News Archive

A former WA Senate representative who was instrumental in Federal inquiries into child migration and institutional care will speak at a free public lecture at The University of Western Australia next week (Monday, August 4).

Andrew Murray's presentation, ‘Forgotten Australians:  Identity, Records and Their Search for the Past' will be part of the Fourth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives to be held at the University.  The lecture will be held in UWA's Alexander Lecture Theatre at 6pm on Monday August 4.

Born in England, Mr Murray was sent as a Fairbridge child migrant to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) where he attended several schools before going to the University of South Africa. He later won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He was deported from South Africa in 1968 for opposing the National Party's Apartheid policies.

As an Australian Democrats Federal Senator for WA in 1996 and again in 2001, Mr Murray was recognised as a champion for the disadvantaged. He secured the support of the ALP for an inquiry into child migration to Australia and initiated another inquiry into those Australians who were not child migrants but who also experienced institutional care as children.

Mr Murray's lecture will cover identity-related issues for the more than 500,000 ‘Forgotten Australians', including Aboriginal ‘stolen generations' and British, Irish and Maltese child migrants, referred to in the 2004 Senate Community Affairs Committee report.

Other speakers at the conference, which will focus on issues relating to the history of recordkeeping by and about Indigenous peoples, and migrant, minority and disappeared, communities include:

• Associate Professor Jeannette Bastian, of Simmons College, Massachusetts, who will speak about records of carnival in the United States Virgin Islands;
• Dr Ben Alexander, of Queens, New York, who will discuss space and documentation in an artists' community; and
• Professor Masahito Ando, of the University of Tokyo, whose talk will be about the struggle for the return of lands in Okinawa under the US Military Occupation and its records.

Media references

Audrey Barton (Institute of Advanced Studies)  (+61 8) 6488 1340
Simone Hewett / Sally-Ann Jones (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8) 6488 7977
(+61 4) 20 790 097 / (+61 4) 20 790 098