionally probably met basic needs. But it's funny how you remember something like that so vividly. 

Interviewer: And it stays, doesn't it? 

Robert: Yeah, and it was the communal eating. It was long tables sitting side by side, sleeping communally in this long sort of rectangular hall with cots on either side. 

David McDonald: And the second. 

 [Recording starts] 

Hugh: I've got a lot of problems, you know, I don't sleep too well sometimes. I still think about the orphanage, even though I'm 55. I go back and it's funny, I wake up and I still think I'm in the orphanage sometimes. You know, like I'll get a bit, the window might be open and the breeze will come through and I say, oh, I'll wake up and I think I'm in the orphanage. It's just, it's there all your life. It's like anything, when you younger you can always remember going to school, you know, it's the prime of your life. And it's supposed to be the happiest days of your life, schooling, and it wasn't. You know, it was very disappointing and very hard, and. 

[Recording ends] 

David McDonald: So each of these clips and many others like them, tell us about the sensory realm of life inside institutions and the texture of how life felt. They also tell us about how these sensations aren't just confined to a past life. For each of these men, memory is a kind of tissue that connects or collapses past and present through the sensors. The texture of the past continues to be felt in the here and now. From that breeze that flows through an open window. Taking Hugh back to his days in the orphanage. Or for Robert, the monotony that's represented by the powdery tomato, the bland powdery taste of the tomato soup. He couldn't eat it, much less look at it for 20 years.  

Now neither of these represent the most intrusive sensory experiences that interviewees describe. I've deliberately chosen to avoid dwelling too voyeuristically on these. However, these give us a sense of the embodied experience that the interviews describe of institutional living and how this continues to be felt in the here and now.  

So in thinking about the significance that interviewees afforded to the sensors, I'm reminded as a criminologist of some recent work that criminologists have begun doing or begun to place on the sensors, the sensory realm. In the introduction to a recent edited book, Sensory Penalities, Kate Herrity, Bethany Schmidt, and Jason Warr write, foregrounding the sensory by thinking about sounds, smells, taste, and touch, and utilising these sorts of sources of information as a mechanism for understanding presents a new way of exploring phenomena, which has long been the focus of criminological inquiry. So put another way, while sites of punishment and processes of social control have long been the kind of stock in trade of criminologists, it's only recently within this discipline at least that more explicit attention has begun to be placed upon, you know, how these sorts of sites, how these processes operate and are experienced according to the sensors. And this has led to a flurry of work that considers the embodied dimensions.  

Based on these sorts of interviews, the accounts of interviewees, I'd suggest that these sites, to these sites we might also add that of the children's home, the industrial home, or the orphanage. After all the language of imprisonment is regularly invoked by interviewees to describe their experiences of institutional life. While a sensory reading of these experiences is therefore crucial I think, we can push this notion of the sensors even further. After all sensation and affect don't simply come to us via the descriptions from interviewees. They're also ingrained in the research process. They're experienced by me as a listener, a researcher.  

Over the last few decades, oral historians have begun to emphasise the interrelations between interviewer and interviewee to describe that coming together of these two parties. They use the concept of inter-subjectivity to describe that dynamic interaction or encounter between these parties and their respective subjectivities. So there's an affective sort of interrelation here between the interviewer and the interviewee. That oral historians nowadays are accustomed to describing, that they're more attuned to.  

To this end we might add the experience of the listener and their encounter with the archive. It's obviously not the same as that between an interviewer and interviewee whose interrelation to one another is more tangible, you know, typically in the same room as one another. But there's nonetheless, I think, an affective encounter that comes to pass between the researcher and the interview.  

So as I've sat upstairs here at the National Library in the Special Collections room, listening to these interviews, I've been intensely moved by what they've revealed, the horrors of these experiences, the courage, the tenacity of those who have survived them, smiling with a sense of fondness, at times laughing at unexpected humour in the collection of which there's surprisingly quite a bit. So I dare say the embodied effective experiences that come with listening wouldn't be so easily or powerfully conveyed through a written transcript.  

And it's one of the reasons why I've decided against the use of timestamps. So timestamps tend to be available for open access interviews. It would be possible to look at a kind of overview of an interview, to get a sense of the different themes, and then to go straight to a particular part of the interview, rather than to engage with it in its totality. I've come to think of doing this, I'm sure oral history and oral historians have different views or far more insight, but to me it feels like skipping to the end of a novel and passing over chapters.  

As I've said, one of the central questions I've sought to ask in undertaking this project related to a spectrum of harms the interviewees conveyed. So while institutional abuse has come to be recognised internationally as a widespread social problem, implicit to the trajectory I described earlier is this kind of unevenness in how it's understood. Particularly, the emphasis that has come to be placed upon sexual abuse. The sensory dimensions I've just discussed or described are an entry point to show how issues of harm are more expansive than a narrow emphasis on sexual abuse tends to imply.  

This isn't to say that examples of sexual abuse are uncommon across the interviews. While they're frequent, they nonetheless sit among a broader suite of harms that interviewees recount. In feminist theorising of violence against women, the concept of a continuum has been invoked to illuminate the complex, the multifaceted range of harms that men's violence against women can take, and the kind of the interconnectedness between those different forms. So from harassment or threats, coercion, sexual violence, domestic violence, fatal violence, the point has been to emphasise that these manifest in a range of harmful behaviours. And that despite the diversity or forms that they might take, they're nonetheless connected, they're nonetheless mutually reinforcing.  

So it's therefore unhelpful to privilege particular forms of harm as more serious than others. I mean, we put something like homicide in a different, or murder in a different category. But in a similar way, the litany of harms that interviewees describe here convey I think a more complex reality than the emphasis that's come to be socially placed upon sexual abuse might suggest.  

So I'm not for a moment suggesting that sexual abuse isn't serious, but it's rather that there is a broader set of interconnected harms that come through these interviews and that greater recognition of those diverse harms requires greater recognition. So why does this matter? For a start, we risk, I think, minimising the impacts of harms separate to sexual abuse. But I'd also say that it invites us to reflect on, again, the interconnections between these harms and how they arise from the structure of out-of-home care. Rather than understanding these harms, say as a symptom of individual wrongdoing on the part of a staff member, for instance, the notion of a continuum that entails multi kind of faceted harms helps to show how they're interrelated and how they're intrinsically ingrained in institutional life.  

While it's important to therefore reflect with nuance about the litany of harms that interviewees describe, it would also be remiss of me not to acknowledge those who describe their experiences as life enhancing. Examples to this effect are provided on the PowerPoint slide, you can see here, Greg describes being placed in care in a children's home, probably as the best thing that ever happened to him. He describes the freedoms he enjoyed, the fact that he went to a public school, that he had his weekends to himself, that he could roam free, that he could visit friends and so on. There may be a temptation to understand this as a reflection of the fact that Greg's time in care occurred later than many other of those interviewees who I've engaged with. And that conditions may have eased across time. I think this would be an unsatisfactory rationale because it would risk flattening out those other more recent experiences, which have also been harmful.  

Similarly, the harms of institutionalisation continue still today. If we assume that harm was only a factor of, in relation to historical law, past experiences, we'd be negligent to the many and varied ways in which harm is still experienced by children still today in out-of-home care, in juvenile detention and so forth. That said, the kind of institutional experience that Greg describes is nonetheless at odds with those much more totalizing institutions in which every facet of life is controlled. Adding further conceptual difficulty is that for some individuals for whom the experience was regarded as life enhancing, were instances in which they also described having been abused, at times sexually abused.  

So I think this actually reinforces the previous point I was making that requires us to kind of rethink or to challenge the so-called specificity of sexual abuse. Even more however, I think it requires us to understand the harmful experiences that led children like Greg and others like him to be placed in care.  

While it's true that many were from family or familial backgrounds that were, you know, I described as deeply loving and affectionate before nourishing, for example, there were others that were not. With experiences for accounted of abuse, of incest within family contexts. The significance of these accounts then is that they, again, they underscore this spectrum of experiences that children have experienced in institutional care. And second, they show that institutional abuse is not synonymous, doesn't capture all of the harms that children in our society experience. It's not, it either be it historically or contemporaneously. So I think this is a salutary point for all of the progress that's been made in coming to understand institutional abuse as having long existed, having been remarkably common, having often been covered up and so forth. For all of that progress, the institution of the family remains to receive, continues to be neglected or overlooked as an enduring source of harm to children. I'm not suggesting that this warrants practises like out-of-home care or so on, but it does tell us that we need to think through, I think this conceptual messiness.  

In what remains, I wanna, in the last few minutes, I want to turn now to what these interviews tell us in terms of issues of justice. The first way this can be seen is through the rich accounts that interviewees offer up in relation to the meaning of official apologies. So I came to this work a bit agnostic about apologies. I knew that they could be important, I don't wanna suggest otherwise. But it's felt at times that governments might too easily favour the symbolic at the expense of committing to more tangible justice. I have to say, however, that I was deeply moved at times by how interviewees describe things like the 2009 national apology and what it meant to them.  

It's also led me to rethink, to begin the task of rethinking how we distinguish between symbolic and substantive justice. One example was Robert. Robert describes early in his interview, having been in Canberra at the time of the apology, knowing about it, feeling ambivalent about attending. He was nearby at the time for work. He knew, as I said, that was happening. He didn't think too much about whether he'd attend or not. But in spite of himself, he found himself there. He was in his forties at the time. He describes that meeting another man. This man was much older than he was. He had a very different experience. Whereas Robert was born to a single mother and became a ward of the state. The man he met was a Former Child Migrant. Despite these differences, he came to be confounded by how much they shared in common. And as the clip goes on to demonstrate, he also became confounded by the response he had in listening to the apology. 

 [Recording starts] 

Robert: That's the thing with the apology, that's what I felt at the time with the apology. It was someone else and someone important in the federal Parliament. And it was Malcolm Turnbull who made me feel this way. And I never would've guessed that. I'm a fan of the guy, but I don't know him or anything. And I wasn't particularly moved by Kevin Rudd's speech. It was a nice enough speech. But that it really did hit me like a tonne of bricks when he was speaking, that this was real, it was a genuine acknowledgement that you did nothing wrong. You are as worthwhile and as valuable as everyone else. And we now recognise that we did not treat you that way and it was wrong. And we can't change what happened, but we can certainly apologise for it.  

Certainly say sorry, that was totally wrong. It was not your fault, it should never have happened. And that's the first time I'd genuinely believed that anyone thought that or felt that and it did make me cry, and it's making me cry now. It's kind of like I breathed out and like, you know, 40 years breath came out 'cause I'd been holding my breath waiting, not realising, but waiting for that kind of acknowledgement that you're not a piece of shit, you're not worthless, you didn't bring this on yourself, it's not your fault. 

 [Recording ends] 

David McDonald: What comes through really powerfully for me here and in other similar interviews is how for many the public and the personal are deeply interwoven in ways that I'd perhaps underestimated. So such as the status of, or the significance of official recognition, it speaks both to the public at large while also having an important constitutive role in relation to the self. Further, we can also see here how it enabled a kind of fellowship, the making of a sense of community. And there are others who speak in these terms. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to imply that everyone regarded the apology in the same way. This next clip is from Walter who responds to the question when asked about what it meant to him. And he indicates that it didn't really, it didn't register in the same way. 

 [Recording starts] 

Interviewer: As far as the, I would say recognition, you know, about the kids that have been in homes and that since the apology, do you think that's a good thing? 

Walter: Oh, personally, the apology didn't mean too much to me. Like I feel I really didn't need to be apologised to, I mean, I'm quite happy with what I've been through and what I've done. I mean, there's been a few circumstances you wish it hadn't happened, but yeah, that's life. But I'm actually glad this is all getting done and recorded and been put away so other people can read the story. Yeah, I'm happy for that, yeah. 

Interviewer: So the apology? 

Walter: No, it didn't do much for me. 

Interviewer: Did you get an invitation at all? 

Walter: Oh, I did get an invitation. 

 [Recording ends] 

David McDonald: So this segues really with the last lens that I want to reflect on here. So for Walter, the apology didn't matter much. But he registers satisfaction with having taken part in the interview. So beyond what the interviewees describe in terms of the meaning of official responses, like the national apology of redress, in doing this work, I've been interested to think about how the collection might be understood as a form of alternative justice. And Walter perhaps gives us a small sense of this in his interview. Another example comes from Jane who's asked at the beginning of her second interview, which is about three months after the first, how it felt, how it's felt in the time that's passed. 

 [Recording starts] 

Jane: Being able to tell my story. And I'm sort of, and I'm really glad that I, once I was approached to actually do this interview, I'm glad that I agreed to do it because there's a risk in doing it too. There's always a risk. But I think that I did have another level of letting go, which was really quite profound and noticeable. 

Interviewer: So what are some of the ways that you noticed it? 

Jane: I felt a bit, I felt lighter in my spirit. I felt like since the interview, I felt like I didn't have the need to tell my story. Whereas I've always thought I have to tell this person my story, I need to tell them about me. I just wanna be heard. That's what it is, I just wanna be heard. So in actual, in telling the story and having it recorded for the first time ever, I thought I'd been heard. 'Cause it's actually recorded. 

Interviewer: And it will be forever. 

Jane: Yeah. And you weren't judging me, you weren't trying to advise me. I could just actually express it. So since then I've had less of a need to tell my story. Matter of fact, I don't think I've told my story since. I haven't even elaborated on my story. So I felt a freedom. I felt a letting go of it, which is really significant. I did not realise that with the case. So it's brought me, I feel lighter because of it. 

[Recording ends] 

David McDonald: So criminologists are accustomed to thinking about what's known as procedural justice, how we can ensure that the experience of sharing one's story is powerful, it's restorative and the like. And we can see Jane use similar language to describe the experience of the interview. In asking how we might think about this collection in relation to alternative justice, I'm not trying to downplay the significance of conventional criminal justice responses, for example, in criminological research with victims of crime, when they're asked what justice means to them, a formal legal outcome might be just, can be described as important, as mattering. But typically victims of crime also point to other factors. Things like meaningful consequences, feeling heard, feeling recognised, being afforded dignity, having voice, a sense of connectedness and so on.  

This research parallels other recent research on the concept of alternative justice. Such work has been driven by the recognition that conventional justice is but one site in which victim survivors turn in the aftermath of victimisation. And the concept describes those different avenues or processes which might produce a more empowering outcome for victims. It's not an either or choice, one or the other between traditional and alternative justice. But in thinking about this collection of oral histories, in this way, I hope that we can begin to see justice not simply as a formal legal outcome, but as something that's socially and culturally situated.  

In this way it entails a kind of collective responsibility as the renowned trauma psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman wrote in a 2005 study of victim experiences of justice, whether the informants to study sought resolution through the legal system or through informal means, their most important object was to gain validation from the community. This is what she calls the quest for validation, which refers to the importance of bystander validation.  

As a criminologist, for me, this underscores that justice entails a broader social dimension in comparison to the narrow parameters of conventional justice. So that by listening to the voices that make up the Library's collection of oral histories, I hope we might see or reflect on the role that such testimony provides in relation to the articulation of collective memory.  

So ultimately I think the power that comes from having such a collection of personal experiences exist here at the National Library situated in Canberra, the seed of government and within proximity of other memorials, monuments, museums, and the like, is that bringing together the personal stories and public memory national and recognising these personal experiences as national stories. I'm conscious of the time, but I'm gonna conclude by playing one short clip 'cause I think it's best to hear from an interviewee to wrap up. 

 [Recording starts] 

Deidre: I hope that whoever listens to this will find some benefit in it. And if people are doing it for research that they will, you know, be glad that they listened to my story. And I'm glad to have the opportunity to do it. And I feel that even though I've had closure in some extent, I feel that doing this is like the final closure in a way and a very wonderful way to have that final closure. So thank you. 

Barbara Lemon: Thank you so much David, for sharing those incredibly complex and moving portraits and for your own interpretation. And I guess also a reminder of the sensory power of oral history and oral history and research. We are, as you say, close to time, but I think we've got time for one or two questions. We have some roving mics if you don't mind speaking into the mic for the sake of the people online. But if you do have a question, please do throw up your hand and we'll get a mic to you. Scanning, scanning. Yes, up the front, Blake. Can you get to Blake, Fran? I'm gonna move out of your way. 

David McDonald: Thanks. 

Audience member 1: Thank you for that. That was absolutely fascinating. I'm interested, considering the size of our collection in the limited time that you had, how did you ensure or at least consider that the diversity of the interviews that you listened to, I guess, have an understanding of what the small part represented the bigger part? 

David McDonald: Yeah, it's a good, really great question. It's something I grappled with for a while leading up to doing the work. I had struggled with, you know, like whether or not to really strive to ensure that I was dealing with, you know, a range of geographic locations, a range of historical periods, gender. Really, I think, ultimately it was just by trying to diving into the interviews and listening to whatever kind of came through first. And from that I could kind of see that I had a good kind of cross section of experiences. The only exception to that is as I mentioned, Former Child Migrants. But certainly, you know, from very elderly interviewees whose periods of institutionalisation was earlier in the 20th century, right through to the 1970s. There was, you know, like I was kind of, I was wondering how to kind of resolve that, but it just, the course of doing the work, it just seemed to be, it wasn't an issue that I had to kind of manage. Yeah? 

Audience member 2: Thank you. Can you hear me? 

David McDonald: Yeah. 

Audience member 2: Thank you, thank you Dave for this presentation, it's really interesting. And my question would be, so you know literature in criminology about child abuse in institutional context in Australia across the world. How common is it for criminologists to work with oral history sources? And how common are these sorts of collections around the world? 

David McDonald: Yeah, it's a great question and I know several colleagues are listening into this presentation and I'll probably offend criminologists and probably get it wrong. I mean, I'm often happy to do so. But, you know, I describe myself as a cultural criminologist, which means that I'm interested in practises of cultural storytelling. And I think we're kind of fewish and far between. Criminology as a discipline has been, you know, remarkably conservative over time. And to an extent that's still reflected today. I don't know of many criminologists who engage with oral histories. I don't know in terms of the engagement that I've done with the oral histories literature, the overwhelming bulk of academic research tends, as I understand it, focuses on the creation of oral histories, rather than what it means as a researcher to come to preexisting oral histories.  

Certainly within criminology there's renewed interest in what's known as narrative criminology, which focuses on individual narratives, be it in relation to offending desistance as it's known. And also more recently on victimisation kind of scripts on narratives, practises of storytelling individually. But it's not, I don't know of widespread engagement with oral histories. So I hope that's partly what makes this work interesting to criminological audiences. Yep. I know a historian's gonna ask me a question. 

Audience member 3: Thank you. I thought that was so interesting. And I was really thinking about this moment as a sort of historical, you know, thinking about the oral history turn institutionally as a kind of response to these sort of events is really interesting I think this is, you know, part of the process of gathering these interviews is in often after an inquiry, it's government kind of sponsoring these projects to kind of happen after a major inquiry.  

So I'm curious about how the people who were interviewed, how did they kind of come to be part of the project and, you know, did they reflect on that process of, that there's yes, there's the institutional, there's the large scale apology, there's the government inquiry, and they're taking part in a second, you know, another part of this process, which is kind of putting their experience on the record as part of this sort of process of memorialising and recognising this event. 

David McDonald: Yeah, it's a really wonderful question, thank you. So as I understand it, the project invited applications, there are about 200 responses to that from people coming forward indicating an expression of interest to participate, to share their oral history. I think the fact that this collection predated the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, so there we saw in the context of that inquiry testimony was such a strong focus that the previous inquiries Forgotten Australians, Former Child Migrants, I think, you know, looking at the Bringing Home Report, you can see the testimonial nature of that just in looking at it. But certainly for survivors of institutional abuse, I think, you know, that came a little bit later. So in some ways that's partly what makes this collection again interesting that, you know, that we can see these testimonial dimensions taking place prior to that Royal Commission being established. Yes, I'd love, yeah, I. Yes, yes. And really, I think, you know, ultimately we have to be really thankful for the persistence of survivors who have, you know, in various different ways have demanded the public listen to their experiences. So that's what drove the enactment of things like the Royal Commission, of the apology, of redress. They didn't just come to exist. And, you know, the oral history collection is another example of that. So, you know, it's like, I guess the final acknowledgement again, should be with those survivors who have and their activism that led these transformations. 

Barbara Lemon: Thanks, David, thanks so much. We might have to call it for time, but if you don't mind sort of hanging with me for a minute. Just a couple of last messages before we leave. We hope you can join us for our next performance. It is a performance by Mr John Shortis, who is our 2024 Folk Fellow. And that will be on 26th of September, the 26th of September. If you have time, I encourage you to visit exhibition Hopes and Fears: Australian Migration Stories, through the National Library's Collection, the exhibition explores many of the migration experiences and stories that have shaped our nation. And finally, our website is the place where you'll find recordings of talks and performances by our fellows. Most importantly for now, our thanks again to you, Dr David McDonald, for a wonderful presentation. Thank you. 

David McDonald: Thanks very much.