The Forgotten Children (19 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
Lennie also remembers her cruelty:
And she was a very brutal woman, very brutal … She would beat the children – ironing cords, I’ve still got scars on my legs from ironing cords … She was very cruel. We had to get up very early in the morning, even as a little child, even when it was winter [and get] into the cold shower … And she would stand there and watch.
Jimmy ‘Tubby’ Walker is still angry:
[She was] fucking shocking … She’d say, ‘Bend down and say your prayers, you little heathens.’ And we’d have these pyjamas on with no tops and she’d come round and flog us all with the ironing cord, you know, the ironing cord doubled over was her favourite weapon. Or the riding crop that she had.
Ten-year-old Gwen Miller’s younger brother was regularly beaten in Brown Cottage by Hodgkinson.
My nine-year-old brother went into a cottage that had one of the most cruel, sadistic cottage mothers out. She had a whip with which she used to whip the boys; she didn’t care for the boys at all … I felt very sorry for siblings. You saw what was happening but when you are only a small child yourself you know there is nothing that can be done.
The victims of the abuse and cruelty had no one to turn to. They certainly saw no point in appealing to the principal for justice or redress: whenever Woods was faced with a situation where he had to side with either a child or a staff member, he invariably sided with the staff member.
Derek Moriarty recalls a morning in Gowrie Cottage when he stopped the cottage mother, ‘Fag’ Johnstone, from beating his younger brother Paul with a steel poker during the early-morning shower time:
We had to get in and have a cold shower and it was just a case of run in and run out sort of thing; it didn’t make any difference, as long as you got wet … And one day my younger brother got in there and he just did the same as I did, in and out, and she said, ‘Get back in there, you’re not even wet,’ and of course he objected.
At that point, Johnstone made a lunge for the steel poker that was used with the ‘donkey’ water heater in the bathroom.
She grabbed that and she was flailing into him with this poker. Now, he’s stark naked. I was … in the locker room which was next door and I was in there getting dressed and of course he started screaming. And I hit the panic button and I just raced in to see what was going on. And I raced in there and she’s got the poker up over her head … about to flail him again; I made a lunge for it and I got it.
… And to this day, I will never know why I didn’t bring it down on the back of her head because that was the mood I was in.
… I went out the back and I threw it as far as I could up the backyard. And of course she went straight to the boss and that was it. I got every punishment I could get. There was no pictures, there was no pocket money, there was no dances, no nothing. And plus the usual six of the best.
She could have very well killed him. If she hit him the wrong way one more time, you know, he could have been dead.
What distressed Moriarty for a long time afterwards was that there was no one to turn to.
I had nightmares over that for a long, long time. Not so much the fact that she could attack him like that, but the fact that the authorities just turned a blind eye to it. They didn’t believe me and, if they did, they turned a blind eye anyway. And it sort of gave me the feeling of what it would take for them to listen to a kid with a genuine complaint.
Billy King also recalls there was no one the children could turn to:
Of all the years that I was at Fairbridge, not one government official had ever come to me and said, ‘Now, are you happy with your life? Are you getting enough food?’ Not once. And everyone that I’ve talked to, they’ve said the same thing. They can’t recall anyone coming.
Lennie Magee remembers being struck on the head by Harry Harrop in Nuffield Hall after an argument about the food. It was unusual for Harry to hit the kids but he never liked Lennie.
Harry hit me on the side of the head so hard … my right ear popped and began to buzz … Then the whole hall fell silent and every person turned and gawked in my direction. It’s hard to pretend you’re not hurt when everyone’s staring at you. I’d been physically attacked and emotionally violated and I was still standing in a situation where I was completely unable to comprehend just what and why this was happening to me.
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We were totally unaware that much of the punishment meted out to us at Fairbridge was illegal. The law relevant to us was the New South Wales Child Welfare Act 1939. To prevent the abuse of children in institutions, Part XI, Section 56 of the Act states that the corporal punishment of ‘inmates’ should not exceed ‘a maximum of three strokes in each hand’ and that ‘it should not be inflicted in the presence of other inmates’.
It is incredible that no one seemed to take any interest in what was happening to the children or that punishments were carried out in breach of the child-welfare laws for decades. On occasions the governing Fairbridge Council was made aware of the abuse of children at Molong but dismissed the claims and defended the offending members of staff.
In 1958 two fifteen-year-old boys, Nobby Stemp and Fred Southern, ran away from Fairbridge when they were taken with a group of children to Orange to do their Christmas shopping. Hitchhiking and sleeping in parks, they made their way to the Pyrmont wharves in Sydney, where the S.S.
Strathmore
was berthed and preparing for a return voyage to England. They told the drummer in the ship’s band that they were unhappy and homesick and wanted to work for their passage back to the UK. The drummer suggested they go and talk to the British consul, whose office was in the Prudential building in Martin Place. They went there, and met a Mr Condon of the UK Information Service, who contacted the New South Wales Department of Child Welfare.
Fairbridge was notified and the boys were put on the overnight train back to Molong. Before the train left they were interviewed at Sydney railway station by a child-welfare officer.
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The boys made a number of serious complaints about cruelty, including several about their cottage mother, Mrs Da Freitas, who regularly whipped the small boys in her cottage. They also complained about the excessive hours of hard work the children at Fairbridge were obliged to undertake as trainees on the farm.
The under secretary of the Child Welfare Department, R. H. Hicks, wrote to the chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, W. B. Hudson, saying: ‘I am particularly concerned as to the reasons which prompted the absconding.’
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Hicks told Hudson that a number of issues needed to be investigated, including the suitability of Da Freitas to have care of children; what punishments were authorised and administered at Fairbridge; whether a proper log of punishments was kept; and the working hours of the children. Most importantly he asked: ‘Are the children free to complain of injustices to the principal or other authority and is each complaint properly investigated?’
Hudson would have none of it. In a reply sent two months later he dismissed Hicks’s concerns, saying he was satisfied the children were well treated. ‘The cottage mothers discipline their children by giving them small penalty chores, sometimes a handslap or, on very rare occasions, a light caning,’ he wrote, ‘but the principal is always advised.’
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Hudson went on to give Da Freitas a glowing character reference.
Smiley Bayliff, who had Mrs Da Freitas as a cottage mother, recalls that she owned a number of sheep and earnt a bit of extra money from the fleece. She kept the flock in the paddock behind Blue Cottage.
She used to bring sixteen to twenty sheep into the kitchen when it rained and she would make the children keep the cooking stove going at night so the sheep would stay warm and dry. We kids were down in the dormitory with all the windows kept permanently open and no heating. Next morning there would be sheep droppings and urine all over the kitchen floor and we would be made to clean it up.
The chairman of Fairbridge thought this was acceptable. In his response to Hicks, W. B. Hudson supported Da Freitas:
Now I come to my own personal opinion of Mrs Da Freitas. Her children are well turned out, they are fond of her, they appreciate her interest in their various activities but she may be a little inclined to place too much importance on the Junior Farmer aspect of the work, but she only does this at her children’s urging. I think it is possible that her interest in animals, particularly sheep, may result in her cottage not being quite as clean as some others, but I am not at all sure that what she does is not in the best interests of the children.
The children were far from fond of Da Freitas. As Smiley Bayliff remembers:
She was the most despicable person you could ever – she’s dead now – I’ll tell you this now – I don’t know where she is … if I knew where her grave was, I’d go and find it and work out where her head is, and I’d piss on it. And I tell you what, I’d have to hope she died with her mouth open. And I’m not the only one – I’d be in a long line if I ever found it.
[It] was absolutely miserable; it was absolute hell. Any instances in my life, not just Fairbridge, I can forgive but one person I’ll never forgive is Da Freitas, because she was such a sadistic person. Not just to me, to everybody. It didn’t matter what she picked up – she used to wield a riding whip, or an electric jug cord – and she used to slash and belt you on the bare backside.
Smiley became sick shortly after arriving at Fairbridge but Da Frietas would not believe he was ill.
I got to the stage where I couldn’t walk to the hospital. She called me a malingerer. And I just couldn’t walk, and I could always remember David Morgan, he had a broken arm, he piggybacked me to the hospital because I was that bad. I got acute rheumatic fever and was taken to Molong Hospital, where I had my ninth birthday. I was there several months when they eventually said, ‘You have to go back now.’ I bawled my eyes out. Not many people bawl their eyes out when they go home from hospital.
Barney Piercy came to Fairbridge as a five-year-old with his eight-year-old brother. He remembers Da Freitas when she became the cottage mother of Canary Cottage:
She had forty cats with a cat pan in each room of the cottage. She used to feed them our meat. Spaghetti bolognaise had meat but we’d have spaghetti without meat and the meat was going to the bloody cats. She was another ratbag, belted you for nothing. Abuse you and scream at you and swear. We were only kids, for Christ’s sake. We didn’t ask to be there. They seemed to get away with it. There was no one to tell …
While some of the former Fairbridge children think the food we were fed was adequate, it got the thumbs down from a nutrition expert in 1953. Sydney Hospital’s Molly Baker, B.Sc., was asked by the Fairbridge Council in Sydney to investigate the diet of the children and she compiled a five-page report after a week-long visit to Fairbridge. She was scathing in her criticism of the food and food management. In the report, which was never made public, she claimed the children were not given enough to eat, that the food lacked sufficient nutrition and that much of it was contaminated.
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She observed ‘maggots floating in stewed mutton’, ‘moths in the porridge’, ‘flies floating in the custard and cream’ and numerous ‘live flies on food and fly-blown meat’ and ‘decomposing organic matter on the kitchen floor’. Her further remarks on hygiene included: ‘The kitchen walls are dirty’ ‘Garbage cans have no lids and are left standing in the alleyways outside the dining hall windows’ and ‘Almost without exception,
all
kitchen utensils were dirty. Milk cans bringing milk from the dairy, and those sent from cottages for the evening milk, are frequently improperly washed, having a sediment of grit and gravel in the bottom.’ Regarding nutrition, she reported: ‘The food served is monotonous, unpalatable and lacking in essential nutrients’ and ‘does not constitute an adequate diet’. Baker criticised the lack of covers on food and the absence of soap and towels.
Baker also claimed that the cottages were not allocated enough food and cottage mothers had complained to her that their rations ‘were exhausted days and even weeks before the next issue could be expected’.
The meat, Baker said, was badly butchered by the boys: ‘Meat served [was] unattractive and unpalatable.’ The chops were more than half fat so that when they were stewed ‘the liquid fat makes the dish most unappetising’.
Other criticisms included that the milk was sour on four occasions during the inspection; while cream was plentiful it was only ‘issued to private families’ and not to the children; the variety of vegetables from the Fairbridge garden was ‘very limited’, particularly in winter, when children were served ‘parsnips, turnips, cabbage and cauliflower for a period of about a month without change’ and for months of the year there was no fresh fruit.
Baker said the breakfast for the trainees was ‘unsatisfactory’ and always a ‘hashed meal of the previous day’s dinner’ and that the school lunch sandwiches were ‘dry and badly wrapped’, the fillings ‘neither nutritious nor attractive’.
Baker did not agree that the staff should be served a wide range of food while the children’s diet was limited:
The distinction between staff and children, in the matter of food, is very great. I feel this distinction is both unnecessary and undesirable. The cottage mother has an egg for breakfast every morning and this is eaten at the table with her cottage children, to whom an egg for breakfast is unknown.
