Failed Ambitions: Kew Cottages and Changing Ideas of Intellectual Disabilities

The history of Melbourne's Kew Children's Cottages (1887–2008) is the challenging story of an institution that failed its residents – and it is vividly relevant to today, when the rights of people with disabilities are the subject of a royal commission.

Those with an intellectual disability were historically the most vulnerable in our society and the least protected. Governments continually failed them by underdelivering on ambitious promises of reform. Failed Ambitions traces the developmen...