Ground floor of the Girls Dormitory 1987

The dormitory system “… did not encourage the inmates to adopt the values of the white man. In the dormitories, the inmates were poorly fed, denied privacy, forced to sleep in crowded conditions, separated from their families and sent to work throughout the state. Indeed, the oppression and hardship in the dormitory system only served to reinforce a sense of otherness in the inmates. In the school, the crowded conditions and few teachers did little to foster an appreciation of the so called superiority of European culture. In fact the lack of learning enabled inmates to maintain their own cultural traditions and forms.”
— Thom Blake, A Dumping Ground

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The Cherbourg Memory is an initiative of the Rationshed Museum and brings together the photos, videos, oral history recordings, documents and other artifacts of our lives on this settlement. It a website, an archive, an educational resource, a recording project, a research data-base, a store of the people’s stories and an interactive space for comments and engagement. We encourage the people of Cherbourg, the Indigenous communities in Australia and others who have experience of our settlement to help us create a living archive of Barambah-Cherbourg. So find out a little more about the Cherbourg Memory, discover how you can Participate, or find out how you can Contribute to the development of the Cherbourg Memory.