The Forgotten Children (23 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
Fairbridge children cut each other’s hair.
Tuesday afternoon’s cottage gardening. The annual cottage gardening competition was fiercely fought out among the longest-serving cottage mothers.
Fairbridge children were officially described as ‘generally educationally retarded’ and most were forced to leave school at the minimum legal age.
The Governor-General of Australia, the Duke of Gloucester and the Duchess of Gloucester on a visit to Fairbridge in 1946. The Duke became the president of the London Fairbridge Society when he returned to England.
R
ETARDS
If the absence of anything resembling parental care was hard enough for kids to deal with, another harsh reality of Fairbridge was its failure to live up to the promise of providing a better future.
A big factor in many parents’ decisions to let their children go to Fairbridge was the assurances they received that their children would have greater educational opportunity there. It was certainly an important consideration for my mother. Yet Fairbridge Farm School children were denied a decent education; they did not even receive the same level of schooling given to other Australian children. Almost all Fairbridge children were forced to leave school at the minimum school-leaving age to work on the farm and half of the Fairbridge children left school without completing the second year of secondary school. If a Fairbridge child turned fifteen in the term following a holiday, they didn’t have to go back to school after the break, which meant some became trainees when they were still only fourteen years of age.
The practice of pulling students out of school to work on the farm began with the first party of children and continued throughout the life of the farm school. Henry McFarlane, who was an eight-year-old in the first group of boys to arrive at Fairbridge in 1938, recalls:
We left at fourteen: we had no choice. They’d just say, well, everything on the farm had to be done, the harvest is coming on. Big strong blokes, you’d better go up there and help with the farm.
See, what happened, being illiterate and that sort of thing – couldn’t read or write, you know – I just used to, when my mother sent a letter, I just used to go on what they’d read out to you.
Joshin Richards arrived as part of the third party of twenty-three boys and six girls on the S.S.
Orama
in 1939. He was forced to leave school at fourteen years and four months old, and says: ‘One weakness there was: anyone who was qualified to go higher in their education was pulled out of school to help run the farm.’
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Joyce Drury, who also arrived at Fairbridge in 1939, remembers:
At fourteen and a half I left school … and then I became a trainee … learning to be a farmer’s wife. We were doing things with the boys like hobbling up horses to go and fetch wood; and it wasn’t only cleaning and ironing and washing and looking after babies and learning how to sew and cook … if you were going to be a farmer’s wife. You know, stooking hay, going up for rabbits, doing all kinds of things like that.
Nearly thirty years later Fairbridge children were experiencing the same thing. Ian Dean, who went to Fairbridge as a ten-year-old with his older brother in 1961, turned fifteen in July 1965 and was forced to leave school even though he wanted to continue.
I wanted to stay on at school and sit for the School Certificate at the end of fourth year but Woods just laughed. He said my marks weren’t good enough and that I was needed as a trainee.
Ian spent the next two years working as one of the declining band of trainees. When he turned seventeen he left Fairbridge to work as a labourer in a dry-cleaning shop in Molong.
In the early 1950s a financial crisis had forced Fairbridge to again cut back the children’s schooling. In February 1953 the chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council wrote to Principal Woods instructing him to shed paid staff and replace them with children, who should be taken out of school at the earliest possible date. The policy of giving every child the chance to reach the Intermediate Certificate was abandoned. The chairman told Woods: ‘For the present only children of exceptional mental ability should be left at school after the compulsory age’.
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Fairbridge kept this a secret in the UK and continued to promote educational opportunity when recruiting children. As late as 1959 Fairbridge claimed in its annual report: ‘The Fairbridge children who qualify for higher education and wish to carry on are encouraged and permitted to do so.’
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Evidence that Fairbridge forced children to leave school against their wishes survives in some official files. In 1954, four Fairbridge boys wished to continue at Molong Central School beyond their fifteenth birthdays so that they could sit for the Intermediate Certificate at the end of the year. They were prevented from doing so by the Sydney Fairbridge Council, despite its stated commitment by Council to a policy ‘that all of our children must aim to reach at least the Intermediate Certificate standard’.
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The headmaster at Molong Central School recommended that they be allowed to stay on, writing to tell Fairbridge that the boys had been good citizens and had done a lot for the school ‘willingly and in good spirit’. He said that while their chances of attaining the Intermediate Certificate were ‘not good, at least they could [attempt] that goal with steady application’.
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Principal Woods agreed and sent the headmaster’s recommendation and the school reports of the four boys to the Fairbridge Council. In his letter to the Fairbridge board he said: ‘I recommend that the Headmaster’s proposal be accepted since they might all achieve the Intermediate [Certificate].’ Interestingly, Woods added: ‘We will not be short of trainee boys this year on the farm.’
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The four boys were Norm Brown, Ray Tate, Joe Smith and Jimmy Neave. Their school reports from the end of 1953 show that Ray Tate had the highest marks, having come thirteenth in the class of twenty-four. However, his conduct was described as ‘indolent and inattentive’. Joe Smith, who was to commit suicide at Fairbridge later in 1954, had come eighteenth and his conduct was described as ‘good’. Jimmy Neave had come nineteenth and his conduct was also described as ‘good’. Norm Brown had come fourteenth and his conduct was described as ‘fair’.
The chairman of Fairbridge, Hudson, initially responded by saying that he thought extra schooling for the boys would be ‘a waste of time’.
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On 21 January Woods was told only Jimmy Neave would be allowed to sit. He then withdrew Norm Brown’s application but appealed again on behalf of Joe Smith and Ray Tate. (It was not unusual for Woods to question the decisions of the Fairbridge Council.)
I would like to make a further plea to Council on behalf of the boys who were recommended by the headmaster and myself for continuation of their schooling to enable them to write the Intermediate Certificate at the end of the year.
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He said Ray Tate showed ‘a very keen desire to continue with his school, and was very disappointed at being put to trainee work’. Of Joe Smith he said, ‘He has it in him to make the grade and get through at the end of the year with encouragement.’ Woods added that of the fifty Fairbridge children at the secondary school in Molong that year only three would be sitting for the Intermediate Certificate.
The Fairbridge Council was unmoved by the appeal. Two months later, Woods was notified of the decision of the Child Welfare Committee of the Fairbridge Council. Only Jimmy Neave could stay on.
The committee has considered your request … They have decided that J. Neave should be permitted to sit … They have decided that J. Smith and R. Tate should not be permitted to sit as they have only a remote chance of passing and the Sub Committee feel that they have not made the best of their opportunities.
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Fairbridge’s failings were compounded by the New South Wales Education Department, which kept many of the Fairbridge children out of mainstream classes at school. A high proportion of Fairbridge children who were sent to Molong Central School were put in a General Activities, or GA, opportunity class designed for children who had learning difficulties or were intellectually disabled. The students were in a composite class known as 1G-2G, crammed together into a tiny classroom. Nearly all of the Fairbridge children who spent their secondary school in this class have struggled through life with problems reading and writing.
Stewart Lee, who arrived at Fairbridge as a four-year-old, remembers being one of the Fairbridge children crowded into the little 1G-2G classroom:
[It] was known as the ‘dumb class’ … 1G-2G. We were in one little segregated mob … Their idea is that you’re basically waste, you’ve probably been kicked out of your home or you’re from broken families.
We weren’t expected to pass, put it that way. That’s basically why you were in 1G-2G … Being Fairbridge, you were automatically put in there. So if you had any potential whatsoever, you weren’t going to go nowhere anyway. Fairbridge was exactly the same. They didn’t let you get to the top of your own potential. Like, there were kids that were artists and everything else there – they wouldn’t let them get to their potential.
Daphne Brown arrived at Fairbridge as a six-year-old in 1939 with her nine-year-old brother and feels that she was not given the help she needed to address learning difficulties. She says her stay at Fairbridge wasn’t all bad, but as a result of her poor schooling she has struggled through adult life unable to read or write properly.
My education was very poor … They should have picked up on a lot of us … We were in a class at Molong School called an ‘opportunity class’ and out of that class, all of us were from Fairbridge except for two children. Now, that should have told them something – we needed help. We missed out on that basic education when you were a child.
We had to write compositions. It was all in my mind but I couldn’t spell – no one could understand what I wrote. So, therefore, I was disadvantaged right through life … I tried to learn but I’m probably dyslexic in some way. So, I was a bit resentful in later life that I wasn’t given a good education. Maybe they could have helped me a little bit there.
It remains a mystery why so many Fairbridge children were locked up in this class until they were old enough to leave school and become trainees at Fairbridge. A 1951 Department of Education report that assessed fifty-four Fairbridge children who would begin going to Molong Central School from the next year suggests that a staggering number of them were incapable of a normal school education and needed to be placed in 1G-2G. The report claimed: ‘The existing intelligence scatter shows that approximately 40% of Fairbridge children will require Opportunity … type of teaching and courses.’
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However it is not clear what was used to measure the ‘intelligence scatter’. It could not have been IQ, the widely used measure in those days, because the IQ test results for the same fifty-four children – which also survive in the Education Department files – show that the range of their IQs was normal, or slightly above normal. Twenty-nine registered an IQ of over 100 and twenty-five below 100. Of the twenty-nine who measured above 100, six registered IQs above 120, eleven were between 110 and 119, and twelve were between 100 and 109. Of the twenty-five below 100, fifteen measured between 90 and 99, and the remaining ten measured below 90.
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An IQ above 100 is considered to be above average. But Smiley Bayliff, who registered an IQ of 112 in a test in England shortly before he arrived at Fairbridge as an eight-year-old in 1955, spent all of his secondary school years in 1G-2G.
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While in the GA class he achieved consistently high marks and favourable comments from his teachers, yet he was never placed in a mainstream class, where he might have sat for the Intermediate Certificate.
Smiley was taken out of school before his fifteenth birthday to become a trainee and when he left Fairbridge he was ‘unable to write two words together’. It was only in his thirties, at the prompting of his wife, Kerry, that he went to evening college to learn to properly read and write English.
David Eva spent two years at Fairbridge Primary School from the age of ten, and attended Molong Central School for two years.
I was in classes 1G-2G which was the lowest secondary-school [level] and I stayed there all the time. As I turned fifteen, they kicked me out … You couldn’t stay on at school. When you got to that age, you were told you had to do two years as a trainee … Education wise, it was shocking. I think that a lot of children that went through that place – if they’d had a decent education, I think a lot of them would have done better.
One of the Fairbridge children who successfully worked his way up and out of 1G-2G and into the mainstream Molong Central School classes was Laurie Reid:
Well, I went into one class there, it was the sort of class where you sort of entered into it but that’s as far as you went, right, 1G-2G. But it happened that I topped the class, two exams in a row, right. So I got out of that and got put into the next class up. But they were short on the farm, so they decided at fourteen and a half they were going to pull me out. So I had to do work on the farm then.
My [older] brother went down and saw F. K. S. Woods and said that he wanted me to stay on. Even my teacher said he wanted me to stay on. And I was starting to get on top of the problems I had with mathematics and all that, you know … And they said, ‘No, you’re coming out; we haven’t got enough trainees to run the farm; you’re coming out.’ So, I was put out of school.
Their poor education was to be reflected in the lives of Fairbridge children when they left the farm school. A record of the occupations of former Fairbridge children in the mid-1950s shows that of the fifty-nine boys and girls surveyed, almost all worked in unskilled or semiskilled jobs: they were farmhands, labourers, domestics, shop assistants or factory workers. A few were in the military, only one had pursued ‘further education’ and none were employed in a profession.
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