Barry Coldrey (second from left) with family members.

     Barry M Coldrey was born in 1939 in Melbourne, Australia and graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1964. Since that date, he has taught English, History and Politics in three Australian states, at Teachers Colleges in Papua New Guinea and Pakistan and at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby.

     Since 1964, he has acquired Masters degrees in Arts and Education and a Ph.D. researching the links between education and revolution in Ireland.  In 1989 he was in Pakistan concerned with the establishment of a Catholic Teachers College in association with the Pakistan army.

     Dr Barry Coldrey has written some twenty books and a number of refereed journal articles in the areas of history, politics and social issues.  He is a member of the Australian Association of Authors, the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Independent Scholars Association of Australia.

     Barry Coldrey spent the year 1990 working in the History Department of the University of Papua New Guinea, but in 1991 was invited to proceed to Western Australia to write the history of the four Christian Brothers orphanages in that state, both to celebrate their combined 210 years of service, but also to investigate allegations of widespread physical and sexual abuse in these place, especially during the 1940s and 1950s when British and Maltese child migrants were placed there.

     During the 1990s, Barry Coldrey spent much time abroad in the UK and Malta exploring and writing about child migration, orphanage history and institutional child abuse.

     One of Dr Barry Coldrey's academic papers due for publication over the next few months is 'The Extreme end of a spectrum of violence: Physical abuse, hegemony and resistance in British residential care - a Survey.'  This article commences as follows:

During the years 1991–8, the author was an investigator of residential care abuse allegations for an organisation within the Catholic church. Some of the results of this investigation have been published; others are private to those who commissioned the studies. (1) However, widespread reading and numerous interviews showed that physical and sexual abuse in institutional care were not restricted to Catholic residential care managed by nuns and religious Brothers. Abuse — sometimes on an industrial scale' — was endemic throughout traditional residential care. (2) This paper explores the reasons for the abuse phenomenon and limits its observations to the care provided for boys and young men.
 

Traditions and Influences

My upbringing was within the Irish-Australian catholic sub-culture at a time when Irish Australian Catholics still felt somewhat threatened, with the advent of the Democratic Labour Party out of the 1954 Labour Party split when a teenager. The Honours section of the History department at Melbourne University provided a somewhat broadening experience during the early 1960s. Travel and work oversees has countered and Australian-centred insularity and more recently, the probing of revelations of quite widespread corruption within otherwise respected institutions has challenged any remaining simplistic views of human goodness.