Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to acknowledge today as the 10th anniversary of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the stolen generations on behalf of the Australian government. In doing so, I want to talk about a site in Parramatta which was incredibly important in the history of this very dark time in Australian life. I am going to talk about the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct and call on the minister to urgently work to list this precinct as a World Heritage site.

The precinct contains a number of buildings. The oldest is the Parramatta Female Factory designed by Francis Greenway and established in 1821 to house female convicts and to serve as a workhouse for those women. It produced the country's first export—linen; it was the first factory; and we had our first industrial action there as well. The children of the convicts that worked there were housed next door in the former Roman Catholic orphanage site. That building became the Parramatta Girls Industrial School in 1887 and, eventually, what was known as the home for wayward girls and renamed the Norma Parker Centre, where it remained as a place for the incarceration of women until 2010.

An estimated 30,000 women and children passed through these institutions, including many of the New South Wales stolen generation. In one of the great ironies, those young girls were essentially imprisoned in what was, before white settlement, a sacred women's site. The place of 200 years of incarceration of women was built on top of a sacred site for women of the Dharug nation.

Bonney Djuric and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project have recently had the collection of heritage buildings on Fleet Street, North Parramatta, listed as a site of conscience to memorialise the memories of the women and children who passed through the doors and ensure the injustices they faced never happen again. Bonney also put through the first applications to get the precinct placed on the National Heritage List, which it was, late last year, and I thank the minister for that. The listing acknowledges the female factory as a site which demonstrates Australia's social welfare history and the institutionalisation of women and children. It's estimated that one in seven Australians are descendants of the women of the female factory. It has been a place of incarceration of women and girls, with some appalling stories, for over 200 years.

However, despite the National Heritage listing, the New South Wales state government and its development arm plan to build a minimum of 2,700 units in the direct vicinity of and between these heritage buildings. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends have been advocating for World Heritage listing for years. They have 4,000 signatures calling for the same, and I add my voice to theirs in calling on the minister to immediately take action to protect this incredibly important site by working towards its inclusion on the World Heritage List.