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Broadmeadows Home &
St Augustine's Orphange 

Broadmeadows

An excerpt about the home - (records kept by the McKillop Foundation0     .......... 

Broadmeadows Babies' Home, opened in 1890 and run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of St Joseph, housed orphans and wards of state until they were about five years old, when they were sent to other Catholic institutions throughout Victoria.

The home was an unimpressive rambling collection of brick and weatherboard buildings about 20 kilometres north of Melbourne and was an unlikely setting for cruel medical experiments, but it was there in September 1947 that researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research started work to try to find a vaccination against herpes simplex.

It closed in 1975.

St Augustine's Orphange 

A group of Mercy Sisters from Dublin arrived in Geelong on December 3, 1859. 
In March 1860, with assistance from a local subscription committee, the Sisters purchased a brick house called 'Sunville' on Newtown Hill, previously owned by the late Hon. G.F. BELCHER. 
Prior to this, the Sisters took charge of the girls at St Augustine's, with two Mercy sisters residing there until 1862 when the girls were removed to Our Lady's Orphanage adjacent to the convent at Newtown. 
The first burial in the convent cemetery was Sister Mary Gertrude O'FARRELL on August 8, 1878.

  St Augustine's Orphanage as it still stands in 2007.