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This article explores the case of the Queensland's reformatory for boys through the years 1871–1919 to analyse how the institution negotiated the complex, and at times competing, goals of reforming, educating and punishing its inmate population.

The article relies on documentary evidence, including archival material produced by the institution and newspaper records published between 1865, when the legislation allowing the institution to be created was passed, to 1919, when the institution ceased to be known as a “reformatory”.

This research demonstrates that, despite considerable changes during the studied period, the overarching goal of reforming criminal and potentially criminal young people continuously relied on achieving a balance between reformative techniques such as religious instruction and work placements, providing a useful education and punishing offenders. It also demonstrates that, despite efforts to achieve this balance, the institution was often described as unsuccessful.

Due to the paucity of available archival evidence, there is still relatively little known about how the reformatories of late-19th- and early-20th-century Australia attempted to carry out programmes of moral reformation. This paper contributes to the field through an analysis of an institution which faced unusual challenges as a result of a complex inmate population.

Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland, Australia, existed in various forms for over 100 years. As such, it offers a valuable window into Australian approaches to managing and reforming boys through the twentieth century. The purpose of this paper is to examine its approach to reforming teenage boys during a period marked by a mass escape in 1961. It argues that the reformatory education initially intended was no longer tenable during this moment in history, and that this period represents a breakdown of that approach.

This paper draws on material including newspaper reports, memoirs, and the report of an inquiry into an escape by inmates in 1961. These are analysed in order to construct a picture of the type of reformatory education during this period and the public and official responses to this.

Westbrook Farm Home for Boys was, during this period, an institution attempting to provide a reformatory education at a historical moment when such an education was no longer viewed as appropriate means of addressing the criminal behaviour of youths. This, combined with the leadership of a domineering figure in Superintendent Roy Golledge, led to a culture of abuse, rather than education. The uncovering of this culture was a pivotal moment in the transition of Westbrook into an institution explicitly dealing with criminal youths.

No academic work relating to this moment in Westbrook’s history has been previously published.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the work of the Bible in State Schools League in Queensland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the 1910 referendum on religious education in Queensland government schools. Through examining its campaign and the statements of supporters and opponents this paper seeks to examine the role of the school in relation to morality in this early period of the Queensland history.

This paper draws upon archival material, parliamentary debates, materials published by the Bible in State Schools League and contemporaneous newspaper accounts. These data are thematically analysed.

There was widespread agreement within the early Queensland society that the school was a place for moral formation. The Bible in State Schools League highlighted the tensions in the relationship between morals and religion in relation to the school.

This research problematises the notion that developments in education have followed a straight line from religiosity to secularisation.

Very little has been published to date about the Queensland Bible in State Schools League. This paper goes some way to filling this lacuna.

This paper draws on the archival records of the Victorian Education Department, literature produced by the governing authority of Tally Ho (the Central Mission), and newspaper reports produced in the mid-20th century about school and education at Tally Ho. This paper also draws on material from the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board and the Northern Territory Department of Welfare, as well as two historical key government inquiries into the institutionalisation of children.

This paper uses Tally Ho Boys’ Training Farm as a case study to examine the intersection of welfare systems, justice systems and schooling and education for Aboriginal children in institutions like Tally Ho in the mid-20th century. Further, it provides perspectives on how institutions such as Tally Ho were utilised by governments in Victoria and the Northern Territory to pursue different agendas – sometimes educational – particular to Aboriginal children. This paper also explores how histories can be reconstructed when archives are missing or silent about histories of Aboriginal childhood.

This paper demonstrates how governments used Tally Ho to control and govern the lives of Aboriginal children. By drawing together archives from a range of bodies and authorities who controlled legislation and policies, this paper contributes new understandings about the role of institutions in Victoria to the assimilation policies of Victoria and the Northern Territory in the mid-20th century.

Scholarship on the institutionalisation of children in the post-war era in Victoria, including the ways that schooling and justice systems were experienced by children living in care, has failed to fully engage with the experiences of Aboriginal children. Historians have given limited attention to the experiences of Aboriginal children living in institutions off Aboriginal reserves in Victoria. There has been limited historical scholarship examining the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children at Tally Ho. This paper broadens our understandings about how Aboriginal children encountered institutionalisation in Victoria.