The Inconvenient Child

Parramatta Girls Home

Parramatta Girls Home has also been known as Parramatta Industrial School for Girls, Girls Training School Parramatta and Girls Training Home.

First built by convicts in 1841, Parramatta Training School had been a brutal and cruel institution for the incarceration of young women for more than 125 years. Names like ‘Industrial’ and ‘Training School’ sound innocent enough but don’t be fooled – these were not schools as we know them but prisons where harsh and oppressive conditions were concealed under the guise of child welfare philosophies, to justify their creation.

 In 1946, Parramatta Training School for Girls was re-established for the reception, detention, maintenance, discipline, education and training of young women. It then became known as Parramatta Girls’ Home but the name belied its function: it was no home. In reality, it was a prison where young girls were stripped of their dignity and liberties and punished frequently with physical force and threatened with imprisonment in Hay Girls Institution.

At just sixteen, Sharyn Killens was sentenced to Parramatta Girls Home. She had committed NO crime. She was a runaway.

See the photos below and read her extraordinary life story - The Inconvenient Child.
 

Read about Parramatta Girls Home

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Administration entrance
The entrance to Administration

Inside the gates of Parramatta Girls Home
Inside the main gates of
Parramatta Girls Home

Behind the walls of Parramatta Girls Home
Behind the high wall of
Parramatta Girls Home

The covered way at Girls Training School, Parramatta
The Covered Way

A dormitory at Parramatta Girls Home
One of the dormitories

The dungeon shower room
The dungeon shower room

Photographs Courtesy DoCS NSW             Go to TOP 

Who Are The Forgotten Australians?
The Forgotten Australians are the survivors of neglectful and often cruel Institutional care in Australia between 1930 and 1970. Roughly 500,000 children who were put into orphanages or so-called Homes and institutions where they suffered at the hands of callous institutional staff. These children suffered deep and lasting feelings of abandonment and many were physically and psychologically scarred.
Are you a Forgotten Australian?  Want to find out more? Go to the Alliance for Forgotten Australians.

Care Leavers Australia Network (CLAN) is the national support and advocacy group for those people who grew up in Australia’s orphanages and Children’s Homes. CLAN help everyone, including Australians who grew up in orphanages and Homes overseas. There are almost no services for older Care Leavers provided either by governments or by the agencies which ran Homes in the past. For help or support, please go to Care Leavers Australia Network - CLAN

  


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