An article I did for The Armidale Express (10 December 2010) has been included in the National Museum of Australia's collection of stories about life in children's homes, and can be seen at http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2010/12/15/close-to-home/
It's an interview with Nicola Woolmington, the writer and director of a documentary called 'The Forgotten Australians' which was shown on SBS television on November 16.
Amazingly, I did three stories inspired by this film before finding out that Nicola had grown up in Armidale!
The first was a preview of the documentary highlighting the fact that it mentioned Armidale's St Patrick's Orphanage, and featured a local woman, Tracey, who was there in the 1970s. That stirred up a lot of community angst and was followed by two divergent takes on what it was like growing up at St Pats. Basically, one presented the views of various women who were there in the forties, fifties and sixties, who maintained that it was not such a bad place and even though there were only four nuns to care for eighty children, the amount of work the kids were expected to do was much like the chores that any child would do in a family at that time, and the nuns treated them in a 'firm but fair' fashion. The other corroborated Tracey's account - it was a harrowing tale of being overworked and physically and emotionally abused, told to me by a woman whose life story was written on her face and who repeatedly spoke of her five-year-old self as 'a horrible child' who 'got punished accordingly'.
So the interview with Nicola was the fourth (and I think, final) one on the topic, and it focused on the significance of her documentary, the long haul of bringing it to completion, the feedback she's received since it aired, and her background as an ex-Armidale girl who became a film maker.
