Phoebe Kirkwood

This project was born out of my work experience with The Glebe Society setting up a World War One Exhibition. The exhibition focused on social history and had a memorial aspect therefore I wanted my project to have the same focus even though it was a different topic.

I decided to focus on children because they are such an important aspect of any community. I also saw a running theme in the history of Glebe: one of disadvantage and poverty and the need to care for the youth. From the Glebe Ragged School for slum children in the 19th century to the care homes in the 20th century Glebe has a long history of disadvantaged childhoods. Through disadvantage there is also times of play and happiness, however, so I wanted to showcase this too.

Because my project was focusing on social history I wanted to include as many photos and primary sources as possible. I wanted to make the stories of children as vivid as possible. I thought that the best way to bring to life the childhoods of these children was in short and anecdotal bursts rather than long, detailed historical material. I decided to put the material I found in paper form rather than video to showcase the images a little bit more (some of them have been preserved so well) and to give people to look carefully and better consider some of the aspects of the material.

The second part of the project – the lost children – is also an extremely sad and distressing aspect of Glebe’s (and New South Wales’) history and therefore I wanted people who read the project to engage with people’s stories.  In this way my project is kind of like a sourcebook and a memorialisation of the various childhoods that have taken place in Glebe. When discussing the welfare policies of the last century I did not feel like I wanted to include much analysis of why it happened and the finer details of the policies. I thought it would be more effective to contextualise the stories but let them speak for themselves.  Child welfare policy is a complex area and trying to explain why children in state care were failed can often take away from the complexity and individuality of their experiences.



— PHOEBE KIRKWOOD