The Royal Children’s Hospital Heritage Project is run by a project team comprising RCH staff and historians from Context. Our guest bloggers from Context will be giving regular updates on their experiences as they delve into the rich history of the RCH.

View the first instalment of the Heritage Project updates here:
The RCH Heritage Project #1: Bringing Our History to Life

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The RCH Heritage Project #2: First look at the archives

Thursday 29 May 2014

Today was our first day in the RCH archives. As historians, the excitement of getting to know a new archival collection is the kind of thing that keeps us up at night. But not everyone knows what an archive collection is or exactly why it is that we get so excited, so we thought we would explain some of it so you can hopefully be infected by our enthusiasm.

Most organisations – including public institutions like the RCH – keep their old records and documents. It’s sort of like how we all keep our own paperwork and important bits and pieces: bills that we have paid, important correspondence we have received, school reports, first drawings, letters from friends, family and first loves, photographs, things like that.

You might not realise it, but all of these things you’ve kept over the years (even the boring bills) are your own little archive. If someone didn’t know you, but was given your collection of stuff’ to look through, they would fairly quickly be able to get a feel for who you are and the sorts of things that are important to you. So imagine the archival collection of the Royal Children’s Hospital like a great big box of paperwork, bills, documents, photographs, letters and other treasures that have been saved over the hospital’s long and fascinating life caring for children, training doctors and nurses, pushing the frontiers of medical research and science, and building a community. Trawling through this great big box of ‘stuff’ allows us to get to know the RCH as if it were indeed a person. That’s why we get excited!

Luckily for us, the Royal Children’s Hospital’s great big box of stuff is very well organised. More like a huge filing cabinet than a large disorganised box – each drawer dedicated to a different collection or type of documents. Today we were trying to get a feel for the whole collection – the equivalent of having a poke around in most of the drawers. In reality the filing cabinet is more like a room, but it is a useful analogy. We could easily get lost in this collection for years!

As historians we read a lot and often have to do detective style work to piece together the stories and meaning behind individual documents. Photographs are also a huge part of our research and involve a different kind of ‘reading’. The RCH has an incredible photographic collection. There are over 12,000 pictures that stretch right back to the 1890s. Looking through them is a bit like time travel as the photographs transport us back to days when medical equipment was terrifyingly large and scary looking and nurses wore stiff, starched uniforms. Despite clearly being from times past, the expressions on the faces of the people drew us in. They all seemed to have stories to tell and experiences to share, which is precisely what we are trying to uncover as we journey through the RCH’s amazing collection and get to know who and what have made it the hospital that it is today.

On that note, we would like to explore your stories and experiences of the RCH. So we wanted to ask you a question, and would love it if you feel like leaving a comment on this blog. It can be as long or short as you like. So our first question is, when did you first visit the Royal Children’s Hospital and why? And also, what do you remember about your first experience of the RCH?

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Katherine Sheedy and Sarah Rood
Historians from the Context Heritage team 

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Announcing: the RCH Heritage Project

The new Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) stands proudly on Flemington Road in Parkville. It is a colourful beacon of extraordinary patient care, world leading medical research and training. The state of the art facilities contain the latest equipment and embody cutting edge theories and practices in paediatric medicine. But the RCH is also a link between the present and the past. This hospital, despite its modern architecture and equipment, has been caring for sick children since the 1870s.

Many of us have stories of the Royal Children’s Hospital – experiences of visiting a sick friend or family member, or maybe spending time as a patient at the hospital ourselves. Perhaps we visited a specialist there. Or maybe we trained at the RCH as a nurse or doctor, or worked there in another capacity. These stories are part of the history and heritage of the Royal Children’s Hospital. It is this heritage, these stories – both those that can be shared by the community that surrounds the RCH today, and those that can be uncovered in its archival collection – that are the focus of this project. A project that aims to uncover, explore and celebrate the heritage of this remarkable hospital and community.

Over the next six months a team of consultants, including historians, heritage specialists and visual communication and graphic designers, will be undertaking a project specifically commissioned to explore the history and heritage of the hospital. The team will develop a plan that will guide the RCH’s approach to celebrating and communicating its history over the next decade, including its 150th anniversary in 2020.

Our first task is to get to know the Royal Children’s Hospital. We will do this by exploring the archival collection of this remarkable hospital. We have created this Heritage Blog so that we can share the stories we unearth with you. But we have also created this space so that we can invite you to share your thoughts, recollections and experiences of the Royal Children’s Hospital with us.

We will be updating the Heritage Blog regularly and asking you to contribute your own stories. We look forward to getting to know you and the Royal Children’s Hospital in the weeks and months to come.

The Context Heritage Team