Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (21 page)

Men described how, instead of going to school, they had been made to load trucks with rocks as they cleared paddocks at Bindoon. The bricks were made by hand, as were the terrazzo slabs.

One boy who tried to escape had his head dipped in a forty-four-gallon drum of liquid lime. This seemed difficult to accept, but it was not for me to investigate. Another told of getting half a mile down the road when he was picked up by a brother on horseback. ‘I was put into a cold shower and flogged for hours,’ he said.

During each interview, I would ask the men, ‘Wasn’t there anybody you could tell?’

They would shake their heads.

A middle-aged man described how he went to confession at Bindoon and told the priest about being sexually abused.

‘The priest asked me who did it, and I told him the brother’s name. But a few days later this brother found me and beat me. He obviously knew what I’d confessed. You know what upset me most?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘It wasn’t the beating. No, that father broke the sacred seal of the confessional. There was no-one left to trust, ever.’

I was pleased when Joanna arrived, if only for the moral support. But there was little she could do to lessen the constant barrage of pain and hurt I was facing.

Unbeknown to me, the film crew had made a decision to film at Bindoon. Joanna had decided that this wasn’t going to take place until I’d left Australia. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have gone with them. There were too many dreadful stories about Bindoon and it was the last place in the world that I wanted to see.

The day before I left Perth, Merv phoned and said that a social worker had called the house about a client of hers who was in hospital. This man had been telling his doctor for a year that he was put on a boat as a child and sent to Australia, then allegedly deported back to Britain at the age of fifteen. Nobody would believe his story.

However, he heard David Spicer talking about the Child Migrants Trust on radio and his social worker rang to talk to me.

‘Can you try and find his family?’ Merv asked. ‘He thinks he might have sisters still in Australia.’

‘You must be joking,’ I said. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like here. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. I can’t look for anybody now. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow.’

‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it all up and wait till you get back.’

I put the telephone down and it rang again. It was reception.

‘There is a lady down here; she hasn’t got an appointment, but she’s desperate to see you,’ the girl said. ‘She won’t take no.’

I found this woman pacing the foyer. ‘My brother’s been missing for years! Bloody years!’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t see you now. Come back this afternoon and we’ll have a cup of tea, is that OK? What’s your brother’s name, by the way?’

She told me. I thought somebody was playing a joke on me.

She repeated the name.

‘Right, sit there!’ I said. ‘Don’t move!’

I ran straight to my room and looked at the notes of the details Merv had given me. It was the same name. I called Merv to make sure.

It was a week before Christmas and here was this woman who for all these years had been parted from her brother and suddenly she seeks help and within minutes somebody tells her exactly where her brother is and how to contact him. I thought to myself: They’ll think I’m a bloody miracle worker.

When I told her the news, she asked, ‘What should I do?’

‘Well, if it was me, I’d go out and buy him a Christmas card! I’ll make sure he gets it.’

As she left and I returned to my room, I kept thinking of a saying my mother liked to use whenever something unexpected and pleasing happened. She would tell me, ‘Margaret, God moves in mysterious ways.’

The next morning – my last in Perth – I was packing and arranging for the flowers in my room to be sent to a local hospital, when the telephone rang.

A man’s voice said, ‘You’re not welcome in Perth and you’d better not come back.’

It was difficult to know if it was an Australian voice; I’ve always had difficulty with accents. But the person was quite well spoken. The voice was calm, not angry. There wasn’t a hint of agitation.

He hung up after making this one bold statement.

I was shocked rather than frightened. It was just so unexpected. Yet something broke deep inside of me.

It was six days before Christmas – a day that seemed to epitomize ‘family’, and I knew that thousands of former child migrants had never had a true family Christmas. They had everything taken from them: their toys, their names, their birthdays, their brothers and sisters, their identities, their childhood, their innocence. Everything. The more I thought about it, the emptier I felt. It came to the point where I didn’t know how I was going to relate to anybody. How could I tell them what had happened to these children? How could I begin to describe it – even to Mervyn?

I slept for twenty-four hours and woke up at about seven o’clock on the night of 21 December.

Wandering downstairs, I slumped in a lounge chair in the sitting-room and Merv offered to make me a cup of tea. The television was on but the programme was interrupted by a news flash.

A grim-faced announcer said a 747 had crashed over Scotland. They were searching for survivors.

‘Where is it?’ asked Merv, coming in near the end.

‘Near Lockerbie,’ I said, feeling numb and disorientated.

Somehow, on top of everything else, it was just too much.

I sat for a long while staring at the television until Merv put his arm around me, worried that I was too quiet.

‘It’s the lights,’ I said. ‘The Christmas lights.’

‘What about them?’ he asked.

‘Can we turn them off?’

‘But why? What’s the matter? It’s Christmas.’

‘I can’t cope with Christmas this year.’

It all seemed so trivial to me. It was sad, really, because normally Christmas was such an important time when the whole family was together. We’d almost hibernate for a week, performing the annual rituals and overindulging.

In the hallway, the Christmas lights were brightly lit and I thought, I can’t take this.

Merv turned them off and I could sense him wondering, How do I tell the children that Christmas has been cancelled?

I think he expected that in an hour or two the lights would be turned back on and everything would be back to normal. But as I sat in the hallway, staring blankly into the darkness, I think he realized that I was shaken and absolutely exhausted.

Tears were streaming down my face. I just couldn’t stop them.

Ben arrived home from a neighbour’s house and walked into the hall. He saw me and looked up at Merv. ‘Daddy, why is Mummy crying? Why is she sad?’

I heard Merv tell him, ‘Mummy’s upset about some of the friends she’s left in Australia.’

‘Why?’ Ben asked.

Merv was at a loss. Finally he explained that some of them, as children, had not had happy Christmas Days with their families.

The festivities did go ahead, for the children’s sake, but for me the season passed in a slow-motion haze. Little things would trigger the tears. Often, when I looked at Rachel and Ben, opening presents, or sitting on Merv’s knee, the tears would just flow. Small details became magnified in my thoughts. I thought of the tremendous loss and misery caused by the terrorist bomb on the Pan-Am flight. And also the loss and misery that I’d witnessed throughout that year in Australia, Canada and Zimbabwe.

I didn’t want to be with people. Apart from Merv and the kids I didn’t even want to be with members of the family. Above all, I couldn’t bear anybody to touch me. People would come and put their arms around me and I’d freeze, but I couldn’t tell them why. I didn’t know.

The local vicar lived just across the road from us and every year he and his wife invited all the neighbours for carols around the piano. The kids would make up their own songs or read a piece of poetry they’d written specially for the occasion. The whole road went along and it was all very wonderful. This year, however, I sat in the kitchen thinking, I can’t go across the road!

‘Don’t let the children go, Merv!’ I said.

Merv looked at me hard. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘while you’ve been away they’ve been writing their Christmas poetry and Rachel is going to play the piano.’

‘No, no! They can’t go.’

‘But you don’t have to be there. If you like, I won’t go with them – they can go on their own.’

It was totally illogical, but in my mind I wanted to blame this lovely, kind-hearted vicar for all the sins of the Church and the role it played in sending innocent, vulnerable young children to the far side of the world and then failing them, time and time again. The discovery that children had been abused by members of the clergy shook my spiritual foundations for a long while afterwards.

The children did join our friends and neighbours, and I stood in my bedroom, in the pitch black, and watched them singing in the vicar’s front room. All my neighbours were congregated there, around the piano, celebrating Christmas Eve. And I thought to myself, they are all nice Christian families, leading good Christian lives. If only they knew.

Merv came up to comfort me and I said to him, ‘I’ll never speak to anyone on this road again!’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know why not!’

Merv shook his head. ‘What happened to those people is disgraceful, Margaret, but you can’t blame the whole world for it.’

I knew what he was saying was true, but my feelings were so raw and open. There was nothing rational about them; very little in the past few months had seemed rational.

The next day I was getting in my car and my next-door neighbour came up with a broad smile as he shouted, ‘Did you have a good holiday?’

Did you have a good holiday!

I stared at him in disbelief and said, ‘Yes, bloody wonderful!’

He thought he’d misheard me somehow.

‘I hear they’ve got good beaches in Australia?’ he persisted.

‘How the hell would I know?’

Merv came out and saved the situation.

It was a terrible few weeks. I showered many times a day. I’d go up for a shower, get changed and I’d be all right. Then half an hour later, I’d go up and have another shower.

Eventually, Mervyn arranged for me to see a professor of psychology at Nottingham University. I wanted an explanation for my desperation and anger.

There is a growing realization that professionals need skilled debriefing after being involved in traumatic events. I was no exception.

The professor told me that some of my feelings were similar to those of a rape victim. I had been exposed to so much emotional pain and suffering, that it had traumatized me. He was also concerned that I had gone through this experience primarily on my own.

It took time before I could accept my experiences in Australia and let them become part of me. Eventually I could laugh at my own extreme reaction – and hoped my neighbours would understand.

One of my first priorities was to organize official approaches to the various charities and government agencies that were responsible for the child migration schemes. I wanted to keep them informed of exactly what I’d discovered in Australia, Canada and Zimbabwe.

Surely, I thought, they couldn’t possibly know how drastically wrong their schemes had gone for so many.

I was confident that when I showed them my evidence they, too, would be outraged and immediately swing into action. I expected that the files of individual child migrants would be made available to the Trust to help find families and that we would get desperately needed funds to expand our work.

This sense of urgency was heightened by a distraught phone call and then a letter from Christine, the Old Fairbridgian that David and I had met at the reunion in Molong.

Judy Hutchinson had kept her promise regarding the Fairbridge files, as it appeared that Christine had indeed been sent a copy of her file.

This horrified me. All along I’d tried to stress to the charities that these files contained very sensitive information which needed to be imparted with some forethought and common sense. Child migrants were going to need counselling before, during and after being given information which had been deliberately kept from them for so long.

Sadly, this advice was ignored by the Fairbridge Society, and Christine experienced the consequences. She was simply sent her file through the post.

Christine knew that she’d been adopted; I had managed to discover this, and had broken the news to her when I was last in Australia. But now she learned that her adoptive parents had rejected her – a shocking realization for anybody, let alone a child migrant whose feelings of abandonment are already so profound.

The file also revealed that Christine had been IQ tested at the age of eight in the UK and was found to be extremely intelligent; so bright, in fact, that it was recommended that she be fostered in England and not be sent abroad.

Unfortunately, that recommendation came too late. Christine had already been earmarked for Canada. When she missed that boat, they found her passage on another – this one to Australia.

I now faced a bizarre situation where some charities refused to release files or acknowledge they even existed and others were handing them out with little thought to the consequences.

David Spicer, as a trustee of the Child Migrants Trust, wrote letters to all the major charities and agencies, including the Department of Health. I wanted to make sure that no other child migrant received their file in such a way. It was also time that the various organizations involved began to accept their responsibilities to the children they sent overseas.

We were greeted with almost total silence. I found it difficult to understand.

Eventually we heard from the Catholic Church which said that it was unwilling to share its confidential records with any other organization working on behalf of former child migrants.

Despite this lone response, I still didn’t want to criticize the charities and agencies involved with child migration. I knew that these organizations hadn’t purposely got together and said, ‘Let’s ruin the lives of thousands of children.’ I simply believed that very little thought had been given to the long-term implications. Perhaps they genuinely believed they were giving the children a new start, and that the end therefore justified the means.