Group with Nancy Chambers at the Girls Dormitory in Cherbourg c1930

By the early 1930s, two out of three of all Cherbourg children live in the dormitories. Dormitory life is a strict routine of bells, cleaning duties and inspections. Those of us in the dormitory are kept away from other residents on the settlement; we even have to get special permission to visit our own families in the Camp. The dormitory friends become our family – we become mates for life.

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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.