Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (35 page)

It’s no good sitting there saying I don’t want it. You take their baggage because you know it’s too heavy for one person to carry through a lifetime.

The headlines said it all.

‘Liverpool the Best’, ‘Gripping Tragedy of Child Migrants’, ‘Castaways of Empire in an Inspiring Drama’.

Every major newspaper carried the story, publishing interviews, location reports or television previews and reviews.

The Leaving of Liverpool
became one of the ABC’s best-rating series ever and took top honours at the Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, picking up the prize for best original mini-series.

Philip Adams, one of Australia’s leading social commentators, wrote in
The Australian
: ‘If this isn’t a masterpiece, it’s the next best thing.
The Leaving of Liverpool
is so compelling, so beautifully crafted, you view it with a mixture of anguish and wonderment, wishing you could disbelieve it, looking for flaws that might allow you to escape its pain and sadness …’

Of course, the child care agencies were less enthused. The Catholic Church displayed an uneasy mixture of defence and concern, learning perhaps from past mistakes that outright denials won it few friends. Far better to display a sense of sadness and an eagerness to help.

Dr Barry Coldrey fielded most of the calls from the media, and described the drama as powerful but ‘unbalanced’. At the same time, he continued the quiet offensive, directing blame to the British and Australian governments.

The Editor of the
Catholic Record
was more outspoken, telling readers: ‘A very small group of complainants are riding on the back of Liverpool and the earlier BBC production
Lost Children of the Empire
to captivate press, radio and television with their selective defamatory reconstruction of documented history …

‘The smug middle-class Australian critics of today had best go back to what their parents were saying about migration in the 1950s and whether Australia House London is to be indicted for the millions of Britishers who landed with a jolt in Australia’s so-called post-war “paradise”.

‘In what passes as a media debate in the late 1900s the Christian Brothers will have to live with being damned whether they do or don’t reply to these cultivated impressions …’

By September, Western Australia’s State parliament was drawn into the debate. Philip Pendal, a Liberal Party MP and ‘product of a Catholic education’ told the House he was fed up with ‘Kick a Mick Week’.

‘Over the last 160 odd years, Western Australian society has bled dry the services of Catholic institutions that were among the few to minister to outcasts in our society.

‘Thousands of priests, nuns and brothers have devoted their lives to lepers, drunks, orphans and rejects at a time when those people were abandoned by most sections of society, including successive governments. The efforts of those people are unquestionably being denigrated because of an errant few …

‘I am sure that some misfits crept into the priesthood and the religious life of the Catholic Church. The bad-apple syndrome is as old as time itself. Those who know their Bible history from a Christian perspective will know that our friend Judas was only the first weak link. To the extent that misfits creep into the system, I do not condone their actions and neither does the Catholic Church.’

The media debate raged on. My main concern was that in the furore surrounding
The Leaving of Liverpool
, everybody was focusing on the involvement of the Christian Brothers and the Catholic Church. The child migration issue was not limited to one country or one agency. Western Australia wasn’t the only place where children were sent and suffered hardship, degradation and abuse.

I also stressed to journalists that not all child migrants complained of such harsh treatment. Some felt they were treated with kindness and compassion in the children’s homes. They did not witness or suffer abuse or cruelty and had fond memories of their childhoods. This, however, did not stop either their longing to find their families or their anger at having been told they were orphans.

In the first forty-eight hours after
The Leaving of Liverpool
, we received more than 700 calls on the hotlines – increasing the backlog of missing families. When I returned to Perth before flying home, my hotel room floor was littered with new files.

Amid this organized chaos, a large brown envelope was delivered to the hotel. I didn’t have time to open it or recognize the handwriting. I simply assumed it contained documents sent to me by a child migrant who wanted to find his or her family.

I slid the envelope into my briefcase, hoping to read its contents during the flight or when I got back to Nottingham.

It was wonderful to be home. I wandered through the house, constantly ambushing Mervyn, Ben and Rachel with unexpected hugs. I needed the reassurance and comfort of holding them close.

By now Rachel was old enough to understand. While she wanted us to spend more time together, she appreciated that time was running out for many child migrants and that our family sacrifice was minor compared with their problems.

But not long after I returned, Rachel said something that stopped me in my tracks. She had noticed that my hair was falling out again – it was all over the towels and the bathroom floor. Putting her arms around me, Rachel whispered, ‘Oh, Mum, it’s time somebody said to them that you belong to us.’

I was deeply upset. It was not the child migrants’ fault. The Trust’s lack of funds had ensured that we had to work twelve hours a day, most days of the week.

I had missed Rachel’s birthday almost every year except one – her eighteenth – in the previous five years. I had missed anniversaries, school concerts, fêtes, football games … the list was shamefully long.

And no matter how hard I tried to acknowledge that failure when I returned home, it was never the same. You can’t make up for missing a birthday – that special day is gone for ever.

On the other hand, I was working with people who sometimes had never known, with any certainty, on what day they should be celebrating their birthday, or even their correct age. I’ve often sent people their first birthday card. It is my way of letting them know how important they are to me.

My children have grown up in the real world. Thankfully, they understand the sacrifices our family has made. And they know that I would never let the child migrants down. I couldn’t live with myself.

Soon after I returned to the UK, I was surprised to hear that Dr Barry Coldrey had finally revealed limited details of his ‘investigation’ on behalf of the Christian Brothers. He admitted to the
West Australian
newspaper that he had uncovered evidence that some brothers may have sexually abused children at Bindoon Boys’ Town. Whether his wider findings were made public, he said, would depend upon his ‘employer’.

‘I am prepared to say that the lines of evidence against certain staff members are strong, but I’m not, at the moment, prepared to go further than that.’

He went on to comment on one brother whose name had cropped up often in the Bindoon old boys’ stories, saying, ‘There are strong allegations against this chap [Brother] Angus but all I would say at this stage is that if he was living, well, he would have a lot to answer for.’

As far as I knew, this was the first time the Christian Brothers had admitted that there might, after all, be some truth in the allegations of sexual abuse. Dr Coldrey went on to name another brother and a priest, Father William Giminez, against whom there had been ‘constant but never precise’ allegations.

Playing the fair-minded academic, Coldrey conceded some points and appeared both reasonable and balanced. However, having accepted that the allegations might be true, he then attacked other claims made by old boys.

But research can work both ways.

Perth social psychologist, Juanita Miller, was writing a doctoral thesis on the treatment of child migrants in Western Australia. Ms Miller interviewed 180 former child migrants from Bindoon, Clontarf, Tardun and Castledare and eventually claimed that in a given year at Clontarf Boys’ Home, as many as 50 of the 250 boys were being sexually abused. She collected the names of sixteen Christian Brothers alleged to have been involved.

Meanwhile, the Christian Brothers and many other charities maintained that the child migration schemes were inspired, subsidized and monitored by governments. They had merely picked up the pieces.

I knew this wasn’t entirely true, but, inevitably, governments must have been involved. You cannot move thousands of children from one side of the world to the other without it being sanctioned by the government of the day.

The plain brown envelope that had arrived at my hotel in Perth sat in a pile of mail for almost a week before I had time to open it.

I was in the office, working my way through the backlog when I picked it up and examined it carefully, looking for an address or some indication of the sender. Since the death threats I’d become very cautious of unmarked packages or unfamiliar handwriting.

As I cut through the tightly sealed flap, it was obvious that whoever was responsible didn’t want the envelope to open accidentally.

I soon knew why. Dozens of photocopied Australian documents spilled out across my lap. I took one look at the letterheads and realized that I was holding some very unusual material. There were letters, reports and memos dating from the 1940s, and addressed to senior officials from the Department of Immigration, the Attorney General’s Office, the Education Department and the Child Welfare Office.

I burrowed through them, looking for some note of explanation. There was nothing. Whoever sent me this information didn’t want to be identified.

As I leafed through the pages, pictures of the origins of child migration schemes began to emerge. Sometimes I laughed out loud, or groaned in disbelief.

An early indication that Australia wished to recruit large numbers of children came in 1922 when the Western Australian State Premier suggested that the nation’s war dead should be replaced by 6,000 children from Britain, the mother country.

Some ‘private organizations’ were already operating their own schemes, such as Dr Barnardo’s and the Fairbridge Society and these were encouraged to expand their operations.

The Big Brother Movement and Northcote Children’s Emigration Fund were specifically established to meet the need, but many organizations simply transferred existing resources to face the new social challenge. These included the Catholic Child Welfare Council, the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, National Children’s Homes and the Salvation Army.

Among the documents was a 1938 letter from the Prime Minister’s Office in Canberra to Downing Street, London. It accompanied copies of three agreements. The first was to provide for the cost of establishing a farm school at Molong, NSW; the second to provide maintenance for not more than 300 children at the school; and the third to jointly sponsor the 110 boys about to be handed into the welcoming arms of the Christian Brothers in Western Australia.

The child migrants were to be funded not only by the British government but also by the Australian Federal and State Governments. Together they would contribute 7 shillings a week towards maintenance of each child until he or she reached fourteen.

To qualify for the money, the receiving organizations, like the Catholic Emigration Association and the Fairbridge Society, would provide quarterly reports on each child and, when satisfied, the Treasury would transfer the payments into the association’s bank account.

There were more letters – each more damning than the next. There was one document that stood out, perhaps because of its jingoistic language. This, I quickly realized, was a key piece of evidence that identified some of the architects of Australia’s post-war migration policy.

In January 1945, the Prime Minister called a conference of State Premiers in Canberra to discuss child migration. The briefing paper, no more than six pages, outlined the problem. Australia had seven million people – a population that increased naturally by only 55,000 to 56,000 a year. To achieve a population of ten million within twenty years, it was necessary to bring in up to 70,000 immigrants a year.

The paper revealed, ‘There are special and urgent reasons why a major effort should be made immediately in the field of child migration. The peculiar circumstances of the war have created in Europe a greater number of orphans, stray children, “war babies” et cetera, than ever before. This makes the present a time of potentially unparalleled opportunity for Australia to build up her population with child migrants who, on account of their easier assimilation, adaptability, long working-life ahead and easier housing, constitute a particularly attractive category of migrant for the first post-war years … The opportunity must be seized immediately and exploited for two or three years ahead, or lost for ever.’

Conference delegates were told that voluntary organizations like the Fairbridge Society and Barnardo’s were to be encouraged to continue their work, but their efforts were essentially small scale. From all the schemes combined, Western Australia had received only 1,255 child migrants between 1924 and 1940.

‘Children have apparently not always been well selected; they have often been given inadequate opportunities in life (due to an understanding, in part, that earlier Governments wanted them to be trained as agricultural labourers and domestic servants only); and in the cases of some organizations, have been afforded quite inadequate after-care. Part of the deficiencies can be traced to unqualified and/or under-paid staff. A closer supervision by Governments of their standards of performance should ensure that within their numerically limited scope, they should do good work in the post-war years.’

I read this passage aloud and paused. If the existing schemes were considered small scale, what did the Australian government have in mind? It was soon made clear.

‘The present proposal, approved in principle by the Commonwealth Government and now put forward to State Governments on whose full co-operation its success depends, is for an official child migration scheme …