Sensory afterlives of child institutionalisation: Oral history,carcerality and social memory

Abstract

This article investigates the enduring afterlife of twentieth-century childhood ‘care’. Based on a deep engagement with the National Library of Australia's Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Collection, it examines experiences of institutional ‘care’ across this collection through the lenses of carceral geography, criminology and memory studies. In comparison to more explicitly place-based approaches to institutionalisation, these oral histories reveal how diffuse carceral sites and experiences are reanimated through the realm of memory. The sensorial dimensions of these memories underscore the diffuse and layered temporality of institutionalisation, which I explore as an afterlife. By tracing how time, space, memory, and sensation are interwoven in accounts of institutionalisation, the article highlights the persistent impacts of institutionalisation and cautions against conceiving of carceral space as too narrowly bounded by the physical.

Introduction

Throughout much of the twentieth century, institutionalisation was a globally dominant response to child welfare. Operating across an array of sites, including orphanages, children's Homes, reformatories, industrial or training schools, and systems of foster care, it is now widely accepted to have involved conditions and experiences that were deeply punitive (Wilson, 2013; Wilson et al., 2024). ¹ Care Leavers' accounts of control, discipline and deprivation closely resemble imprisonment, reflecting the broader diffusion of carceral logics that Foucault (1978) chronicled in Discipline and Punish. After all, such logics extend well beyond prisons and are dispersed through diverse networks of institutions, practices and technologies. This has been reinforced by recent advances in carceral geography (Gill et al., 2018; Moran, 2015; Moran and Schliehe, 2017), particularly the move to challenge the idea of the prison as a fixed entity (Armstrong and Jefferson, 2017; Moran et al., 2017). As Moran and Schliehe (2017: 5) argue, ‘the prison is not the only site with the “social realm” under the influence of incarceration’. It is thus a central paradox that children identified as deserving care and protection were subjected instead to carceral experiences in which cruelty, neglect and deprivation were so often endemic.

These insights have important implications for how histories of institutionalisation are remembered and preserved in the present. Growing recognition of the widespread harms associated with child institutionalisation has influenced heritage preservation efforts to prevent decommissioned sites from falling further into disrepair (Chynoweth, 2017; Cooke et al., 2020; Hayes et al., 2020, 2023; Wilson, 2013; Wilson and Carlton, 2022). One objective of these place-based responses is to facilitate social memory, ensuring that histories of institutional abuse are neither erased nor forgotten. However, memorialisation of such sites can be fraught with tension. The broader literature on prison tourism and dark tourism is instructive, highlighting the uneasy intersection between education and commodification that can come to pass in such responses (Carlton, 2024; Carrabine, 2017; Stone and Grebenar, 2022). Similarly, questions of voice and ownership abound in the preservation of institutional sites of confinement. On the one hand, representations of institutional histories have often occurred in a top-down, even self-congratulatory manner that sidelines survivor voices (McGinniss et al., 2024: 1373). By contrast, a bottom-up approach that centres the memories and experiences of otherwise marginalised voices has contributed to growing interest in the framework offered by the sites of conscience movement. This movement ‘involves engaging communities in the history, heritage, and memory of places to prompt dialogue on contemporary human rights, social justice, and democracy’ (Lloyd and Steele, 2022: 140; see also Punzi and Steele, 2024; Steele, 2022). This shift in relation to place-based memory work has been driven by a growing recognition of the importance in placing human stories at the centre of institutional memories (see also Djuric, 2016; Wilson, 2013). These stories are, after all, intrinsic to the meaning of institutionalisation, offering insight into how institutional sites have shaped everyday living for those in ‘care’. ²

Informed by these broader developments in relation to social memory and carceral geography, this article investigates twentieth-century experiences of institutionalisation through the oral histories of Care Leavers. While heritage responses to decommissioned sites foreground questions of space, place and materiality, recent advances in carceral geography offer insight into the liminal or diffuse nature of institutional experiences. Seeking to bridge these trajectories of inquiry, this article examines enduring legacies of institutionalisation vis-à-vis a collection of oral histories that comprise the National Library of Australia's (NLA) Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project. This archive was commissioned as part of a broader reckoning in relation to institutional abuse, reflecting wider efforts to officially acknowledge experiences that have otherwise eschewed sufficient public recognition.

While some research has addressed the role of memorialisation in response to institutional abuse (e.g., Atkinson-Philips, 2019, 2022; Lundy, 2024; McDonald, 2024a), the bulk of scholarly engagement has centred on public inquiries as forms of official memory. As a result, other forms of memorialisation and commemoration – including oral histories – have been less comprehensively considered in research on institutional abuse. A similar gap is also evident in how criminology and carceral geography have engaged with oral histories more generally. Despite growing interest in narrative methodologies and analysis (Maruna and Liem, 2021; Pemberton et al., 2019; Presser, 2016; Presser and Sandberg, 2018; Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016; Walklate et al., 2019), little attention has been paid to oral histories. Addressing this oversight, this article foregrounds oral histories as an important domain of survivor truth-telling.

By positioning oral histories in relation to carceral geography, criminology and memory studies, this article demonstrates how institutionalisation extends beyond physical structures of confinement. It begins by situating the NLA's Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project within the context of the recent discovery of institutional abuse and the growing emphasis that has been placed upon survivor testimony. It then turns to a closer engagement with the oral histories themselves, reading the NLA's archive as both a repository of, and contributor to, social memory. This is first explored through the lens of carceral diffusion, showing how institutional life represents a circuitry that extends beyond the discrete physical bounds of the Home. I then consider the enduring sensorial register of these memories as an afterlife of institutionalisation, underscoring how memory and sensation remain interwoven in the recollections of Care Leavers. Together, these accounts illuminate how institutional experiences effectively reverberate through time, linking past and present, public and private, through the senses. In doing so, the article deepens criminological engagement with oral histories while contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the enduring, embodied and affective dimensions of institutionalisation.

Situating the archive: Institutional abuse and the age of testimony

The creation of an archive of oral histories by the NLA forms part of a broader set of international developments addressing abuse and neglect in institutional contexts. Referred to here as institutional abuse, this emerged as a widely recognised social problem across much of the Western world in the 1990s (Daly, 2014a; Sköld, 2013). Despite national variations, survivor accounts across different countries have been marked by striking similarities (Penglase, 2007: 40). As Sköld (2013: 7) observes, ‘irrespective of country of origin, the informants have told partially similar stories about an existence marked and sometimes defined by physical violence, emotional violation, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect, all of which occurred for the better part of the twentieth century’.

While institutional abuse has emerged as a global concern, its recognition and treatment have also been shaped by distinct national contexts. In Australia, this process has been characterised by unevenness in how it has come to be understood in recent decades (Daly, 2014b; McDonald, 2024b). Underscoring the fact that this has at times been profoundly linked to the settler colonial context, throughout the 1990s, the social problem of institutional abuse principally coalesced around the specific experiences of First Nations children whose systematic removal from their families is known as the Stolen Generations. Rosanne Kennedy (2011: 333) has described the Stolen Generations as a ‘something of a litmus test for how Australia would respond to its postcolonial legacy of violence, trauma, and injustice’. Amid larger questions about enduring white occupation and sovereignty, growing public and political attention culminated in the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, conducted by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Its Bringing Them Home Report (1997) marked the first national effort to formally document the scale and impact of child removal policies. A distinguishing feature was its approach to testimony. As Euahleyai and Gamillaroi woman Larissa Behrendt (2019: 202) has observed, the centring of these voices was the most powerful aspect of the report, putting a human face on what had been otherwise reduced to statistics. Across almost 700 pages, the Bringing Them Home Report contains more than 500 testimonies from Indigenous people, offering first-hand accounts of the multifaceted and enduring harms that were inherent in forced removal.

While the report significantly shaped public understandings of First Nations experiences, its impact extended beyond this. Underscoring how different histories of violence interact dialogically in the public sphere – what Michael Rothberg (2009) calls multidirectional memory – in the years that followed, it would also prove pivotal in enabling other, non-Indigenous experiences of institutional abuse to come into focus. As Nell Musgrove (2013: xi) has observed, ‘other groups of people who had grown up in institutional “care” were listening to the testimonies of the Stolen Generations and finding that they could relate to a lot of what was being said’. One such group were Former Child Migrants, whose experiences came into greater focus in the immediate years that followed.

Although national political and public attention in Australia had more explicitly centred on the Stolen Generations, awareness of unaccompanied child migration schemes started to surface from the late 1980s. Developments in the UK were an important catalyst for this, particularly an inquiry by the House of Commons Select Committee on Health into the welfare of Former British Child Migrants that was established in 1997. Its final report, published in 1998, revealed that up to 150,000 children had been sent from Britain to Commonwealth countries – primarily Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and what is now Zimbabwe – under migration schemes organised by churches and charitable bodies. The report described the enduring difficulties many such individuals faced, including a lack of information about their identities and families, poor access to medical histories, and the enduring physical and emotional impacts of institutional abuse (UK Parliament Select Committee on Health, 1998).

While the House of Commons Inquiry helped draw attention to the UK context, pressure continued to mount for an independent national inquiry in Australia (Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, 2001: 2–4). In June 2000, the Australian Senate referred the matter to its Community Affairs References Committee, culminating in the Lost Innocents report in 2001. This inquiry investigated the forced migration of up to 10,000 children who had been brought to Australia from Britain and Malta as unaccompanied minors throughout the twentieth century. In 2004, this was followed by another Senate inquiry into the experiences of those who became known as ‘Forgotten Australians’: the approximately 500,000 children who had been placed in institutional or out-of-home care during the twentieth century (Australian Community Affairs References Committee, 2004). As with Former Child Migrants, the removal of these children was typically justified on the grounds of poverty, family breakdown, the illness or death of a parent, or perceptions of neglect. These rationales were deeply rooted in class-based assumptions about unfit parenting and form a little-understood part of Australia's working-class history (Chynoweth, 2014: 175).

Bringing Them Home, Lost Innocents, and Forgotten Australians reports represent what are collectively known as the trilogy of national inquiries into institutional abuse in an Australian context. Although inquiries into institutional abuse have long existed, such recent iterations are notable for the emphasis they place upon testimony. This feature has generated significant scholarly interest (Attwood, 2008; Bakker, 2022; Behrendt, 2019; Kennedy, 2004; Penglase, 2007; Swain, 2014; Swain et al., 2018). For the purposes of the present article, however, my interest lies not in the role of testimony within the inquiries themselves per se, but rather how this trilogy of inquiries contributed to the commissioning of oral history collections in their aftermath. Notably, the first recommendation of the Bringing Them Home Report concerned the allocation of funding to record and preserve testimonies from Indigenous people affected by forced removal. This led to the NLA's Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, which ran from 1998 to 2002. Comprising 340 oral history interviews, the project created a significant repository of testimonies from First Nations survivors impacted by forced removal, as well as other people connected to such policies. In the wake of Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians, similar recommendations informed the development of the NLA's Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project, which was announced in 2009. This project comprises more than 200 interviews with those who experienced institutional ‘care’, alongside policy makers, advocates, administrators and former employees. In accordance with the NLA's mission, the interviews are archived and preserved for posterity in the Library's collection.

While the remainder of the article explores this latter archive in more detail, it is instructive in the interim to reflect on the significance of public inquiries giving rise to oral history collections. In broad terms, the historian Bain Attwood (2008: 75) writes that ‘history making has been democratised, but more particularly there has been an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony’. The contextual developments I have described thus far reflect this wider transformation, bringing a new epistemological salience to experience. This democratisation of history was borne out of broader social movements concerned with class, race, gender and sexuality throughout the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to the emergence of ‘history from below’, which enabled a voice for those whose experiences have otherwise been hidden from history (Attwood, 2008: 78–79). At the same time, as the role of the National Library underscores, these forms of testimony have come to be institutionally produced, sanctioned and preserved. Such cultural institutions inevitably reconfigure – or at least mediate – these accounts through the curatorial frameworks and value judgments they bring to oral history collections. While the creation of this archive has been made possible by broader shifts in the narration of history, it is also shaped by the institutional settings through which it is assembled. Further, while these historiographical transformations extend well beyond the institutional abuse inquiries I have charted here, they help to contextualise the testimonial turn these developments represent and illuminate the conditions through which survivor experience has come to be recognised as an important mode of knowledge.

Returning to the newer domain of institutional abuse studies, I have outlined how testimony has become a central subject of scholarly interest. However, this has largely focused on official state mechanisms, particularly public inquiries. In contrast, the cultural significance of testimony beyond such official contexts has received comparatively less attention. While the relationship between official and unofficial warrants further consideration – a question I return to in the latter parts of this article – it is nonetheless the case that the significance of the age of testimony is not confined to inquiry contexts alone. As the remainder of this article demonstrates, survivor testimony in the form of oral histories housed within national cultural institutions such as the NLA raises distinct questions that warrant deeper consideration.

Of additional significance to these developments is the segmented nature of this historical backdrop, particularly as it influences my methodological engagement with the NLA archive. While Australia's trilogy of inquiries ushered in greater recognition of histories of child institutionalisation, they did so in a siloed manner. That three separate national inquiries were required within a few short years underscores this fragmented approach. It is similarly reflected in the divergent trajectories that eventuated – including the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2009 National Apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants – as well as the NLA's oral history collections, which separately catalogue these experiences. Although these experiences share features in common, their exigencies should not be collapsed into a singular narrative. First Nations experiences were shaped by the structural violence of racism and settler colonialism. The Bringing Them Home Report's finding concerning the genocidal nature of these practices exemplifies this, making clear that these policies cannot be disentangled from broader histories of dispossession. In contrast, the institutionalisation of Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants has not been well understood, and their experiences have received less sustained public attention. This is not to suggest that the response to the Stolen Generations has been anywhere near adequate. Indeed, it is paradoxical that the broader, unresolved question of Australia's settler colonial status was reduced in the 1990s to the Stolen Generations alone. Nonetheless, the fact that First Nations child removal has come to be recognised as part of a wider project of colonial violence, while the experiences of non-Indigenous institutional survivors remain more marginally understood, highlights the need for closer attention to the latter.

The significance of this segmented context is therefore twofold. First, even where institutional conditions appear similar, forced removal needs to be understood as a manifestation of underlying racist logics. Second, the uneven public recognition these histories have received has implications for how survivor testimony is preserved and framed within a cultural institution like the NLA. It is from this context that I turn to the NLA's Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project.

Institutional diffusion across the archive

Drawing on fieldwork undertaken as part of a 2024 NLA Fellowship, the remainder of this article examines what these survivor accounts reveal about the carceral nature of child institutionalisation. This collection primarily consists of interviews with individuals who have experienced institutional out-of-home ‘care’ as children, alongside interviews with former staff, administrators, policymakers, and advocates. They vary significantly in length, ranging from under an hour to one that exceeds 20 hours. Of the 170 interviews for which a duration is publicly available via the NLA's catalogue, the average length is approximately 220 min (or 3.6 hours).

This collection is subject to a range of access conditions, most of which are determined by the interviewees at the time of their recording. Approximately half of the interviews are open for full public access, for which digital recordings can be accessed remotely via the Library's catalogue. The remainder are subject to various forms of restriction, ranging from fixed embargoes to partial access (for example, where listening is permitted in the Library's special collections reading room but where copying is prohibited). In undertaking the research for this article, both open and restricted interviews were accessed. Requests to access restricted material were managed through the Library's Special Collections team, of which the overwhelming majority (approximately 90%) were approved.

Given the size and scope of the collection, it was not feasible to engage with the archive in its entirety. I therefore prioritised interviews available for onsite listening and for which access had been granted. This approach, in effect, constituted a form of random sampling, shaped by availability and access status rather than purposive sampling on the basis of such factors as institutional, time period, or experience. What follows does not attempt to offer an exhaustive account of the archive per se, but rather is filtered according to the specific question guiding this article – namely, how survivor testimony contributes to understandings of the carceral nature of child institutionalisation in twentieth-century Australia.

In their totality, these oral histories capture a wide spectrum of experiences. This is what brought me to the collection. Building on previous research on institutional child sexual abuse, I was interested in the diversity of experiences that make up the collection, and how these illuminate a broad spectrum of harm, particularly given what has been described as a tendency to privilege sexual abuse over other forms of violence and neglect in the recent trajectory through which institutional abuse has come to be recognised as an international social problem (see Daly 2014a, 2014b; Golding, 2018; Penglase, 2007; Swain, 2015). For the purposes of this article, my focus is on the carceral quality of institutionalisation, and the degree to which the archive represents a form of social memory. These questions limit the focus of what follows.

The spectrum of perspectives that make up this archive is underscored by the diverse array of institutions that interviewees describe, ranging from large government-run orphanages and religious missions to smaller group Homes and foster care placements. The temporal scope is similarly broad, with experiences across the archive ranging from the 1920s through to the 1980s. The oldest interviewee was 98 years old at the time of their recording, and the youngest was 34. While many describe long-term experiences of institutionalisation, others recount shorter but nonetheless formative experiences, or cycles of movement between multiple sites of ‘care’. In this way, the collection is marked by diversity not only in the range of people represented, but also in the range of institutional settings in which they were confined. This diversity points to the networked nature of child institutionalisation in twentieth-century Australia, comprising a diffuse geography of ‘care’ that oversaw the confinement of approximately 500,000 children.

Foundational scholarship on sites of confinement, most notably Erving Goffman's (1961) concept of the ‘total institution’, characterises such settings as closed, self-contained environments where individuals are cut off from wider society. As Goffman (1961: xxi) wrote, the total institution is ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’. Developed from ethnographic work conducted inside a 7000-patient psychiatric institution, Goffman's formulation has been highly influential in capturing the routines, discipline and social severance that define institutional life. Institutions such as the prison, disability Home and military barracks all fit this description, distinguished by the control they exert over all aspects of daily life: where individuals sleep, eat, work, and socialise within the same bounded space, under the same authority, according to a highly regimented routine. Goffman was particularly interested in how these sites strip individuals of their autonomy, often through processes of ‘mortification’ that symbolically and materially break down a person's previous identity and remake them into an institutional subject.

Notwithstanding the influence of Goffman's work, however, it has also been challenged for being too totalising, inattentive to the porosity of institutional boundaries and their relation to wider carceral networks (Gill et al., 2018; Moran, 2015; Schliehe, 2016). To this end, Foucault's (1978) concept of the ‘carceral archipelago’ has been useful in overcoming a sense of the total institution as bounded, to consider how carcerality is diffused across logics and techniques that extend beyond the walls of discrete institutional sites. This has been taken up by carceral geographers to emphasise that ‘the carceral is something much more than merely the spaces in which individuals are confined’ (Moran, 2015: 3). This shift in focus from the institution as stated and fixed, to a more mobile and networked form of carcerality, is indicative of how institutionalisation is more than a matter of place, but infused across time and space.

This sense of diffusion is palpable across the oral history archive. Interviewees speak both of their experiences within individual institutions, but also their movement across multiple sites of ‘care’. For some, this entailed movement between such institutions as the foundling hospital, orphanage, and children's Home. For others, movement occurred daily in the form of being transported from the Home to local schools attended by other non-residential children – experiences often marked by isolation and the stigma of being labelled a ‘homie’. These accounts reveal a circuitry of institutionalisation: a complex labyrinth that extended well beyond the physical bounds of any one institution. Confinement was thus rarely static or singular, tied not just to material buildings, but seeping through social interactions and structures of differentiation with the broader social world.

The highly dispersed nature of child institutionalisation has prompted Find and Connect, a web resource that offers information about child welfare in Australia, to create an interactive map that displays the locations of thousands of institutions that have existed since 1795. Cate O’Neill and Kristen Wright (2020: 16), describing their work in creating this tool, write how ‘the map is an enduring public history resource that verifies the narratives of Care Leavers and contradicts the “if only we knew” narrative by showing that Homes were located everywhere’. Contrary to the view that institutionalisation was isolated or hidden from public view, the ubiquity of these carceral sites across the national landscape suggests a more entangled reality. The oral history archive powerfully reinforces this, showing how institutional ‘care’ often existed within plain sight. This has implications both for how institutionalisation is conceptually understood, and also for the meaning of heritage preservation. As O’Neill and Wright (2020: 16) observe, ‘heritage preservation frameworks are not always able to capture the emotional value of places to people, although many buildings that were once children's institutions are included on state and national heritage registers’. In relation to the highly diffuse and networked nature of institutionalisation across the oral archive, a similar tension rings true. The point is not that heritage preservation cannot be meaningful, but rather that such place-based memory work can be at odds with the expansive totality of institutional dispersal across time and space.

An archive of sensation

Having considered the degree to which experiences of institutionalisation illuminate a sense of carceral diffusion across the oral history archive, what remains to be explored is the character of these experiences themselves. As I have said, my engagement with the archive was motivated by an attempt to understand a spectrum of institutional experiences, and how these may transcend a narrow privileging of sexual abuse that characterises recent state responses. To this end, a wide array of institutional experiences is indeed revealed across the archive, ranging from harrowing accounts of harm and abuse, through to experiences that some interviewees describe as life-enhancing. Notwithstanding this diversity, what unites the collection – and what I had not anticipated in approaching the archive – is how these experiences would be so deeply tethered to the senses. Indeed, one of the most striking features is how vividly interviewees describe the sensory organisation of everyday confinement: the scouring of bodies being bathed, the bland monotony of meals, the acrid smell of urine-soaked sheets, the sting of leather straps blistering skin. Across the collection, memory is thus revealed as deeply embodied in the way it is recounted.

In broad terms, criminological interest in the sensory has grown steadily over the past decade. While attention to visuality is more longstanding and reflects an ocularcentrism that privileges sight over other sensory modes (McClannahan and South, 2020), recent work has sought to overcome this by attending to the full sensorium (Herrity, 2024). Belated in comparison to disciplines like geography, sociology and anthropology, this development has nonetheless driven a newfound interest in the embodied and affective dimensions in which crime and power are experienced. As Herrity et al. (2021: xxiii) write, ‘places and processes of punishment and social control are experienced sensorially by those subject to them, those who work within them, and those who are researching them’, such that ‘we need to account for these multifarious sensorial experiences and their effects’. It is perhaps unsurprising that the prison has been a key site of interest in recent sensory analysis, with Jewkes (2014: 389) observing how prisons ‘are peculiar places from a sensory perspective, managing to deny and deprive while, sometimes simultaneously, overloading the senses’.

Underscoring the carceral nature of child institutionalisation, such experiences are rendered in deeply sensory terms. Across the archive, and in an abundance of ways, the texture of daily life is powerfully conveyed through the senses. How life felt inside, the rules that structured day-to-day existence, the regimes of discipline, the degradations: these are all recounted in highly affective and bodily terms. Former Child Migrants describe the smell of coiled rope on the voyage from Britain, their fingers swelling in the heat when they encounter the blistering Australian sun. Many others describe cold and austere dormitories, the unmistakable taste of reconstituted tomato soup, the piercing screams of crying children and nuns striking naked skin. These experiences are relayed in highly tactile terms, showing how institutions are inhabited in intensely affective ways, and how memory is felt and relived through senses and the body.

More than descriptive chronologies of institutionalisation as an event, these oral histories comprise what might be called an archive of sensation. Katherine Biber (2017: 289) has described another NLA archive – the Chamberlain papers – as ‘a literal archive of feelings’, channelling Ann Cvetkovich's (2003) influential An Archive of Feelings. Donated by Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton (as she is now known), the collection includes tens of thousands of letters written by members of the public in the context of her wrongful conviction for the death of her baby Azaria, who was taken by a dingo during a family camping trip to Uluru in 1980. As Biber (2017: 291) observes, these letters are infused with emotion, conveying such reactions as grief, rage and remorse. Together, they capture the emotional mood of a nation transfixed by Australia's most notorious wrongful conviction.

Returning to the NLA's Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Collection, this archive is similarly saturated with affect. To describe it in such terms conveys how dominantly both emotion and sensation are conveyed by interviewees. However, while deeply infused with the sensory textures of institutional life, it would be misleading to imply that they only represent past experiences. Rather, sensation reveals itself in temporally complex ways across the archive. For example, these oral histories take the form of whole-of-life interviews: they include childhood experiences, but also extend into adulthood and beyond. To this end, they are not merely historical but demonstrate how the past continues to shape the present. Consider the feel of a cool breeze wafting through an open window in the middle of the night, transplanting the speaker back to an earlier time in the orphanage. Or the reconstituted tomato soup, which produces an enduring, lifelong aversion. It is not simply that the memory represents an idea of an earlier sensation, but that the sensation itself continues to be felt. Moreover, the sensation is emblematic of the broader experience of institutionalisation, metonymically standing in for the collective experience as a whole. ³ Sensory memory reverberates across time and represents a kind of afterlife, a tissue that connects and collapses past and present.

The intertwinement between memory and sensation is central to how oral history functions as a repository of feeling. Similarly, it exemplifies a set of temporal dynamics that interest oral historians. As Attwood (2008: 80) writes, ‘if history or historicism demanded a disconnecting of present and past, oral history has demanded a connecting of past and present; “then” and “now” become entangled with one another’. In contrast to the professional historian whose job was to record and explain past events, oral history has been driven by an attention to the affective and emotional aftermath of experience. Such an approach to history is indicative of how the past is not left behind. The NLA archive operates in a similar way, revealing how sensory memory bridges time and space – collapsing past and present through feeling.

Embodiment with the archive

The oral history archive is not just an archive of sensation. Issues of embodiment and sensation also characterise the experience of being immersed in the collection as a listener. In this section, I move from considering the sensory dimensions described by interviewees to reflect on how such issues extend to the research experience. Listening to these oral histories in the Special Collections Reading Room at the National Library in Canberra is often deeply moving. Accounts of abandonment, cruelty and horror appear alongside deep courage and tenacity. The act of listening brings with it a level of intimacy and fondness. Nowhere is this more evident than in accounts of deep love from parents towards their children, such as the single father who used his daily lunch break to bake cakes for his two daughters, which would be waiting for them when they returned home from school in the afternoon. These life-spanning interviews span a wide emotional spectrum, from sadness, grief, despair, but also joy, cheek, and humour. This emotional terrain envelopes the listener, its embodied dimensions manifesting in reactions that include smiles, gasps, tears and even at times laughter.

This affective embodiment aligns in some ways with the concept of intersubjectivity that is important to oral history. Over the last few decades, oral historians have become increasingly attuned to the relational dynamic between interviewer and interviewee, and how this sense of connection can be central to the oral history interview. The concept of intersubjectivity thus describes, as Lynn Abrams (2010: 58) writes, ‘the interaction – collision, if you will – between the two subjectivities of interviewer and interviewee. More than that, it describes the way in which the subjectivity of each is shaped by the encounter with the other’. Where earlier positivist critiques treated oral history with suspicion on account of being unreliable, subjectivity has come to be reframed as a key asset (Thomson, 2007: 55–56). Interest in intersubjectivity as a concept has grown out of this context. However, in the same way that the overwhelming bulk of oral history literature is concerned with the production of oral histories, there has been much less engagement with the meaning of intersubjectivity as it relates to encounters with pre-existing archives of oral histories.

While most pertinent to the relational and affective dynamic between interviewer and interviewee, for the purposes of this article, it can be extended to encompass aspects of the listener's engagement with the archive. Considered in this context, it helps elucidate the sense of connection that can be forged through such research. To understand it in such terms is not to say that listening to a pre-existing recording entails the same set of issues as those at stake in its creation for interviewers and interviewees, where the latter is more explicitly dialogic. Nonetheless, there is a relational dynamic that comes to pass between the listener and an archive. As theorists and philosophers of sound remind us, listening entails immersion and proximity. In the words of Voegelin (2010: 5), ‘the listener is entwined with the heard’. Whereas vision requires distance from the object, to experience sound involves a temporal relationship: it ‘sits in the ear’ and cannot be heard without the listener's immersion (2010: xi-xii). The emotional reactions elicited when listening to such accounts in part convey this, typifying how archival encounters may themselves be embodied and affective. Further, while it may not involve the same fluidity that intersubjectivity poses in relation to the encounter between interviewee and interviewer, nor is it only one-directional. Many interviewees speak directly to their (imagined) listeners and reflect on what it means to have their voices heard by an audience in the future. One interviewee reached out to express their joy at knowing their oral history interview was being listened to and generously offered to assist with further research. Similar experiences have arisen in the time since the initial period of archival research at the NLA, including unexpected encounters with interviewees in other contexts. These moments further exemplify the interrelations that can arise through an encounter with the archive, revealing the falsity of traditional ideas of archives as static and archival research as dispassionate and objective.

Emotion, sensation and affect are thus key features of both the oral history interviews and the relational experience of listening to them. Accordingly, the collection provides more than a historical record of institutionalisation: it transmits feeling. These embodied and affective dimensions of sensory memory collapse distinctions between past and present. This occurs in part through the endurance of the past in relation to the narrator's sensory memories, which continue to be felt in the present. It also extends to the proximity that is produced through the embodied experience of listening. This is in part what I mean by a sensory afterlife: the way that sensation connects and collapses past and present, narrator and listener. The other dimension, taken up in the final section that follows, addresses the transmission of private memory into public acknowledgment. Namely, I consider the archive's placement within the NLA, reflecting on how its location within such a national cultural institution serves to bridge the distinction between private and public memory.

Placing the archive: Sensory afterlives as social memory

Beyond its traditional metaphysical connotations, the notion of an afterlife has been invoked in the context of memory studies. This is most evident in Holocaust studies, where the subject of intergenerational memory transmission has been richly discussed. Robert Crownshaw (2010), for example, uses the concept to describe how cultural memory is transmitted from the generation that witnessed the Holocaust to the next generations that inherit it through commemorative practices spanning literature, museums, memorials, and the arts. Similarly, Mariane Hirsch (2008: 1) uses the similar concept of postmemory to describe ‘the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nonetheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’. Elsewhere, she observes how ‘these events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present’ (Hirsch, 2012: 5). The Holocaust represents the context in which memory transmission has been most comprehensively theorised, and has deeply influenced other domains in which social memory is negotiated. In comparison, the experiences I have examined throughout this article are still insufficiently publicly recognised.

The significance of such debates about memory transmission is reinforced by the circumstances in which the collection of oral histories I have examined came into existence. As noted earlier, the establishment of the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project was influenced by a similar archive that was established as an outcome of the Bringing Them Home Report. This had been recommended by a submission by Link-Up NSW, an organisation that supports Aboriginal people directly impacted by forced removal, which called for the establishment of an oral history archive modelled on the Shoah Foundation. As the submission stated, this ‘would fund and facilitate the collection of oral histories of Aboriginal survivors of our holocaust’ (cited in Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997: 18).

The Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, consists of more than 55,000 video testimonies from witnesses of the Holocaust alongside newer collections that respond to other genocides, including those in Rwanda, Cambodia and Armenia. This is an example of what Annette Wieviorka (1999: 125) calls ‘mass testimony’ – testimony that sits at the intersection between individual and society. Elsewhere, Wieviorka (2006: xii) observes how such accounts are influenced by broader cultural movements, reflecting the social context in which they are produced as much as they do an individual whose experiences they recount. To this end, such testimonies are both irreducibly unique while also embedded in collective memory. The work of Wieviorka and other scholars of memory in relation to the Holocaust offers important insight into the relationship between individual and collective memory: it has become, ‘for better or worse, the definitive model for memory construction’ (Wieviorka, 2006: xiv). While the contexts thus differ, the oral history collection I have examined can nonetheless be understood in relation to broader processes of social or collective memory that have been most acutely theorised in the case of the Holocaust.

Central to the advent of mass testimony described by Wieviorka is a shift from private memory to public commemoration – a dynamic that can similarly be considered in relation to the oral histories I have examined. I had initially approached the NLA archive as a repository of private testimonies, conceptualising the interviews as akin to an unofficial truth project. While I understood the official context from which the collection came into existence – established in the context of the 2009 Official Apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, as an outcome of the 2001 and 2004 Senate Inquiries – through the course of listening, it became clear that assumptions about the distinction between official and unofficial were misplaced. Indeed, the enmeshing between public and private became increasingly evident. Interviewees reflect, for example, on what it means to have their experiences held by a national cultural institution, and how they feel heard through the potential of an imagined audience of listeners. This highlights the fact that these accounts are not simply personal, nor entirely divisible from official state forms of recognition.

In her work on the NLA's Chamberlain papers, Biber (2017: 290–291) draws on the experience of another user of the archive, Deborah Staines, for whom the symbolism and scale of the NLA's architecture, coupled with the Library's rules and protocols governing access, shaped her appreciation of the collection's significance. This physicality, Staines recalls, inaugurated her into a relationship with the nation: ‘“After reading the letters, I understood I’d walked into the public sphere”’ (cited in Biber, 2017: 291). While there is something still intensely personal about many of the experiences I encountered, Staines’ observation is similarly indicative of their positionality within the NLA. To this end, they could not be unilaterally separated from more official modes of acknowledgment. Beyond the modernist grandeur of the Library's architecture, this was reinforced by its prominent position in Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle, alongside other national institutions such as the National Archives, the High Court, the National Gallery, Parliament House, and Old Parliament House.

The significance of the collection, then, needs to be understood in terms of the spatial and symbolic status of the NLA as a key national cultural institution. As Biber (2017: 288) observes in her engagement with the Chamberlain collection, ‘the NLA identifies itself as the “keeping place” for records that define Australian “collective identity” and “record the range and diversity of the national story”’. In this sense, such collections underscore the Library's role in mediating national identity. It follows that the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project represents not simply an archive of private memories, but also a form of public acknowledgment of the experiences of the more than 500,000 children institutionalised at the behest of successive Australian governments throughout the twentieth century. If oral history as a method has often been associated with the idea of ‘history from below’, this framing is somewhat complicated by the status of these interviews within such a national institution. These are not merely voices from the margins, unmoored from state structures; rather, they have been institutionally collected, preserved and made legible by a state institution – and at the behest of the state. Through this enmeshing of public and private, the collection signals an afterlife in the way that private memory is transmitted into a form of public acknowledgment.

Conclusion

This article has investigated oral histories of institutionalisation as a form of social memory. Broadly speaking, experiences of institutional abuse, cruelty and neglect have garnered increased social and political attention since the 1990s, particularly in relation to institutional child sexual abuse. These developments have driven a wave of official responses throughout much of the Western world, including public inquiries, redress schemes and national apologies. Central to many of these responses has been a key emphasis they have placed on survivor testimony. This is particularly evident in the case of public inquiries, which have at times been organised to explicitly foreground the voices of survivors. As Shurlee Swain (2014) has observed, this marks a shift in focus from policy makers to victims whose testimonies constitute a greater part of the evidence, and can be understood to form part of a broader ‘age of testimony’ (Felman and Laub, 1992). While the contours of this shift have been widely acknowledged, engagement with testimonies of institutional abuse survivors has largely been confined to the context of public inquiries.

Alongside such official state responses, there has been an important move to acknowledge legacies of institutionalisation through place-based heritage responses, particularly at decommissioned sites. Such spatial responses can be valuable, illuminating the embeddedness of institutional sites across national landscapes. However, there is no guarantee they will be sensitive to the experiences of those who have endured such sites, with examples having been criticised for being top-down, for failing to sufficiently centre the voices of survivors, and for commodifying experiences of institutionalisation. This is to say nothing of the challenge posed where institutions have been demolished or repurposed for other functions. In any case, their capacity to convey the emotional intricacies of such sites can be difficult to capture through heritage preservation frameworks (O’Neill and Wright, 2020: 16).

Set against this broader backdrop, this article has investigated oral histories through the lenses of carceral geography, criminology and memory studies, revealing how such testimonies produce an enduring afterlife of institutionalisation. Through a deep engagement with the archive, the diffuse nature of institutional ‘care’ comes into focus. Experiences were often dispersed across a network of institutionalisation, illustrating the spatial arrangement of child welfare across the national landscape. For Former Child Migrants, this extended to Britain and Malta, highlighting that child institutionalisation formed part of a global movement. Experiences were therefore often rooted in specific institutional sites, while mobility was also a key feature for many. While place-based memory work remains valuable, the oral histories highlight the spatial and temporal dispersion of institutionalisation. Understood in relation to carceral geography and its theorisation of carceral diffusion, the interviews therefore underscore how carcerality has been embedded across the national landscape, rather than fixed to singular sites.

Beyond the emphasis on carceral diffusion, the oral history archive I have examined powerfully illustrates the sensory textures of institutional life. As Herrity et al. (2021: xxvii) observe in their recent collection on sensory criminology, ‘we cannot divorce our sensory experience from our memory, nor memory from our experience of the sensory’. This entanglement is deeply demonstrated by the collection of oral histories I have explored here. From the pungent smells of cleaning chemicals, the burning sensation of scalps treated for lice and psoriasis, the incessant ringing of bells and whistles – experiences are infused in the senses across the plethora of institutional sites and timeframes interviewees describe. However, it is not only interviewees whose experience can be understood in such terms. Archival encounters are themselves embodied, occasioning their own affective and sensory dynamics. The institutionalisation is thus not only evident in how sensory memory endures for those with lived experience of institutionalisation, but also in how it is reanimated in the act of encountering the testimonial address. The proximity of listening to such accounts at times forcefully conveys the sensory charge of what has ostensibly passed, but continues to press upon the present.

The final dimension of the sensory afterlife this article has sought to address relates to the positionality of the archive in relation to the NLA and its status as a national cultural institution. In conclusion, it is instructive to return to the Library's mission and the fact that such a collection as the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Collection is preserved for posterity within its holdings. The afterlife of twentieth-century ‘care’ comes to pass through the assembled memories of interviewees, the status of the archive as a repository of feeling, and the move from private testimony to public acknowledgment. While the voices that make up this collection were not sufficiently listened to at the time, their preservation might yet mean that these experiences can move the nation to deeper recognition. Having been gifted by interviewees, these testimonies are both offerings of memory and calls to action – traces of the past that continue to resonate in the sensory register of the present.