Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (23 page)

John and Penny spent their days at St Catherine’s House, while I prepared families to meet their sons and daughters for the first time, and Yvonne held the fort answering phones and letters.

We still had serious worries about funds. Without the support of the charities I was relying on the public donations triggered by
Lost Children of the Empire
and the newspaper articles.

But if the Trust was to find these families quickly, it needed far more resources than this.

Something had to be done so I turned to the grant-giving charities, of which there are several thousand in Britain. I submitted applications to those charitable trusts with a long history of funding welfare programmes, giving them precise details about our work.

Naïvely, I thought they’d say, ‘Wonderful! Here’s £10,000. It’s a worthy humanitarian project.’

But each time the response was the same. They wrote back saying, ‘No! No! No!’

I was surprised that they did not consider this to be a worthwhile humanitarian project. Perhaps most grant-giving charities believed it was the responsibility of the Government.

Early in January I’d applied for funding from the Department of Health but there was confusion over who should deal with the request. Finally, in August, a meeting was arranged in London at which the Department said it would meet with some of the interested voluntary organizations to ‘facilitate a working and possible financial relationship’.

To add to my problems, I also knew that
Lost Children of the Empire
was due to be shown in Australia later in the year. If the impact in Britain was anything to go by, then it would be dynamite over there. I had to be there for that broadcast, but had no idea how we’d find the money.

I’ve had many surprises turn up on my doorstep, but rarely have they been so unexpected and so welcome as the couple who knocked on my door one night late in September.

‘We’ve read the articles about your work, but missed the documentary because we’ve been away. Can you lend us a video of it?’ the man said.

I gave them my only copy, which they agreed to return.

A few weeks later the man turned up again.

‘May I come in?’ he said. ‘I’d like to talk to you about this terrible business.’

We exchanged a few pleasantries, and as I handed him a cup of tea, he said, ‘Mrs Humphreys, I’ll come straight to the point. There’s not really anything to discuss, because my mind is made up. I’ve seen the articles and the documentary.

‘Next week, you will be receiving a cheque from me for a hundred thousand pounds. It will be anonymous and I must ask you please to keep it that way. It is a gift, and the only condition attached to it is that no-one has a say about its use but you – and you must use it totally to do this work.’

I will take the secret of this man’s identity with me to the grave. He had no direct link with the child migrants, but could certainly identify with their feelings of loss.

‘Start to think about how you’ll spend this money,’ he said as he stood to leave. ‘My advice is to get yourself a proper office. You can’t keep working upstairs.’

Joanna Mack managed to give me a month’s notice that
Lost Children of the Empire
was being broadcast in Australia. Thanks to the Trust’s anonymous benefactor, I flew into Perth two weeks beforehand.

I wanted to be early because I had news for many of the people that I had met in Perth the previous year: birth certificates for some, for others whole families. I was going to be able to tell quite a few of the Nazareth House girls that I’d found their mothers, brothers and sisters, and was carrying letters and photos for some of them.

Penny and John had booked a holiday abroad, but they cancelled it just before I left England.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because we’re coming to Australia,’ said John. ‘Thought we might be useful. If not, we’ll work on our suntans.’

My past experiences of Perth filled me with a sense of foreboding but at least this time I had some good news for people. Perhaps it would ease the burden.

The last thing I expected to receive on my second day there was an invitation to a meeting with various representatives of the Catholic Church, including a member of the Christian Brothers. I knew little of this Order and this would be my first personal contact.

A telephone call to my hotel invited me to a lunch time meeting.

Penny commented to me, ‘This could be a difficult meeting, Margaret.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, but it could also be constructive. I think you’d better come with me to take notes.’

It was a fiercely hot day but we decided to walk. Fortunately, the venue, an office on Hay Street, was only a few minutes from our hotel.

It was a large building, in a high-rent area of the city centre. We arrived at midday and were ushered into a large room where a small group of men, one or two of whom seemed elderly, were sitting on straight-backed chairs around a table. Some wore a solemn uniform of black suit, black socks and black shoes as they sat quietly throughout the meeting.

I anticipated that they had probably seen the documentary. A copy may have been sent from England. I approached the meeting with a very formal attitude and asked for example how long the meeting would last, who was the Chair, and whether I could have a written copy of the agenda. It was clear that my request for formality was not appreciated.

‘What agenda? You’ve been invited to come here for a discussion.’

This reply surprised me. For some reason, it sounded like I had called the meeting. I hadn’t asked to come. I sat there, wondering what would happen next.

There was a long pause before one of the men broke the silence.

‘We wanted you to come here to tell you, in our view, that these outrageous claims of physical and sexual abuse are unfounded. It is all grossly exaggerated. There are many students who are very grateful for the time they spent here. This has been blown up out of all proportion.’

I had a familiar feeling that I was being brought to account. His tone of voice was belligerent, but, unless I was very much mistaken, I detected an underlying defensiveness. I sensed that the men present, perhaps because of the lives they’d chosen, did not know how to relate easily to women. They had spent their lives in a closed, predominantly male environment. In my view this was part of the problem. The Christian Brothers should never have been allowed to look after child migrants because the schemes they ran lacked the full and active involvement of women.

He concluded by saying, ‘This television programme is not balanced, you know. It’s been sensationalized.’

I felt at this point that the meeting was more about shooting the messenger than addressing the issues that the documentary raised.

We were then joined by two professional workers from the Catholic Migrant Centre, and our conversation shifted from abuse to the important issue of the child migrants’ records. I was assured that the Migrant Centre had little information on the child migrants; I was told categorically that records did not accompany the children from the UK. Some files had been burnt, and the remaining files had little useful information about the migrants’ families. Finally, I was told that the brothers had dedicated their lives to looking after these boys under difficult conditions.

I was not asked for my opinions, I therefore said nothing. Indeed, there were times when I felt I was there to be seen but not heard. This was not the constructive discussion I had hoped for.

At one o’clock a tray of sandwiches and drinks arrived and was offered around. Penny gave me an enquiring glance.

I gathered my thoughts and said, ‘I have come here to meet with you because you asked me to, but I didn’t expect to have lunch. If the discussion has finished I have important work to do elsewhere.’

Outside in the fresh air I turned to Penny and said, ‘Well, what do you make of that?’

She smiled. ‘Margaret, I think they call it the Inquisition.’

I was surprised by what I believed to be a basic lack of the compassion that I automatically expect from those associated with the Church. Even if the allegations of physical and sexual abuse were not accepted, it must surely be recognised that these men had suffered a great injustice. It seemed as if their case could neither be seen nor heard such was the strength of the denial. I was also asked why the child migrants were revealing these things now after all these years. I was saddened that the question was spoken in such a disbelieving tone.

Unfortunately, few of those at the meeting seemed to be familiar with the idea of long-term trauma. I was given the impression that the years of silence suggested that the abuse had never happened, whereas I, on the other hand, wasn’t surprised at all that it had taken so long for victims to speak out.

This kind of sexual abuse leaves the victim with the guilt and the shame, not the perpetrator. It seemed to me that, regrettably, the Christian Brothers were going to suffer a great deal of pain and soul-searching before they accepted the accounts of the child migrants.

As Herbert Agar said, The truth which makes men free is, for the most part, the truth which men prefer not to hear.

Back at the hotel, John asked me if I’d heard of someone called Peter Couchman.

‘No, why?’

‘Because you’re the special guest on his television show. It’s just been advertised on the television.’

‘That’s news to me,’ I said.

By the time
Lost Children
was released in Australia, it had won a gold medal in New York and been nominated for a Bafta award. Joanna was very excited. Again, the publicity barrage was launched.

Couchman
was recorded the day before the show and went out immediately afterwards. It was to be recorded in front of a specially invited audience. Peter Couchman forewarned me that there would be a large number of Old Fairbridgians in attendance.

Despite my visit to their reunion, there were still some child migrants from Molong who resented any criticisms of their beloved founder and were angry at some of the media reports.

I was told the Couchman show was a debate-style programme, sometimes quite confrontational. The last thing I wanted was for the tragedy of child migration to become a bitter, point-scoring argument.

The Fairbridgians were, indeed, well represented. So many turned up, that not all were allowed into the main studio. They watched from a special ante-room. Couchman wasn’t impressed. He had wanted the audience to be representative of all the migration schemes, some Catholic, some Fairbridge, some Church of England.

Harold and Pamela were there, and I recognized some of the faces from the Fairbridge reunion: it was clear the audience was predominantly from the farm school, and included the president of the Old Fairbridgian Association, Dennis Silver.

The audience was shown
Lost Children of the Empire
and I could see from their expressions that it was a painful experience for many.

Then the screen went blank and the cameras turned to Peter Couchman. He gave a very powerful introduction, summing up the legacy of the child migration schemes.

After asking me several questions, Couchman opened the discussion to the audience. There were some very pertinent comments but then the discussion was set alight by the intervention of Dennis Silver.

‘While I admire tremendously the work of the Child Migrants Trust,’ he said decisively, holding aloft a sheet of paper, ‘I found my own family. I have interrogated and found them.’

When Peter Couchman turned to me for comment, I simply told him that the Child Migrants Trust did not ‘interrogate’ people. ‘Families and parents in the UK are very caring people, who have had very traumatic experiences in losing their children.’

Dr Ron Sinclair, a former child migrant, said, ‘The search for identity is very important. If you look at the sort of techniques used in concentration camps, they were designed to take away people’s identity. It is the ultimate indignity. So when a person has no identity, this search needs skilled intervention.’

David Hill, the head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and himself a former Fairbridge migrant, was sitting in the front row.

‘Fairbridge never thought this far ahead,’ he said. ‘The schemes were horribly misguided and we will have to pick up the pieces and do the best we can.

‘This awareness is thirty years too late. We are being called the lost children of the Empire, but, in fact, we are the forgotten children.’

Mr Hill then posed the question, Why had it taken a British woman to bring the child migration schemes into the open?

The following night,
Lost Children of the Empire
was screened across Australia.

We were ready. Telephone help-lines were open from the moment the show finished.

We took hundreds of calls that night. The phones rang until 4.00 a.m. and would have kept ringing but the decision had to be made to turn them off.

There was obviously a huge need for on-going support lines, which the ABC couldn’t provide. Thankfully, ever since my first visit to Sydney, I’d had good relations with Barnardo’s, Australia, and it helped find us accommodation and telephones.

John and two other counsellors answered calls from eight the next morning, and they were still there at midnight.

Calls were coming in from all over Australia, hundreds from former child migrants who had been told they were orphans. Extremely distressed and very angry, they wanted immediate answers about whether their parents were alive or not.

A man rang from an oil rig in Bass Strait. He said, ‘Tell me it isn’t true. I don’t bloody believe it. If somebody tells me I’ve got parents after all these years, I’ll bloody shoot myself.’

Others spoke about horrendous acts of physical brutality at Bindoon and other orphanages. There were also calls from men and women who were not migrants but who had also suffered sexual abuse in institutions in Australia.

Ordinary Australians were outraged by the documentary. They couldn’t believe that their country could have imported children in such a way. They were ashamed. Others were incensed and distressed that religious orders were implicated.