Parramatta Female Factory Precinct as a Site of Conscience: Using Institutional Pasts to Shape Just Legal Futures

Abstract

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Association through its Memory Project is activating PFFP as Australia’s first officially recognised Site of Conscience. Through the Memory Project, survivors of Parramatta Girls Home are using art practices and social history to disrupt dominant, official narratives that have silenced their experiences, to put their memories of the Home into action and to prevent future injustices of institutionalisation. For law students and legal practitioners the work of Parragirls through the Memory Project offers possibilities for confronting the complicity of Australian legal systems and legal actors in the harms and injustices of institutional confinement. It provides examples and new methods to direct them towards practices of collective ethical accountability in order to shaping more just future legal frameworks of institutional confinement. In support of this argument the article discusses a recent collaboration between the authors to engage law students in the Precinct through an excursion to the site.

Sites of conscience redressing disability institutional violence

“…Sites of conscience practices have also been utilised across a range of penal and welfare institutions (in which disabled people have been confined alongside other marginalised populations as part of broader settler colonial and eugenics logics). Through PFFP Project, former residents of the Parramatta Girls' Home ('Parragirls') utilise art and social history to connect their memories and experiences to contemporary debates about institutionalisation in Australia (Hibberd & Djuric, 2019;Steele et al, 2020;Wilson & Carlton, 2022). The Parramatta Female Factory Precinct site has been used for a variety of other penal and welfare purposes, including a mental hospital (to which some former residents of PMIH were moved, as earlier discussed).…”

“…In this way, sites of conscience practices can have systemic impact through engaging the broader community in ongoing ethical accountability to make real these judgments in everyday relations. The enduring materiality of Disability Institutions coupled with centring the voices and experiences of survivors in the interpretation of these sites is a reminder that injustices and harms live on and that we should all be accountable for those in our everyday personal and professional lives (Steele et al, 2020). Moreover, focusing on the materiality of a specific Disability Institution and hearing from survivor accounts of everyday routines and experiences living in the institution, can draw attention to the role of victims'/survivors' labour in the very physical existence of an institution and wealth generated on and through the site, as is demonstrated by the Toronto Asylum Wall.…”

“…Such an approach could draw on sites of conscience practices utilised in relation to transitional justice in post-conflict and postcolonial contexts, many of which are situated on sites of former judicial and government buildings. Such an approach might also involve integrating sites of conscience into university legal education, as I have done through including PFFP Project and KBHMEC in my disability law teaching (Steele et al, 2020).…”

“…sheltered workshops) (Ellmoos & Andersen, 2010: 56–62). While not documented in the official history of PMIH (Ellmoos & Andersen, 2010), first person accounts of other Disability Institutions (see, eg, Walker, 2015) suggest PMIH residents were actively resisting their living circumstances and contributed to deinstitutionalisation and disability rights movements.…”

“…This article introduces one dimension that might form part of such an approach: re-engaging with former Disability Institutions through sites of conscience practices. Sites of conscience practices engage the broader community in memories, histories and materiality of places of injustice in order to keep present in the minds of members of the community ongoing systemic perpetration of these injustices and prompt collective action to prevent further injustice through broader social change (Lloyd & Steele, 2022;Steele et al, 2020). The article proposes that, through sites of conscience practices, engagement with the memories, places and materiality of former Disability Institutions can be part of how we collectively recognise and 'set right' disability institutional violence in Australia.…”