Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (33 page)

And now, with the war over, it is the desire of His Grace (the most Rev. Redmond Prendiville, Archbishop of Perth) to renew the stream of new Catholic life to Western Australia, and in consequence consultation has been made with the other bishops of the state and as a result an association of the bishops has been effected … the first objective will be to renew agreements with the Commonwealth, State and Imperial governments in respect to the migration of boys, and to establish concurrently the machinery to receive girls too.

A week later, an editorial in the same newspaper made the migration sound like a piece of Orwellian social engineering.

The plan of the Westralian Hierarchy, outlined in our last issue, to bring to the State some 2000 war orphans and poor children of both sexes, represents a commencement in the most pressing of our national problems. Not only have we to replace the tens of thousands of young men who fell in the recent titanic struggle but also the six divisions of potential citizens who have been lost through contraception over the past sixty years …

The Church was far ahead of the present-day radicals in the enunciation of social theory, and it is both fitting and pleasing that it is able to give a bold yet prudent and practical lead in this most urgent problem of repopulation. At best the war with Japan is postponed. Asia presses from the north and the most effective rampart we can raise is a human one.

Immediately after the war, Australian political leaders had cried: ‘Populate or perish!’ as they glanced nervously northwards fearing that the Asian hordes were waiting to sweep down and seize rich, virginal Australia. After all, the Japanese capture of Singapore and bombing of Darwin had reinforced Australian fears that it did not have the resources or population to defend such a large continent.

Immigration was the answer to the problem. On 15 August 1947, the second wave of child immigrants left Britain. A band played jaunty sea shanties and children waved paper Union Jacks from the decks as the
SS Asturias
set sail for Fremantle with 147 boys and girls on board. Six weeks later, when she arrived, a headline in
The Record
announced: ‘Church Aids State in Population Problem’, and the State Minister for Immigration, Mr Thorn, told the bemused children, ‘Your parents worked hard for their country … now it’s your turn … you are the right type of people, and we want as many as we can get.’

It is ironic to think of Australians sleeping safer in their beds at night, knowing the security of their vast land was being bolstered by a bewildered army of children who were ‘conscripted’ from British institutions.

Although Desmond McDaid had been reunited with his mother, my work with him continued. It is the same with many child migrants. The search for family is also a search for their true identity.

Desmond had become an entirely different person to the man I first met. He still struggled to understand the brutality of his childhood, but I had helped him find the small boy locked inside himself.

‘Margaret, I want to take you to Bindoon,’ he said. He was looking across the expanse of Perth’s skyline at the splashes of green parkland. It was Friday afternoon and the commuters were spilling out of the office blocks in Hay Street and filling the pavements.

‘You’re part of us now,’ Desmond said. ‘You’re the sister we’ve never had. Until you go there, you’ve not fully touched our childhood. The old boys would expect you to go there. You have to think carefully about what message it gives them if you’ve never been to Bindoon.’

‘I have been there,’ I said defensively, hoping that he understood. In my mind I’d been to Bindoon countless times over the past five years. I had the men’s reality to draw upon. Through them, I could picture it already and had never felt the need to go there.

Desmond wasn’t satisfied. ‘You’ve not touched the place. You’ve not felt the place. You’ve not smelt the place. And you should, you know. It’s time, Margaret. Let’s go up to Bindoon. I’ll pick you up in the car. I can come early Sunday morning, at four o’clock, if you want. It’ll be dark when we arrive.’

I gave him no answer.

Desmond called me the following morning and wanted my decision. I told him I was very undecided and had lots of mixed feelings.

He said to me, ‘Margaret, I don’t like to think of you walking around with demons in your head. They can become monsters.’

‘OK, and what sort of monster would this be?’ I laughed.

‘Bindoon,’ he stated boldly. ‘While you don’t go to Bindoon, you’ve only met us halfway.’

I was shocked by his reply. ‘Do the other migrants think that? Is that what they say?’

Desmond said, ‘That’s your monster, Margaret.’

I thought, Right, well, you’ve got quite a few of your own, Desmond.

But I couldn’t forget his words; all day they played in my mind – the thought that some child migrants might feel as if I’d not met them all the way.

Desmond knew I was giving it serious thought and rang again that night. ‘Look, I’m free to go any time. You pick that phone up and we’re off down the road. I tell you what, why don’t we go very early in the morning? We could just quietly slip out of Perth into the bush. What’s the problem, eh? We take it as it comes.’

As I put the phone down, it rang again.

‘What have you forgotten?’ I laughed.

A well-spoken, cold, calm voice said, ‘You’ve been warned. Get out of Perth – and stay out. I hope you know where your children are. You should take them to their last confession.’

He hung up.

My first reaction was fear. I knew that at home in England Ben was on a school trip with his class. It was the first time he’d been away from home on his own.

I rang Merv. He listened quietly and was obviously worried.

‘What should we do?’ I asked. ‘Will Ben be OK?’

‘I’m sure he’ll be fine but let me think about it and I’ll decide if I should pick him up and bring him home. You’ve got enough to worry about.’

After the call, I stood in my room and wondered what was happening. I’m not a threatening figure. I’m very careful about what I say in the media. I choose every word carefully. I don’t apportion blame. Why would somebody want to hurt me and my children?

It was dark when Desmond arrived at the hotel. Reception rang me. ‘Mr McDaid is in reception. He says to take your time.’

I came down, blinking through red-rimmed eyes. I hadn’t slept.

Desmond said, ‘I’ve got the Sunday papers in the car, but I suggest you don’t look at them.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t look at them yet. Just get in the car and we’ll get up to Bindoon.’

As we found the highway heading north, I leaned over the seat and grabbed a bundle of papers off the back seat. I quickly turned the pages, scanning the headlines and then stopped suddenly.

Dr Barry Coldrey had been interviewed by the
West Australian
newspaper about the sexual abuse allegations. First he defended Brother Keaney and the Boys’ Town and then he suggested that British child migrants were already sexually active when they arrived in Australia. They were products of English child care institutions where, quite frankly, everybody knew that ‘boy-on-boy sex’ could be a problem.

There was a tendency, he said, for the Irish-Australian staff at Australian institutions to believe that the British children were more prone to boy-on-boy sexuality than the ‘decent Australian kids’.

‘Our own records presume that the British kids would require closer supervision.’

The facts were being twisted beyond recognition. Dr Coldrey had basically intimated that the innocent young children who had been brought to Australia were sexually perverted when they arrived and brought these terrible practices with them as part of their baggage.

The hurt these comments would cause was enormous. It was so unnecessary. What else had to happen before everybody stood up and owned this piece of history? Before we accepted it and dealt with it?

Desmond was not shocked. It didn’t surprise him at all.

Neither of us said much as we drove towards Bindoon. I think Desmond feared that at any moment I would ask him to turn round and go back. We watched the sky grow light and shadows begin to creep. We passed through Bullsbrook East and followed the Great Northern Highway through the Chittering Valley.

I find some parts of Australia quite pretty, but others are rather burnt and unattractive. There’s so much contrast, but on this journey I could take no comfort in the scenery. All I could think about were the small boys who travelled this same road on the back of pick-up trucks or in buses, bound for a new life. How would I have felt, aged six, arriving at Bindoon?

The journey seemed to take all morning, but in reality we covered the fifty-six miles in an hour and a half.

‘We’re coming up to it shortly,’ said Desmond, turning off the road beside huge iron gates on stone pillars. I expected that beyond these gates, the buildings would appear, but instead we drove down a rough dirt road that led to another gate. As we travelled further and further from the main road I grew uneasy. I realized that I hadn’t told anybody where I was going. The office might ring the hotel. What would they think when I wasn’t there?

My decision to visit Bindoon had been a difficult one. Finally I had decided that it might do some good – not just for the child migrants but also for the Christian Brothers. Perhaps they would see that I wasn’t a monster; I wasn’t a threat. If I could go to them, perhaps it would lessen the fear and distrust.

I asked Desmond, ‘What happens if they won’t let us in?’

He laughed. ‘If they turn you away, they turn me away. If they turn me away, they turn every old boy away. They’ve got to let us in. I’ve been on the Old Boys Reunion Committee. I’ve helped them all these years. I’ve paid everything back.’

Paid them back? I thought about this. Desmond used to repair all their farm equipment and sharpen their saws at his factory. He would never ask to be paid. He felt that if he owed them anything at all, he’d repaid it in full.

‘Did you notice those electricity pylons about half an hour back?’ he smiled. ‘Didn’t you see the fire blazing down those hills. That’s the message to say Margaret Humphreys is on the way. You’re the devil, Margaret, you can do that sort of thing.’

We both laughed.

After opening another stock gate and bouncing down another rough track through farmland, Desmond gazed over the paddocks and said, ‘It’s all owned by the Brothers. You should take in this atmosphere.’

It was quiet and still so early in the morning. Occasionally, I heard a magpie or caught the sunlight bouncing off the corrugated iron water tank of a distant farm.

Glancing up, I saw a statue on a hill. Jesus, starkly in silhouette, looked down over the valley, watching the mists burn away and the bare ground begin to shimmer. It was a breathtakingly powerful image – the towering symbol of a holy place. Desmond asked if I wanted a closer look but I declined.

‘Do you know what all these things are on the right?’ he asked. ‘All the boys built these.’

I recognized them immediately. They were the Stations of the Cross – stone monuments marking the stages of Jesus’ final journey to crucifixion – as large as a man and elaborately constructed. I remembered the migrants telling me how their knees and toes were burnt by the lime as they made the cement; and how their knuckles bled. I could picture the small boys hauling the stones into place. God’s little soldiers.

My stomach churned.

‘I want to go back, Desmond. Let’s stop now.’ I could see no point in continuing. But it was out of my hands. Desmond drove on.

When I saw the main administration building, I was astounded by its beauty. It was far bigger than anything I had imagined and dominated the surrounding countryside like a castle.

Before I could say anything, Desmond motioned towards the middle of a courtyard. There stood Brother Paul Keaney, cast in bronze, with his chin thrust forward, surveying his kingdom while one hand rested on the shoulder of a young boy and the other clutched what appeared to be a diploma or building plan.

When Keaney died in 1954, aged sixty-six, the business community in Perth paid for the statue. The obituaries were glowing in their praise for ‘the Orphans’ Friend’, ‘Man in a Million’ and ‘Keaney the Builder’. He was described as ‘one of Australia’s best-known educationists in child welfare work’, and as having given ‘a life of devotion to the underprivileged boys …’

I looked at the statue and remembered a picture I’d seen of Bindoon’s opening day in 1953. More than 5,000 people attended what the newspapers had called ‘a red letter day for the Christian Brothers’.

Standing on the steps of the administration building, Brother Keaney, founder and principal, had told the crowd, ‘It is an overwhelming day for me. I cannot describe my feelings at seeing such a great concourse of people.’

The State Premier opened the technical school, and the Federal Minister for Territories opened the administrative building. He read a special message from the Immigration Minister, Harold Holt, who was later to become Australia’s Prime Minister.

‘To the Christian Brothers I express admiration for their devotion to the task of training the young.

‘It is splendid testimony that now, only six years from its beginning, Bindoon is able to accommodate 180 boys.’

Desmond parked the car. There was no sign of life. I expected to see children in the grounds and hear choristers singing in the church, but the dormitories, classrooms and pews were silent.

Bindoon was renamed Keaney College, and in the late Sixties became a fee-paying boarding-school for Catholic graziers’ sons. On this Sunday the children were on holiday.

As the car doors closed, an elderly brother with sleep-tussled hair appeared on the steps. He recognized Desmond immediately.

‘Hello, how are you?’ he said, as they shook hands. He didn’t look at me.

‘Very well, fine, thank you,’ said Desmond. ‘I’ve just brought Mrs Humphreys here to see the place. Is it OK to look around?’

I don’t know if he recognized me.

The brother said, ‘Well, go on in – through that door – and have a cup of tea with the brothers. They’re in there having breakfast.’