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I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. I'm currently based in the Race and Ethnicity in the Global South Research Collaboration. My research interests include histories of youth, gender, welfare, education and disability. I have a keen interest in digital history and all things web. My dissertation is titled "Help Us/Help Them: How Australian parents understood the problem of mental retardation, and what they did about it, 1945-1970."
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An Introduction to the Spastic Centre
Mapping it Out
Conference Paper: Reviewing Dr. Benn
The Australian Historical Association’s biennial conference, “Reviewing History,” came and went last week. A wonderful event, and a great chance to catch up with old friends and colleagues, and meet some new ones. I was particularly proud of the large contingent of postgrad students from The University of Sydney, every one of whom presented an excellent paper (or two).
My turn was on Friday morning. It’s always hard to compress any argument down to twenty, presentable, minutes, especially while trying to express some nuances and complexities. For quite a while I was struggling to keep this paper to a reasonable length. Luckily, it emerged that Professor Charlie Fox had been working on a paper on the “parent’s groups” in the 1950s, which took a lot of the background work away from me. Charlie’s paper was great, and a solid introduction to my paper. The other paper on the panel, Caitlin Mahar’s discussion on the links between eugenics and euthanasia in the early 20th century, made for a wonderfully rounded discussion.
I think my paper was fairly good. I would like to have spent more time on the States Grants Act debates, and should probably have drawn more explicit links to the “home vs institution” debates and the Benn case. In retrospect, the conclusion is also a bit feeble, and could certainly be strengthed before I submit this as an article.
This is Maurice Benn, head of the German Department here at the Uni of West Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1951, he’d married Irene, a German, and together they’d moved to Perth to further Maurice’s career. For years they tried for a baby, but it was not until 1959 that their first son, Bernard, was born. Needless to say, they were overjoyed. Read more…
Mary Barton
Personal papers are a marvellous thing. Often they are heavily edited before making it to the archives, but on occasion they contain material that provides a wonderful insight.
Fred Schonell, best known as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland during the 1960s, was also president of the Queensland Sub-Normal Children’s Welfare Association from its inception in 1953, until his death in 1969. Schonell was integral in the Association’s establishmeny, encouraging Mr. and Mrs. R. C. Hooper to visit Crowle Home, the flagship “Occupation Centre” of the New South Wales Association, before starting their own school, located on their verandah, and attended by their daughter and nine other children, all hand-picked by Schonell.[1] The Hooper’s backyard school was the genesis of the Queensland Association. It was also Schonell who encouraged the Queensland Council of the Australian National Association for Mental Health to prepare a report on “ineducable” children in Queensland a few months later, giving weight to the Hooper’s efforts.[2] Schonell then arranged funding for Bowen House, the replacement for the Hooper’s residence, and engaged Thelma McConnel, the Association’s first full-time employee and headmistress. Nationwide, Schonell popularised the idea that the mothers of “subnormal children” were like “a twentieth century slave with the burden of the child all day, every day.”[3] He often emphasised that groups such as the Queensland Association helped the parents as much as the children, and that such parents were under terrible strain:
A strain which had been too great for some, and for whom breakdown had given temporary relief.[4]
Conference Abstract: Revisiting Dr. Benn
Writing an abstract for a conference paper that’s not yet completely drafted is a bit of a challenge. For the upcoming Australian Historical Association’s Biennial Conference, Reviewing History, we’re asked to provide the abstract for our proposed papers, plus their titles, in less than 170 words. The conference is being held at The University of Western Australia, so it seems like a good time to review the case of Bernard Benn, whose father, Maurice, was a lecturer at the University’s German Department.
Bernard was four years old when Maurice shot him dead with a rifle he kept in his study. Maurice, after a poignant trail in which he claimed temporary insanity, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang under Western Australia’s mandatory sentencing laws. During the trial, Maurice argued that he had saved his son from life in an institution.
National Library User Lists: The way of the future
User Lists are a new feature of the NLA website. They allow you to save and annotate favourite library items. More Importantly, though, they allow you to share selected items with the whole world. Anybody can then email your list of items, or download them in endnote, bibtex, or marc-21 formatting for insertion into a referencing program. People can even subscribe to another user’s list and receive new items via RSS or email.
This is the way of the future. Read more…
Dave Earl - Disability history in Australia and the world 