Winlaton Youth Training Centre was a Government owned and run female youth correctional facility located on at 186 Springvale Road Nunawading, Victoria, Australia. The facility was designed to accommodate 14- to 18-year-old wards of the state. It opened in 1956 as the Winlaton Juvenile School, and closed in 1993 as the Nunawading Youth Residential Facility. A housing estate (Candlebark Estate) now occupies the site.
History
The centre was established in 1956 on land purchased from the Health Department. The name, "Winlaton" came from the English town where the land's previous owner Mr Tweddle had been born. The Health Department had intended the site as a venereal disease clinic but sold it to the then Department of Reformatory School for Boys and Girls.
The opening of Winlaton signalled the end to accommodating young women in the overcrowded "Turana" Youth Training Centre in Parkville, Victoria which, in 1956 accommodated children of both sexes from infancy to aged 18. Winlaton was intended as a maximum security centre for young women under sentence (i.e. those who had been committed to the care of the state for criminal offences). As such Winlaton was built to accommodate 45 inmates in private rooms in three residential sections.
Internal organisation
There were three sections: Karingal also known as Kooringal (low security), Warrina (medium security) and Goonyah (maximum security). Winbirra Remand centre was opened on the site in 1960 and acted as the remand facility for female juvenile offenders and young girls awaiting court appearances in Victoria. A hostel, Leawarra, was opened in December 1959 to provide accommodation for inmates who were close to release and were attending outside schools or employment. Leawarra was actually the original farmhouse which had been left on the site when the government purchased it from Mr Tweddle. Coincidentally, the address of Winlaton Youth Training centre was 186 Springvale Road whereas the address for both Leawarra and Winbirra was 208 Springvale Road. The three institutions were run as separate facilities but came under the supervision of the one superintendent. Many former inmates recall their time in Winbirra as time in Winlaton. However, pretty much every female state ward in Victoria spent time in Winbirra between 1960 and the 1970s whether or not they were then committed to Winlaton
Administration
There was a special school on site which was administered and staffed by the Department of Education and was not under the control of the Winlaton superintendent. During the 1950s and 1960s, many State wards had been taken into care because of truancy (not attending school which was compulsory until the age of 15) However, once in care, children were commonly denied access to education. For example, at one point in the late 1960s, despite the population of Winbirra Remand Centre reaching about 40, the school took only 8 girls for classes. The centre had a permanent medical nurse on staff but called in doctors from outside to treat illness.
For most of the centre's history the superintendent was female as was the majority of the staff. From the 1980s onwards, the superintendents of Winlaton were referred to as 'managers' and the residents as 'students'.
Due to changes in child welfare legislation and, fundamentally, moral and control panics about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of girls increased throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, the suitability of new inmates for a maximum security facility declined. Increasingly, the young women and girls sent to Winlaton had been detained not for criminal offences but had been made wards of the state under the Children's Welfare Act for either being "exposed to moral danger" or "likely to lapse into a life of vice or crime". Young women who had been made wards of the state to protect them from abuse at home soon found themselves living in overcrowded facilities with young women under sentence from the courts.
Winlaton did not exist in a vacuum, nor was it the first attempt by the Victorian government to address the needs of young people and the community. Winlaton represented a new chapter in the larger history of Victorian welfare. Of particular significance are the decades immediately preceding the opening of Winlaton. Changes to legislation, accommodation facilities and approaches to juvenile care and juvenile justice which occurred in the 1950s set the scene for the opening of Winlaton and defined the parameters within which Winlaton functioned.