“Many of them never came home,” says Ayres.Īustralian libraries began working together on a national database just over 40 years ago. Some were subject to experimental treatments. Research now suggests Indigenous people were sent to the WA islands – sometimes in chains – because their infectious diseases were hastily and often incorrectly diagnosed. She becomes emotional telling the lock hospitals story, which she considers a demonstration of the “latent power of collections to generate new thoughts, new lines of inquiry and enable all forms of knowledge”. TwitterĪyres was made director-general of the National Library of Australia in 2017, putting her in overall charge of Trove, among other library functions. The memorial to lock hospitals at Carnarvon in WA. That ultimately resulted in the West Australian government creating a park and a memorial at Carnarvon with a very beautiful bronze statue of somebody pointing sadly out to sea.” “That, together with community memories, was enough to bring a whole almost forgotten story back into memory. “They started finding more information, then got together with Indigenous communities in that coastal area and built a community of people to do even more searching. “Researchers searching Trove became intrigued,” says Ayres. That’s until Trove (and its forebears and partners) took on the job of digitising Australian newspapers. The affected families didn’t speak of the intergenerational trauma, and the written reports were in century-old newspapers collecting dust in library archives. ![]() ![]() The grim story of the rugged islands off Western Australia where “diseased” Aboriginal men and women were shipped in the early years of the 20th century had all but faded away.ĭr Marie-Louise Ayres has oversight of Trove as well as physical collections. Dr Marie-Louise Ayres had never heard of the “lock hospitals” in 2011 when she took over responsibility for Trove, Australia’s online archive of 6 billion documents.įew people had.
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