Join Dr David McDonald as he presents a lecture on his 2024 National Library Fellowship research into better understanding the lives and experiences of Forgotten Australians and Child Migrants in institutional care. Dr David McDonald’s research into the lives and experiences of Forgotten Australians and Child Migrants seeks to understand how they may be criminologically understood through a continuum of violence. In Australia, several public inquiries have highlighted the harmful experiences that generations of children have experienced in ‘care’. Seeking to rectify this, David’s project consists of a deep engagement with the Library’s Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project. It focuses on the lives and experiences of those who experienced ‘care’, the impact on them and their families, and interviews with other advocates and professionals about such practices. Methodologically engaging with these interviews as ‘cultural testimony’, the project examines these experiences through a continuum of violence, and the Oral History Project collection as a form of alternative justice. Dr David McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Melbourne. His research investigates recent transformations in understandings of child sexual abuse, and broader forms of abuse and cruelty across institutional contexts. He has examined the role of official state responses like public inquiries, and their impact on local communities that have been significantly impacted by institutional abuse.