Episode 14 of the Public Records Office of Victoria podcast series Look history in the Eye "The Brookside Girls" focuses on Erica Cervini, an award-winning education journalist, researcher and family historian who recently wrote an article for Public Record Office Victoria's Provenance Journal about the Brookside Reformatory for Girls in Cape Clear, ten miles from Scarsdale Victoria. The episode delves into her research, including the cruel and unusual treatment, multiple escapes, and what we can learn from its ultimate failure today.
The focus of the podcast is Jessie Nairn. Jessie was sent to Brookside in 1896. Jessie was one of the Brookside girls to escape the reformatory. Scared, cold and with nowhere else to go, she ended up handing herself into police.
Jessie and several other girls who escaped were sent back to the reformatory, though their claims of abuse against the institution made it from the police to the newspapers, igniting discussions as to whether the institution was too hard on the girls who lived there. Jessie and her cohort weren't the first to escape Brookside. Annie Duce escaped many times before! After multiple escape attempts, she ended up back at Melbourne Gaol serving out her sentence for larceny.
Episode 14: The Brookside girls
Duration: 32 min
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