Shurlee Swain
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3591201 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Shurlee Swain |
| NOMBRES | Shurlee |
| APELLIDO | Swain |
| FIRMA | SWAIN S |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9193-2086 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 62 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 62 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1993 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Australian Royal Commissions Into Child Welfare, Abuse and Protection
Both nationally and internationally, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RCIRCSA) is widely viewed as a remarkably successful public inquiry. Unlike many other commissions, it was stable, attracted little controversy, was highly regarded, and led to extensive legal, regulatory and policy reform. It also influenced the establishment and approach of subsequent institutional child abuse inquiries in se…
An Unlikely Survival
My life in history
The politics of twentieth-century adoption
On peut considérer que l’adoption, le déplacement permanent d’un enfant d’une famille à une autre, est rarement politiquement neutre, mais signale plutôt un déséquilibre de pouvoir qui est souvent nié par les processus juridiques qui l’autorisent. Le choix du terme « adoption forcée » par des militants dans plusieurs pays occidentaux a bouleversé les conceptions actuelles de l’adoption au xx e siècle, qui considèrent celle-ci comme une pratique s…
Left on a Doorstep
Based on a database of Australian cases from 1834–1954, this article argues that abandonment was an intentional strategy intended to maximise a child's chances of survival while preserving its family's reputation. However, abandonment had the potential to expose family secrets, bringing them into the public gaze and subjecting them to interrogation. Abandonment was also used for revenge, exposing the identity of putative fathers in a demand for f…
Trove and the history of childhood – combining microhistory and big data
The experiences of children are notoriously elusive in the sources on which historians traditionally rely. This paper will discuss several projects in which Trove has expanded the history of childhood in Australia, uncovering a nation-wide trade in children through adoption advertisements, and enriching our knowledge of out-of-home care, and the many inquiries into its failings. Trove has democratised the practice of history – allowing care leave…
Women in the City
Feminist analyses have shown how from the mid-nineteenth century women shaped the cities in which they lived. This article argues for the existence of an urban gynocentric zone, the site of a cluster of women-owned businesses charged with handling the unwanted products of women’s bodies. Shaped by shame, it constituted a female space within a larger metropolis, invisible, unacknowledged, yet well enough known to be a place of ready resort for wom…
Alison Atkinson-Phillips, Survivor Memorials
Revisiting Henderson
S arah C arter . Imperial Plots
Equal subjects, unequal rights
"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…
Both Victim and ‘Perpetrator’
Inquiries into historical institutional abuse have only recently come to be viewed through the lens of transitional justice. This article argues that their distinctive victim-focused approach disguises a reality that institutions in which violence was endemic blurred the line between victims and ‘perpetrators.’ Earlier inquiries often blamed residents for the prevalence of institutional violence, avoiding accusations that authorities had failed. …
Speaking the Unspeakable, Naming the Unnameable
The establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse followed years of lobbying by survivor groups, damning findings from previous inquiries, and increasing societal recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by child sexual abuse. Through extensive media coverage, the Royal Commission brought into public view the reality that the sexual abuse of children was widespread, and its r…
Institutional Abuse
This article explores the long history of institutions for children in Australia and of the existence of abuse within them. By examining the function that such institutions were designed to perform, and the forms and structures that were devised to best achieve such purposes, the article argues that abuse was all too often not simply inherent in, but essential to, institutional operation. It pays particular attention to the classification of chil…
Conceptualising and Categorising Child Abuse Inquiries
Testimony before inquiries into out-of-home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn't we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they s…
The Martin Presence
The Martin Presence: Jean Martin and the Making of the Social Sciences in Australia. By Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan and Sheila Shaver (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015), pp.xiv + 293. AU$39.99 (pb)
Child, nation, race and empire
In the second half of the nineteenth century, prominent English child rescuers, reconstituted the vulnerable body of the child at risk as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. The book explains how the project contributed to the neglect and abuse disclosed in recent enquiries into the past treatment of children in out-of-home ‘care’
Reflections on the State of the Profession
This paper provides a thematic analysis of the Presidential Addresses delivered at conferences of the Australian Association of Social Workers from 1969 to 2008. It argues that although each of the Addresses needs to be understood within the context of its time, they are linked thematically by their focus on defining and defending the status of social work as a profession. In the early years, the Presidents, while recognising social work's commit…
Australian Lives
Beyond child migration
The history of child welfare in Australia has been constructed within the context of empire, but the writing of British child-welfare history has paid little attention to Australia, noting only its role as a (complicit) destination for the last generation of child migrants, and, within studies of settler colonialism, its program of Indigenous child removal. This article brings these historiographies into a closer relationship, arguing that develo…
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 advertisement…
Old Age in Australia
Enshrined in Law
While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisd…
A Long History of Faith‐Based Welfare in Australia
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 …
Giving Voice to Narratives of Institutional Sex Abuse
The announcement of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was the culmination of a long campaign by survivor groups to have their stories heard. Although this campaign, and the organisations themselves, date only from the last years of the twentieth century, institutional sexual abuse has a far longer history. This paper will seek to trace the evidence of sexual abuse back into the nineteenth century and …
Speaking the Unspeakable, Naming the Unnameable
The establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse followed years of lobbying by survivor groups, damning findings from previous inquiries, and increasing societal recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by child sexual abuse. Through extensive media coverage, the Royal Commission brought into public view the reality that the sexual abuse of children was widespread, and its r…
Conceptualising and Categorising Child Abuse Inquiries
Testimony before inquiries into out-of-home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn't we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they s…
Enshrined in Law
While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisd…
Stakeholders as Subjects
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 stakeholder…
After the Orphanage
Institutional Abuse
This article explores the long history of institutions for children in Australia and of the existence of abuse within them. By examining the function that such institutions were designed to perform, and the forms and structures that were devised to best achieve such purposes, the article argues that abuse was all too often not simply inherent in, but essential to, institutional operation. It pays particular attention to the classification of chil…
Beyond child migration
The history of child welfare in Australia has been constructed within the context of empire, but the writing of British child-welfare history has paid little attention to Australia, noting only its role as a (complicit) destination for the last generation of child migrants, and, within studies of settler colonialism, its program of Indigenous child removal. This article brings these historiographies into a closer relationship, arguing that develo…
Giving Voice to Narratives of Institutional Sex Abuse
The announcement of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was the culmination of a long campaign by survivor groups to have their stories heard. Although this campaign, and the organisations themselves, date only from the last years of the twentieth century, institutional sexual abuse has a far longer history. This paper will seek to trace the evidence of sexual abuse back into the nineteenth century and …
Responding to “Forgotten Australians”
Included in the recommendations of each of the three Australian inquiries into the legacy of out-of-home “care” has been a call for more history, but what would such a history involve? Commissioned histories rarely respond to the need of “care” leavers to have their lived experiences recognised and validated while broader histories of the child welfare sector struggle to move beyond an analysis of policy and practice. This article offers the pers…
Birth and death in a new land attitudes to infant death in colonial Australia
The goldrush colony of Victoria, Australia, was a favoured destination for aspirational emigrants from nineteenth-century Britain. Yet the persistence of high rates of infant mortality blighted the happiness of many first and second generation immigrant families alone in a new land. Drawing on birth, death and inquest records this paper interrogates the experience of infant death amongst the poorest families in the capital city popularly known as…
Adoption, Secrecy and the Spectre of the True Mother in Twentieth-Century Australia
Adoption was legalised in Australia in the 1920s, but not widely embraced before the Second World War. During the 1950s, a series of court cases in which birth mothers challenged the validity of the adoption of their children, threatened the viability of this new social policy. This paper argues that the 1960s tightening of secrecy provisions should be understood in the context of these challenges which reopened debates around the status of adopt…
Toward a social geography of baby farming
This paper uses a range of archival sources to undertake a case study of the people and practices encompassed by the term “baby farming” in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It argues that baby farming needs to be located in space and time in order to reach some accommodation between its materiality and the discursive construction that continues to distort historical debate. Neither a criminal nor a compassionate practice, baby farming emerges as a…
Women and philanthropy in colonial and post-colonial Australia
Women in Australia developed a distinctive pattern of philanthropy, adapting inherited traditions to their new situation. The Australian colonies had no Poor Laws; government-funded private philanthropy, to which men gave their money but women gave their time, was the primary means of providing relief. In performing this role, women became increasingly allied to conservative forces and divorced from campaigns for social reform. Alienated from the…
Saving the child and punishing the mother
Australian Lives
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 advertisement…
A Long History of Faith‐Based Welfare in Australia
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 …
Homes Are Sought for These Children
Homes Are Sought for These Children":Locating Adoption within the Australian Stolen Generations Narrative Shurlee Swain (bio) In 1838 a child known as Mathinna was removed from the settlement for the remnant of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people on Flinders Island and taken to Hobart to live in the house of the lieutenant governor. Sir John and Lady Franklin, the historical record recounts, were impressed by her intelligence and wanted to bring her …
Negotiating Poverty
Drawing on the records of Melbourne’s largest outdoor relief agency, this article interrogates the nature of woman‐to‐woman charity in the late nineteenth century. Relief, it argues, took place within a relationship, unequal, but unstable, in which the boundaries between deserving and undeserving were both permeable and shifting. Actors on a common stage, charity workers and those who sought their help appropriated a common script to construct a …
Maids and mothers
Historically, domestic servants have been overrepresented amongst women whose ex-nuptial pregnancy became a public “problem.” Despite such apparent vulnerability, female rescue-workers also saw domestic work as the pathway to redemption for such women. Drawing on extensive Australian data on single mothers and their children in the 19th-century, this article investigates the complex relationship between domestic service and illegitimacy. While it…
In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses
The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth‐century struggle for women’s rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize …
I am directed to remind you of your duty to your familyrsquo
Historical interest in the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in the late nineteenth century, has seldom extended beyond the excitement of their early crusading years.This article, based on an analysis of the records of the one surviving Australian branch of the Society, focuses instead on the inter-war era, showing how it found a role as the disciplinary wing of a broad-based, conservative, philanthropic alliance which …
Saving the child and punishing the mother
Apology from the review editors
Women and philanthropy in colonial and post-colonial Australia
Women in Australia developed a distinctive pattern of philanthropy, adapting inherited traditions to their new situation. The Australian colonies had no Poor Laws; government-funded private philanthropy, to which men gave their money but women gave their time, was the primary means of providing relief. In performing this role, women became increasingly allied to conservative forces and divorced from campaigns for social reform. Alienated from the…
Books
The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women's Movement, 1950s‐1990s. By Gisela Kaplan. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996. Pp. xiii + 242. $29.95 paper. The Christesen Romance. By Judith Armstrong. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996. $29.95. Pp. 225 paper. The Politics of Australian Child Care: From Philanthropy to Feminism. By Deborah Brennan. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. Pp. xii + 242. $29.95 paper. Fair Enough: Egalitarianism in…
A network of support
The invasion and subsequent colonisation of Australia took a particularly heavy toll on Indigenous families, systematically separating children from their parents under the guise of welfare and assimilation and destroying intergenerational links. Sue Atkinson's case study of mothering in the contemporary Koorie community, however, has shown that traditional patterns of multiple mothering have survived this assault. This article argues for the str…
I am directed to remind you of your duty to your familyrsquo
Historical interest in the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in the late nineteenth century, has seldom extended beyond the excitement of their early crusading years.This article, based on an analysis of the records of the one surviving Australian branch of the Society, focuses instead on the inter-war era, showing how it found a role as the disciplinary wing of a broad-based, conservative, philanthropic alliance which …
Single Mothers and Their Children
1. Introduction: To have an unlicensed child 2.The mothers: a perfectly nice girl - an ordinary girl, perhaps your own daughter 3. Breaking the news: what are you going to do about it? 4. Pregnancy and confinement: medicos, midwives and morals 5. Death: very army of murderesses within our midst 6. Separation: now put this thing that has happened to you away, forget about it, get on with the rest of your life 7. Surviving: you must maintain your o…
In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses
The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth‐century struggle for women’s rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize …
Women in conversation
This article examines the gendered dimensions of relationships in the conduct of a major academic Australian social survey in Melbourne in the early years of the Second World War.Despite its grounding in methodology current in Britain at the time, its execution and outcomes mirrored the gendered and classed nature of the survey, with its male direction, middleclass female interviewers, and largely working-class respondents.The value of 'women's c…
Our Bodies, Our Babies
This is a wonderful book ...read it and consider what has been won, and how much more needs to be won, in the childbirth revolution! Barbara Katz Rothman, City University of New York Kerreen Reiger is absolutely right to see the childbirth movement as the forgotten women's movement, and the great pleasure of this book is to find in every chapter the right questions being asked. Janet McCalman, University of Melbourne For most of the twentieth cen…
Do You Want Religion with That? Welfare History in a Secular Age
Most welfare agencies in Australia have their origins in faith-based organisations, yet academic historians have struggled to find an analytical framework for dealing with issues of belief. Internally-commissioned histories all too often descend into hagiography. Yet the founders and early workers within these organizations had no difficulty in reconciling word and deed. Believing themselves to be on a mission from a god who actively intervened i…
Toward a social geography of baby farming
This paper uses a range of archival sources to undertake a case study of the people and practices encompassed by the term “baby farming” in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It argues that baby farming needs to be located in space and time in order to reach some accommodation between its materiality and the discursive construction that continues to distort historical debate. Neither a criminal nor a compassionate practice, baby farming emerges as a…
Maids and mothers
Historically, domestic servants have been overrepresented amongst women whose ex-nuptial pregnancy became a public “problem.” Despite such apparent vulnerability, female rescue-workers also saw domestic work as the pathway to redemption for such women. Drawing on extensive Australian data on single mothers and their children in the 19th-century, this article investigates the complex relationship between domestic service and illegitimacy. While it…
In this issue
In this issue
In this issue
Essays in Honour of Professor Patricia Grimshaw
ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF PROFESSOR PATRICIA GRIMSHAW." Australian Feminist Studies, 22(52), p. 35 Notes 1. This paragraph owes much to the Minute of Appreciation tabled at the 27 April 2006 meeting of the Academic Board of the University of Melbourne. The authors of the papers that follow would like to thank Jill Matthews and Penny Russell for their work in organising the symposium, choosing the speakers and allocating the topics
Writing the History of Women and Welfare
Negotiating Poverty
Drawing on the records of Melbourne’s largest outdoor relief agency, this article interrogates the nature of woman‐to‐woman charity in the late nineteenth century. Relief, it argues, took place within a relationship, unequal, but unstable, in which the boundaries between deserving and undeserving were both permeable and shifting. Actors on a common stage, charity workers and those who sought their help appropriated a common script to construct a …
‘Brighter Britain’
The literature produced by the child rescue movement, disseminated from England in the second half of the nineteenth century, was replete with images of Empire. Organizations such as Dr Barnardo’s, the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, the National Children’s Homes and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children all produced magazines for both adult and child supporters from the earliest years of their operation. Alth…
The Value of the Vignette in the Writing of Welfare History
Welfare organisations make extensive use of case vignettes in order to attract supporters to their cause, but welfare historians have, traditionally, approached such material with caution. Taking the magazines generated by the British (and Australian) child-rescue movement as a case study, this article argues that there is a place for an interrogation of the ever-present vignettes. Although the image they disseminate is a highly coloured one, rea…
Writing Social Work History
History provides a focus for many of the articles in this edition of Australian Social Work, which appears at much the same time as Australian Historical Studies (2008) releases a special edition d
Birth and death in a new land attitudes to infant death in colonial Australia
The goldrush colony of Victoria, Australia, was a favoured destination for aspirational emigrants from nineteenth-century Britain. Yet the persistence of high rates of infant mortality blighted the happiness of many first and second generation immigrant families alone in a new land. Drawing on birth, death and inquest records this paper interrogates the experience of infant death amongst the poorest families in the capital city popularly known as…
In This Issue
In This Issue
Sociology (45 obras) · Political science (43 obras) · Law (34 obras) · History (31 obras) · Australian History and Society (26 obras) · History (26 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Politics (14 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Welfare (13 obras)