History of adoption

It includes (but is not limited to) stories from adopted persons, separated parents, adopting parents, and professionals assisting with adoption. Stories are in the form of documents and audio files.

Each story is classified by the following characteristics: state or territory, metropolitan or regional, decade, adoption experience. The national History of Adoption project, with chief investigators Marian Quartly (Monash University), Denise Cuthbert (formerly of Monash University) and Shurlee Swain (Australian Catholic University), seeks to discover the distinctive ways in which adoption has reflected and shaped family ideals within Australian settler society; to influence the making of future policy and practice on adoption; to bring into history the stories of people whose lives have been changed by adoption, in order to acknowledge that experience and to read it against policy change; and to assess and explain the historical outcomes of adoption in Australia, an enterprise significant both for academic knowledge, the making of policy and the understanding of the wider Australian community.