Living Traces – an archive of place: Parramatta Girls Home

Abstract

Back in 2005 I climbed on top of some rubbish bins and jumped over the fence into the front yard of what was then the Norma Parker Detention Centre. Peering up at its imposing façade, I remembered that this place had once been the Parramatta Girls Home, a place where at the age of 15 I had spent eight months as a resident. Now it was deserted and silent. I entered the main building. I was terrified of being caught but resolved in my determination to capture as much of what remained as possible. I needed answers. I needed to make sense of something that never made sense. To reclaim something of myself that had been taken from me in this place. A year earlier, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee report, Forgotten Australians, had been handed down. This was the first national inquiry into Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children. Pandora's box had been opened and there was no going back. Now, in the last months of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Australia is only beginning to realise the extent of abuse experienced by children in this country. Like the Forgotten Australians Inquiry, the Royal Commission has made and will continue to make recommendations, but what happens afterwards? Given that they both fill a temporary cultural space, where do these histories go? As in the words of historian and academic Maria Tumarkin, 'where are those spaces in our culture that can keep these histories in the public imaginary, as open wounds, as provocations and calls to action, not covered up by the historical patina or by a psychologising language that invariably pathologises and atomises people who experienced such abuse'? 1 Now 12 years since the Forgotten Australians report, it is encouraging to see some of the 39 Recommendations actioned. But what strikes me most about these recommendations, as I suspect also those made by the Royal Commission, is that government and non-government agencies, universities, institutes, museums and libraries are always the ones funded to carry out research, oral histories and provide support services. Agency is never given to support or fund those who experienced these things to determine what they want. How can anything change? This has been clear to me from the start when I climbed over the fence and re-entered the Parramatta Girls Home to record and document this site for Parragirls by Parragirls in the hope that one day we would have the opportunity to determine its memorialisation and future use. It has been more than 10 years now, in which time I have seen the deterioration of this site and sadly the passing of so many Parragirls, each taking a part of their history irretrievably to the grave. While the NSW Government has plans well underway for Parramatta North

Place, Memory, and Justice: Critical Perspectives on Sites of Conscience

“…It has also been included on Australia’s National Heritage List (Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, 2021). Yet, as noted by Djuric (2016) and others, these types of official processes do not necessarily center the voices, experiences, and memories of the residents.…”

“…A recent monograph on the Memory Project by Hibberd et al (2019) has drawn attention to the resistance, solidarity, and survival of the residents during their time at the PGH. An example of this is "ILWA," a well-known coded message that was sent between Girls' Home residents, meaning "I Love Worship Always" (or "I Love Worship Adore"), which can still be found scratched into the walls and floors of PGH buildings and has been reinterpreted in separate works by Parragirls Gypsie Hayes and Bonney Djuric. Djuric (2016) also recounts an example of how traces of former residents within the buildings have acted as a legal archive when official records do not exist:…”