The Forgotten Children (2 page)

In 1959, when I was twelve years old, I became a child migrant. With two of my brothers I sailed from England to Australia, to the Fairbridge Farm School outside the country town of Molong, 300 kilometres west of Sydney. My mum, who later followed us out to Australia, sent us because she believed we would be given an education and better opportunities in Australia than she could provide as a struggling single parent in England.

Britain is the only country in history to have exported its children. Fairbridge was one of a number of British child-migrant schemes that operated for over a hundred years from the late nineteenth century, and altogether these schemes dispatched about 100,000 underprivileged children – unaccompanied by their parents – to the British colonies, mainly to Canada, Australia and Rhodesia. About 10,000 went to Australia. By the mid-1950s twenty-six child-migrant centres were operating in the six states of the country. About 1000 children were sent to the Molong Fairbridge Farm School, which opened in 1938 and closed in 1974.

The child-migrant schemes were motivated by a desire to ‘rescue’ children from the destitution, poverty and moral danger they were exposed to as part of the lower orders of British society. By exporting them to the colonies, it was thought they might become more useful citizens of the Empire. Contrary to popular belief, barely any of the children sent out under these schemes were orphans.

In an age before the state took responsibility for the welfare of poor children, the child-migrant schemes were operated by the Protestant and Catholic churches, and a number of children’s charities, including Dr Barnardo’s. Some of the schemes, including the Fairbridge Farm Schools, were created and operated by people from the upper classes. Such emigration programs enabled Britain to deal with its large population of poor children without addressing the massive social inequality that had created widespread poverty in the first place.

The Fairbridge Farm School Scheme was based on a simple proposition first presented by Kingsley Fairbridge in a pamphlet published in 1908, titled ‘Two Problems and a Solution’. The two problems were, first, how to open up the lands of the Empire’s colonies with ‘white stock’ and, second, what to do to with the large and growing problem of child poverty. The solution was to put them together.

Fairbridge promised that children who were sent to Australia would get a better education and more opportunities than they would in their deprived environments in Britain. His vision was simple: for boys from the slums of the cities to become farmers and girls to become farmers’ wives.

Children were sent to Fairbridge on the condition that their parents or custodians signed over guardianship to the Australian Government, which then effectively delegated responsibility for the children to Fairbridge until they were twenty-one years old. Fairbridge felt it had rescued these children from failed or irresponsible parents, so they did not want children reuniting with their families. They deliberately targeted parents who were unlikely to want to get their children back. But many parents did not fully understand what was involved when they signed away their custodianship, and those who did wish to be reunited with their children found it practically impossible.

By the late 1950s the traditional source of poor British children was declining and Fairbridge was forced to introduce the One Parent Scheme, whereby children were sent unaccompanied to Australia but their single parent followed them out later, found a job, established a home and was eventually brought back together with their children. This was the scheme under which we emigrated.

None of our family knew at the time that Fairbridge had been forced to radically change its rules and introduce this scheme in response to increasing opposition from the British Government and child-welfare professionals. The postwar years in Britain had seen some dramatic improvements in child welfare: the passing of the Children Act in 1948 heralded a more enlightened era, and child migration and large children’s institutions such as Fairbridge were falling out of favour.

Nor did we know that fewer than three years before, the British Government had secretly placed the farm school at Molong on a black list of institutions condemned as unfit for children. Fairbridge was able to mobilise its considerable influence in the upper echelons of the British political system to have the ban lifted, and children continued to sail.

Those of us who went to Fairbridge under the One Parent Scheme were far more fortunate than the Fairbridge children who were already there, and our experience was not typical of the majority of children. We were older when we arrived – my twin brother, Richard, and I were nearly thirteen years old, and our brother Dudley was fourteen. We would each spend fewer than three years at Fairbridge and, most importantly, our mother would follow us out, so we would eventually reunite as a family.

In contrast, children unaccompanied by their parents typically arrived at Fairbridge aged eight or nine years old. Some were as young as four. They would spend their entire childhood and youth at Fairbridge, where they would attend the local school till the minimum school-leaving age, then work on the farm for two years until they turned seventeen. The boys were then usually found work as farm labourers on remote sheep stations; the girls as domestic servants on farms. Many of these children would never see their parents after leaving England, and would spend their childhood suffering emotional privation and social isolation.

Few of the Fairbridge children were provided with the education they had been promised before leaving the UK and half would leave school before completing their second year of secondary school. Many left school without having acquired basic literacy skills and would struggle through life unable to properly read or write.

I had not planned to write a book about Fairbridge. In 2005 I completed a Diploma of Classical Archaeology at Sydney University, as I have for a long time been interested in the archaeology of the prehistoric to classical periods of an area in the eastern Peloponnese in Greece. I have also been involved for many years in the campaign to have the British return to Athens the marble sculptures taken by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century.

Armed with my newly acquired archaeological qualifications, I thought I would first test my skills by conducting a heritage survey of the Fairbridge Farm School settlement at Molong. The old village, which had been home to some 200 people, mainly children, had become almost a ghost town. Having received barely any maintenance, many of the buildings had fallen into disrepair. A number of the cottages the children had lived in had been sold off and moved to other towns to become country homes.

With several other people, I formed the Fairbridge Heritage Association and we set about compiling the historic record of the settlement. The New South Wales Migration Heritage Centre and, later, the New South Wales Heritage office backed the Fairbridge Heritage Project and asked that we also record the oral histories of some of the children who had passed through the farm school.

I conducted about forty audiotaped interviews over the first three months of 2006, travelling to meet former Fairbridge children who lived throughout New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and southern Queensland. In March 2006, at the biennial reunion of Old Fairbridgians at Molong, I arranged for three camera crews to film interviews that we plan to use in a TV documentary.

During the interviewing process I realised that while a lot has been written and said about Fairbridge, the stories of the children who lived there have never been told – and the picture their stories paint is very different and much more disturbing than the records of academics and historians. It was then that I decided to write a book about Fairbridge from the point of view of those who lived there.

I found myself both disturbed and angry about some of the revelations of former Fairbridge children, many of whom were speaking up for the first time. I wondered why seventy-five-year-old women would talk on the record of regular sexual abuse at Fairbridge when they had never discussed it with their husbands, children or grandchildren. Nearly every woman and most of the men openly talked about physical or sexual abuse. When asked why they were now prepared to tell of their experiences, some said they had never previously had the opportunity to set the record straight. Others said they did not have the strength or courage to speak out before, but now, as they were reaching middle age, found it easier to confront the ghosts of their past. A number who initially had declined to be interviewed heard that others had spoken and then came forward to say they now wanted to tell their story.

There are many others for whom it is still too difficult. One former Fairbridge girl, Susan, who was at the farm school when I was there and whose brother was in my cottage and later committed suicide, phoned to say she wanted the book to be written and wanted to tell her story but that it was still ‘too painful to open those doors that took me years to close’.

In another case, the wife of a man who was at Fairbridge when I was there wrote to explain why her husband would not be telling his story:

Another former Fairbridge boy, Allan, whom I remembered as an interesting and colourful character, rang and asked me not to send any more letters asking for an interview. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of it. I don’t want to remember,’ he said. ‘I’m happy now I have my eleven grandchildren around me. Please don’t write to me again – it’s too upsetting.’ I told him I wouldn’t bother him again and asked when his life had turned around. ‘It hasn’t,’ he said. ‘It never turned around.’

Almost all those I interviewed insisted their stories were ordinary and unlikely to be of interest to anyone. Yet every single one is special – even more so because nearly all of them experienced deprivation and disadvantage, and were denied the nurturing, love and support afforded to most other children.

Much of this book is based on my own experiences and the stories of others who spent part or all of their childhood at the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong. I was also able to access rather limited personal files about myself from the Fairbridge Foundation offices in Sydney and the London Fairbridge Society archives, which are now held at Liverpool University in the UK. A number of other Fairbridge children who accessed their personal files from Sydney and Liverpool have kindly made them available to me.

I have been given notes, letters, diaries, photographs, unpublished autobiographies and assorted other material by former Molong Fairbridge children in Australia, New Zealand and England. Altogether, I have used material from over one hundred people who were at Fairbridge from the day it opened in March 1938 till it closed in January 1974.

In addition to the children’s stories, I accessed material from the Fairbridge Foundation in Sydney, the Fairbridge Society archives in the UK, British and Australian parliamentary and government files, the National Library in Canberra and the State Library of New South Wales. I also accessed Department of Education and Department of Child Welfare files from the State Records office of New South Wales.

However, I encountered a number of difficulties when trying to access or use material from the Fairbridge organisations in Australia and the UK.

The Fairbridge Foundation in Sydney is the successor body to Fairbridge Farm Schools of New South Wales, which was responsible for running the Fairbridge school at Molong. When the foundation sold off the Molong site in 1974, it invested the proceeds. It donates the profits and dividends from the investments to other children’s charities. The Fairbridge Foundation supported the Fairbridge Heritage Project and contributed $10,000 toward the recording of the history of the Fairbridge settlement and the hiring of film crews for the interviews of former Fairbridge children.

The foundation is the custodian of the old Fairbridge Farm School files, which are kept in its Sydney office in a number of un-catalogued boxes. The records, which include farm production reports, principals’ reports, staff pay sheets and a limited amount of correspondence, are far from comprehensive. While the foundation allowed me to access the material in some of the boxes, it did not allow me to access the minutes of the Fairbridge Society Council meetings, which are also stored in its office in Sydney. This was despite the chairman of the foundation, John Kennedy, telling an Australian Senate inquiry in 2001 that the files would be made available to ‘bone fide scholars and researchers’.

I wrote to Kennedy in July 2006 asking that the foundation reconsider their decision to deny me access to the minutes. Four months later he told me the board had considered my request and decided that I could have limited access to the minutes, but I would not be allowed to use material that identified any child or staff member who had been at Fairbridge. I said that I already had extensive testimony and evidence from other sources that identified improper and illegal acts by a number of staff members.

In July 2006 I was able to gain access to the London Fairbridge Society files, which are in the Liverpool University archives and include the minutes of meetings of the Fairbridge Society. (I did not seek access to the individual files of Fairbridge children.) Before I was allowed to see the material, I was asked to agree to a number of restrictions that the UK Fairbridge Society had imposed. I had to sign a declaration that ‘I will not in any way by any form of communication reveal to any person or persons nominal information or individual details which might tend to identify individuals or their descendants.’ The rules stipulate that I cannot identify any Fairbridge child for one hundred years and any Fairbridge staff member by name for seventy-five years from the date of the lodgement of the files. I was obliged to ‘agree to abide by the decision of the director’ as to what might identify individuals. In the event, I did not need to use any confidential information from these archives to identify individuals as the names of children and staff set out in this book come from either my own knowledge, from information given to me by those I interviewed, or from a variety of other sources.