Eldershaw Lecture - Lucy Frost, Indentured children: apprentices from the Queen's Asylum 1860-80

Lucy Frost speaks on the subject, 'Indentured children: apprentices from the Queen's Asylum 1860-80'. In 1879 the institution founded half a century earlier as the King's Orphan Schools closed its doors. Since the end of transportation, attitudes towards the care of 'children of the state' had changed, and re-naming the Orphan Schools as the Queen's Asylum for Destitute Children had not signalled a transformation sufficient to meet the expectations of the free colony. The apprenticeship program makes visible the Asylum's struggle to remain viable. In the final twenty years of the institution almost a thousand children were sent out as apprentices. This lecture looks at the program and at its effects on the indentured children.