Researcher Profile

Associate Professor Nell Musgrove

Faculty of Education and Arts, National School of Arts 

Areas of expertise: history of child welfare & social welfare; Australian social history; history of childhood; gender & family history; histories of crime, digital history
HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5070-8766
Phone: (03) 9953 3208
Email: nell.musgrove@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

Associate Professor Nell Musgrove is an Australian historian with a particular interest in the field of child welfare history and carceral institutions. Her research is particularly concerned with the human experiences of people whose lives have been shaped by their interactions with welfare systems, and with methodological questions about how historians can hear voices from the past, especially those whose perspectives are often obscured in the historical record. Her two major monographs - The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia (2018) and The Scars Remain (2013) - examine child welfare policy and practice over the course of more than a century to highlight the ways in which successive generations have been harmed by systems which claimed to protect them, and the extent to which historical failures have been recognised and addressed. 

Select publications

Books

• Moruzi, Kristine, Nell Musgrove and Carla Pasco Leahy (eds.) Children's Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 (xix & 342 pp.).
• Musgrove, Nell, and Deidre Michell. The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia - Just Like a Family? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 (xv & 314 pp.).
• Musgrove, Nell. The Scars Remain: A Long History of Forgotten Australians and Children’s Institutions, North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013 (ix & 199 pp.).

Book chapters 

• Musgrove, Nell, Carla Pascoe Leahy and Kristine Moruzi. "Hearing Children's Voices: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges." In Children's Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove and Carla Pascoe Leahy, 1-25, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
• Musgrove, Nell. “The Role and Importance of History.” In Apologies and the Legacy of Institutional Child Abuse: International Perspectives, edited by Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain, 147-158. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Swain, Shurlee and Nell Musgrove. “Contained And Confined: Female Incarceration in Nineteenth-Century Australia” In Silent System: Forgotten Australians and the Institutionalisation of Women and Children, edited by Paul Ashton and Jacqueline Z. Wilson, 3-15. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014.
• Musgrove, Nell. “Teresa Wardell: Gender, Catholicism and Social Welfare in Melbourne” In Founders, Firsts and Feminists: Women Leaders in Twentieth-Century Australia, edited by Fiona Davis, Nell Musgrove and Judith Smart, 130-48. Melbourne: University of Melbourne ePress, 2011.

Journal articles

• Musgrove, Nell, and Naomi Wolfe. “Aboriginal Knowledge, the History Classroom and the Australian University.” History of Education Review ahead-of-print, no. ahead-of-print (2021). DOI: 10.1108/HER-04-2021-0010.
• Musgrove, Nell. “Twice forgotten: assessing the scale and nature of foster care coverage in Australian historical newspapers.” The History of the Family 25, no. 1 (2020): 70-93. DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2019.1647264.
• Musgrove, Nell. “Historical abuse in Australian child welfare: why did it happen and why does it matter?” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 460-476.
• Musgrove, Nell. “Locating Foster Care: Place and Space in Care Leavers’ Childhood Memories.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 1 (2015): 106-122.
• Musgrove, Nell. “Imagining Foster Families.” Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 2 (2014): 175-189.
• Swain, Shurlee and Nell Musgrove, “We Are The Stories We Tell About Ourselves: Child Welfare Records and the Construction of Identity Amongst Australians Who, as Children, Experienced Out-Of-Home ‘Care’”, Archives and Manuscripts 40, no. 1, (2012): 4-14.
• Musgrove, Nell and Shurlee Swain. “The ‘Best Interests of the Child’: Historical Perspectives.” Children Australia 35, no. 2 (2010): 35-7.
• Musgrove, Nell. “‘Every Time I Think of Baby I Cry’: Dislocation and Survival in Victoria’s Child Welfare System.” Australian Historical Studies 39, no. 2 (2008): 213-28.
• Grimshaw, Patricia, Nell Musgrove and Shurlee Swain. “The Australian Labour Movement and Working Mothers in the United Nations’ Decade for Women, 1975-1985.” Labour History, special edition, 2007.
• Musgrove, Nell. “Defining and Defying the Image of Camp Pell.” Parity 19, no. 2 (2006): 9-10.
• Musgrove, Nell. “‘Filthy’ Homes and ‘Fast’ Women: Welfare Agencies’ Moral Surveillance in Post-Second World War Melbourne.” Journal of Australian Studies, no. 80 (2004): 111-22.

Projects

• 2021-2023 - Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Care Leaver Activism and Advocacy: From Deficit Models to Survivor Narratives, Chief Investigators Associate Professor Nell Musgrove and Dr Deidre Michell, $345,083.
• 2013-2015 - Australian Research Council Discovery Project, A Long History of Foster Care in Australia, Chief Investigators Dr Nell Musgrove and Dr Deidre Michell, $221,400. 

Appointments and affiliations

• Co-Convenor: Society for the History of Children and Youth Asian-Australasian Regional Network
• Victorian Representative: Australian Women's History Network - part of the International Federation for Research in Women's History.
• Member: Australian Historical Association; Society for the History of Children and Youth; Australian Women’s History Network

Public engagement

• Care Leaver Activism and Advocacy Research Project Public Website: https://www.morethanourchildhoods.org/
• Weston Bate Memorial Lecture 2002, Sovereign Hill, “Philanthropy, Poverty and Power: A New History of Children’s Institutions in the Goldfields.”
• Nell Musgrove and Dee Michell, “Why children in institutional care may be worse off now than they were in the 19th century,” The Conversation, October 22, 2018, https://theconversation.com/why-children-in-institutional-care-may-be-worse-off-now-than-they-were-in-the-19th-century-104395