Abstract
In this chapter, Musgrove and Michell take a mixed methods digital history approach to studying the profile of foster care in Australia’s historical newspapers from 1865 to 1954. The chapter demonstrates that while child welfare itself was a reasonably significant issue in the press during this period, attention to foster care was dwarfed by coverage of institutional provisions for children. It also reveals how negative coverage of foster care dominated in the media, and, using a case study approach, shows that the Victorian welfare department predominantly engaged with the press in response to negative attention to its work and children under its care.
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Notes
- 1.
See the concluding chapter of this book: What Can History Tell Us About the Future of Foster Care?
- 2.
Secretary, Department of Family and Community Services V Smith, Supreme Court NSWCA 206 (2017).
- 3.
Leonie Sheedy , quoted in: Sam Buckingham-Jones, “Lobby Group Attacks Push to Ensure Privacy for Kids in Care,” Australian—Online (Surry Hills, NSW), 5 September, 2017. Sheedy’s other key concern was that the responsible department, Family and Community Services, was using the legislation to shield itself from public scrutiny.
- 4.
- 5.
Chapter 8: Writing to Heal—The Emergence of Foster Care in Australian Literature.
- 6.
On the validity of reading newspapers in this way see: Yu-wei Lin, “Transdisciplinarity and Digital Humanities: Lessons Learned from Developing Text-Mining Tools for Textual Analysis,” in Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David M. Berry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 320.
- 7.
The library began a newspaper digitisation project in 2007, and two years later launched the Trove portal which included the digital newspapers database. See: Philippa Martyr, “‘The Cleanest Man on Earth’: Harcourt Whipple Ellis and the Nla Australian Newspapers,” Health and History 12, no. 1 (2010): 88–104. For the newspaper access point see: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper, last accessed 28 March 2018. The data harvests described in this chapter were undertaken twice, once in 2014 and once in 2016. The figures reported here are from the 2016 harvest. While the raw number of articles increased from the 2014 to the 2016 collection, the overall patterns and proportions changed little, suggesting that even with the ongoing additions of new titles to Trove, the existing data allows for a robust study.
- 8.
Some moves towards extending the coverage of the database past 1954 have commenced, but the coverage for the period after 1954 is still very small—both in terms of the percentage of Trove articles which relate to that period, and also in relation to the proportion of total press coverage for the period that this represents.
- 9.
On the usefulness of crowdsourcing combined with OCR to produce reliable and robust datasets see: Carolyn Strange and Daniel McNamara, “Mining for the Meanings of a Murder: The Impact of OCR Quality on the Use of Digitized Historical Newspapers,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8, no. 1 (2014), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/1/000168/000168.html.
- 10.
The key search terms which ultimately proved most useful were: foster mother, foster child, foster home, foster family, foster parent, boarding out. For other examples of projects which have taken this starting approach see: Martyr, “‘The Cleanest Man on Earth’: Harcourt Whipple Ellis and the NLA Australian Newspapers,” 88–104; Leonie Rutherford, “Forgotten Histories: Ephemeral Culture for Children and the Digital Archive,” Media International Australia, no. 150 (2014): 66–71; Shurlee Swain , “Market Forces: Defining the Adoptable Child, 1860–1940,” Social Policy and Society, no. 11 (2012): 399–414.
- 11.
On the value of close reading in the process of developing studies of big data, particularly with respect to understanding language use, see: Hinke Piersma and Kees Ribbens, “Digital Historical Research: Context, Concepts and the Need for Reflection,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 128, no. 4 (2013): 78–102.
- 12.
Tim Sherratt, “Mining the Treasures of Trove (Part 1),” http://discontents.com.au/mining-the-treasures-of-trove-part-1/, last accessed 17 April 2018.
- 13.
For more on Caroline Clark and her promotion of boarding out see the introduction to this book.
- 14.
Both classic and more recent histories of Australia identify these as persistent themes in Australian social history. See: Manning Clark, Manning Clark’s History of Australia Abridged by Michael Cathcart (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1993); Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds., The Cambridge History of Australia (Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 15.
Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer, “Colonial States and Civil Society, 1860–90,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 189–217; James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd ed. (Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 16.
We limited this search to the terms: ‘children’s home’, ‘industrial school’ and ‘orphanage’, the first two reflecting shifting usage over time, and the third used fairly consistently across the period. There are additional search terms which could have been added to construct a more complete dataset about press coverage of all institutions for children. However, these three terms alone produced a dataset which was already onerous to clean semi-manually, and as our goal was to put the coverage of foster care into some sense of proportion, rather than attempt to produce a comprehensive study of institutions, we limited the data collection to these three terms.
- 17.
This strategy for constructing a sample to study produced a collection of articles which largely followed the peaks and troughs of our original data set when considered by raw number of articles. On average the number of articles in our sample was 7.83% of the number of articles for each year in our original dataset, with a standard deviation of 4.48. One difficulty in this approach resulted from the relatively low usage of headlines in the nineteenth century as compared with the twentieth, so that the percentage of articles from the whole dataset represented in the sample sat below the average of 7.83% for all but two of the years between 1865 and 1894. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century sample still included a range of article types typical of newspapers of the period—e.g., letters to the editor, general news, court proceedings—and so was still considered to constitute a meaningful sample.
- 18.
Shurlee Swain , “Birth and Death in a New Land: Attitudes to Infant Death in Colonial Australia,” The History of the Family 15, no. 1 (2010): 25–33.
- 19.
Pat Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 3–8. However, this should not be read as meaning that families in the nineteenth century cared less about the loss of their children. See: Lee Butterworth, “Ignorance or Murder: ‘Baby Farming’ and Infant Mortality,” Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 20, no. 1 (2007); Swain, “Birth and Death in a New Land,” 25–33.
- 20.
Hugh Cunningham , Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2005); Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: England, 1872–1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain , Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Protection in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).
- 21.
For more on the role of local Ladies Committees and also the declining need for direct newspaper recruitment of positions such as wet nurses , see Chapter 6: Foster Care—The Emergence of Foster Care in Australian Literature.
- 22.
For example, see the plan for placing older boys in country areas supervised by the Education Department in Chapter 5: They’re Just Doing It for the Money.
- 23.
For examples see: VPRS 3992, Unit 1111, 09/1152; VPRS 3992, Unit 1488, 19/6672.
- 24.
VPRS 3992, Unit 1012, 06/1802.
- 25.
As described in the introduction to this book, the research from the Chief Secretary’s Correspondence (VPRS 3991 and VPRS 3992) is based on a sample of approximately 1500 records from a very large collection. Thus, actual frequency is difficult to determine precisely, but newspaper clippings were attached to roughly 3.2% of the files examined. Considering the wide range of matters covered by the correspondence between the department head and the Chief Secretary, this represents a significant activity.
- 26.
Only one record in our sample predated the 1880s, and this was a query from the Chief Secretary, forwarding a promotional piece that had been written about boarding out in South Australia, to see if the Inspector had written an equivalent piece for Victoria.
- 27.
VPRS 3992, Unit 23, 84/4560.
- 28.
VPRS 3992, Unit 23, 84/4560.
- 29.
VPRS 3992, Unit 14, 84/2581. For more on the department’s attitude towards keeping siblings together see Chapter 3: Making and Breaking Families.
- 30.
VPRS 3992, Unit 14, 84/2581.
- 31.
“The Roman Catholic Industrial Schools ,” Advocate (Melbourne, VIC), 29 March 1884, 9.
- 32.
VPRS 3992, Unit 23, 84/4307.
- 33.
VPRS 3992, Unit 23, 84/4307.
- 34.
VPRS 3992, Unit 23, 84/4307.
- 35.
VPRS 3992, Unit 23, 84/4307.
- 36.
VPRS 3992, Unit 45, 84/8979.
- 37.
VPRS 3992, Unit 2037, 36/7568.
- 38.
VPRS 3992, Unit 2037, 36/7568.
- 39.
VPRS 3992, Unit 2685, 56/7143.
- 40.
After this, the records are closed and it is not possible to be sure how long this continued.
- 41.
For example, we know that there was some press coverage of John Wood Pledger ’s case (see Chapter 2: Did Anybody Care? The Death of John Wood Pledger ) but there were no clippings attached to his ward register at all. Similarly, we know there was press coverage of Annie Thomas and her daughter (see Chapter 3: Making and Breaking Families) but again, no clippings on either of their ward register pages.
- 42.
For examples see VPRS 3991, Unit 1330, 82/8173 and VPRS 3992, Unit 738, 99/235. On provisions for pregnant former wards, also see Chapter 3: Making and Breaking Families.
- 43.
“Untitled,” Argus (Melbourne), 21 September 1878, 6; “Industrial School Children,” Age (Melbourne), 5 December 1878, 3.
- 44.
“Industrial School Children,” Age (Melbourne), 5 December 1878, 3.
- 45.
VPRS 3991, Unit 1055, 79/934.
- 46.
A large portion of the department’s records no longer exist. For further details on the known history of destruction of government records, including those of the department, see: Charlie Farrugia, “Convicted and Neglected: Researching Victoria’s Wards of State Records 1864–1961,” Provenance, no. 12 (2013), https://www.prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/provenance-journal/provenance-2013/convicted-and-neglected.
- 47.
Cate O’Neill, Vlad Selakovic, and Rachel Tropea, “Access to Records for People Who Were in Out-of-Home Care: Moving Beyond ‘Third Dimension’ Archival Practice,” Archives and Manuscripts 40, no. 1 (2012): 29–41.
- 48.
Cathy Humphreys and Margaret Kertesz, “Making Records Meaningful: Creating an Identity Resource for Young People in Care,” Australian Social Work 68, no. 4 (2015): 497–514.
References
Bashford, Alison, and Stuart Macintyre, eds. The Cambridge History of Australia. Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Buckingham-Jones, Sam. “Lobby Group Attacks Push to Ensure Privacy for Kids in Care.” Australian—Online (Surry Hills, NSW), 5 September 2017.
Butterworth, Lee. “Ignorance or Murder: ‘Baby Farming’ and Infant Mortality.” Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 20, no. 1 (2007): 18–30.
Clark, Manning. Manning Clark’s History of Australia Abridged by Michael Cathcart. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1993.
Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500. 2nd ed. London: Pearson Education Limited, 2005.
Farrugia, Charlie. “Convicted and Neglected: Researching Victoria’s Wards of State Records 1864–1961.” Provenance, no. 12 (2013): Unpaginated. https://www.prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/provenance-journal/provenance-2013/convicted-and-neglected.
Hendrick, Harry. Child Welfare: England, 1872-1989. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Humphreys, Cathy, and Margaret Kertesz. “Making Records Meaningful: Creating an Identity Resource for Young People in Care.” Australian Social Work 68, no. 4 (2015): 497–514.
“Industrial School Children.” Age (Melbourne), 5 December 1878, 3.
Jalland, Pat. Changing Ways of Death in Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006.
Jupp, James. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration. 2nd ed. Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Lin, Yu-wei. “Transdisciplinarity and Digital Humanities: Lessons Learned from Developing Text-Mining Tools for Textual Analysis.” In Understanding Digital Humanities, edited by David M. Berry, 314–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Macintyre, Stuart, and Sean Scalmer. “Colonial States and Civil Society, 1860–90.” In The Cambridge History of Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, 189–217. Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Martyr, Philippa. “‘The Cleanest Man on Earth’: Harcourt Whipple Ellis and the NLA Australian Newspapers.” Health and History 12, no. 1 (2010): 88–104.
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O’Neill, Cate, Vlad Selakovic, and Rachel Tropea. “Access to Records for People Who Were in Out-of-Home Care: Moving Beyond ‘Third Dimension’ Archival Practice.” Archives and Manuscripts 40, no. 1 (2012): 29–41.
Piersma, Hinke, and Kees Ribbens. “Digital Historical Research: Context, Concepts and the Need for Reflection.” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 128, no. 4 (2013): 78–102.
Public Record Office Victoria, VA 475 Chief Secretary’s Department, VPRS 4527/P0 Ward Registers.
Public Record Office Victoria, VA 475 Chief Secretary’s Department, Chief Secretary’s Inward Registered Correspondence II & III, VPRS 3991 & 3992.
Rutherford, Leonie. “Forgotten Histories: Ephemeral Culture for Children and the Digital Archive.” Media International Australia, no. 150 (2014): 66–71.
Scott, Dorothy, and Shurlee Swain. Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Protection in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002.
Secretary, Department of Family and Community Services V Smith, Supreme Court NSWCA 206 (2017).
Sherratt, Tim. “Mining the Treasures of Trove (Part 1).” http://discontents.com.au/mining-the-treasures-of-trove-part-1/.
Strange, Carolyn, and Daniel McNamara. “Mining for the Meanings of a Murder: The Impact of OCR Quality on the Use of Digitized Historical Newspapers.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8, no. 1 (2014): Unpaginated. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/1/000168/000168.html.
Supreme Court of New South Wales (Coutr of Appeal). Secretary, Department of Family and Community Services V Smith, Supreme Court NSWCA 206 (2017).
Swain, Shurlee. “Birth and Death in a New Land: Attitudes to Infant Death in Colonial Australia.” The History of the Family 15, no. 1 (2010): 25–33.
Swain, Shurlee. “Market Forces: Defining the Adoptable Child, 1860–1940.” Social Policy and Society 11 (2012): 399-414.
“Untitled.” Argus (Melbourne), 21 September 1878, 6.
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Musgrove, N., Michell, D. (2018). Rediscovering Foster Care. In: The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93900-1_7
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