The Forgotten Children (28 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
I knew no one in Sydney except for Auntie Effie, Mum’s sister, who had migrated to Australia in the late 1940s with her husband, Harold. They lived with their two daughters, Jan and Ann, in Panania in the city’s south-western suburbs.
Because I had nothing else to do, after work on Saturdays I would often catch a train to stay with Paddy and Mary O’Brien’s mum, who had a little flat in the outer suburb of Penrith. She had followed her kids to Australia, as my mother had done. Although she didn’t have much she always made me feel welcome and allowed me to stay overnight. I would sleep on the kitchen table because she didn’t have a spare bed and Mary, who had also recently left Fairbridge, was sleeping on the lounge.
On other occasions I would go by myself on a Saturday afternoon to watch Rugby League being played at the Sydney Cricket Ground. On the walk back down to Central station I would treat myself to a sixpence bag of hot chips from the fish and chip shop in Foveaux Street.
Like most of the children, I experienced terrible loneliness after leaving Fairbridge. And I was one of the lucky ones – I had a mum – and things also got better when Richard and Dudley left school and joined us in Sydney, and we managed to rent a slightly bigger flat.
Mary O’Brien felt deeply for those children who had nowhere to go and no one to take them when they left Fairbridge.
I remember arriving in Sydney and being with my mum. And a sense of freedom. Somebody that I loved was there for me and I really feel sorry for those who never had that: to walk out of Fairbridge and have their mums to go to. My mum was poor and she was sick. But she was my mum. And she took me away from there. And that was everything.
Most of the kids had no family to go to when they left Fairbridge and were found jobs on farms in the more remote parts of the state. In many cases, in the absence of someone to protect them from unscrupulous employers, they worked extremely hard and for long hours for poor pay, living in awful accommodation.
They left Fairbridge with a little money – usually less than a week’s wages – and a suitcase containing a new outfit, which for boys usually consisted of underwear, two pairs of shoes and socks, two shirts, two pairs of slacks, a jacket, a pullover and a pair of pyjamas. They were expected to repay Fairbridge the cost of the clothing from their wages. They were also expected to send half their wages back to Fairbridge, to be banked for them until they reached twenty-one and Fairbridge was no longer their guardian. Many complain they never saw the money and believe Harry Harrop may have pocketed their cash when he was robbing Fairbridge.
Fairbridge children left with few social skills and little knowledge of the workings of the outside world. As Jimmy ‘Tubby’ Walker observes, most Fairbridge children had rarely even been into a shop.
I had never used a telephone when I left Fairbridge. I didn’t how to bank my wages. You couldn’t even buy your own clothes. Because you never did it, you know. You went into a shop – you didn’t know what size you were – and they’d say, ‘What size are you?’ I didn’t have the faintest idea.
David Wilson spent more than ten years at Fairbridge, and was then sent to a job on a remote farm in the north-west of the state.
My first job was at Collarenebri [on a sheep property], working anything up to fifteen hours a day … I was a jackeroo up there. And you’d complain your hands were sore, so [the boss would] give you more to do … I lived in the shearers’ quarters, by myself … it used to get lonely there, yeah.
Actually, I asked Woods – and this is as true as I sit here – I wanted to be trained as a baker … Baking bread at Fairbridge was just a job I liked doing … And he wouldn’t let me. He just said, ‘No, you’re going out on a property.’
Another job they sent me to when I was seventeen and a half – and I’ll never forget it – it was at Narromine. I worked for a wheat cocky. I couldn’t lift up the 180-pound bags of wheat, which is what the bags were at the time. He [the boss] said to me, ‘You’ve got to learn how to lift these bags.’ He was a man of about thirty-five, forty, and he expected me to be able do the same work as him. I used to live in a shed at the back of the house and he used to just throw rocks at the thing to wake me up in the morning – about four o’clock in the morning … to go and milk the cow and feed all the pigs. Then I’d come in and have breakfast, and he used to give me a tractor and say, ‘Come in when you can’t see no more.’ Luckily it didn’t have any lights on the tractor. You’d be out ploughing all day … All day – up to sixteen or seventeen hours a day.
No one knew that the reason most of the Fairbridge children were found jobs in the remote west and north-west of the state was that a secret deal had been made by Fairbridge with Barnardo’s to divide New South Wales when it came to finding jobs for children leaving their farm schools.
Barnardo’s had been operating its child-migrant farm school in Picton outside Sydney since the 1920s, which was the reason Fairbridge London did not initially share the enthusiasm of the Rhodes scholars pushing for the establishment of a Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales.
Before Fairbridge was opened a formal agreement was reached between the two organisations: Fairbridge would not seek jobs for its children in the south of the state or in Sydney, which was left to Barnardo’s. Fairbridge trainees would be found jobs north of a line that ran from Port Stephens on the north coast west to Dubbo, south to Molong and then followed the railway line west from Molong to Broken Hill.
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Barnardo’s was relieved that as a result of the demarcation of the state its children would not be sent out to lonely and remote places. A Barnardo’s internal report recorded that the arrangement was more favourable to them than it was to Fairbridge:
Though Fairbridge would have more of the remote extensive grazing areas, it would not be a tremendous advantage as these properties are not suitable for our children and are often difficult of access.
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Billy King remembers his first job in the remotest part of the north-west:
It was right up near the Queensland border on a cattle station. The nearest town was Bourke, which was about … three hours away. There was only the station owner and myself there … I lived on the verandah … I couldn’t use a telephone. I knew nothing about banking; I knew nothing about my entitlements – they could have paid me a pound a week if they wanted to – I wouldn’t have known. I was doing everything. I was fencing, working cattle, mustering, in the shearing shed, scrub cutting, killing.
Joyce Drury remembers the terrible loneliness of leaving Fairbridge to work as a domestic servant and live in a tiny attic storeroom.
And they showed me where I was to sleep, and it was up in the attic, which was a box room, and there was a bed in there and all these boxes and boxes … It was the loneliest part of my life I would say. That was the first time I’d been alone in a room by myself. Now, Fairbridge hadn’t prepared us for those kinds of things. That was one failing I would say. Suddenly, after living for years in a dormitory, and here you are. And also I was treated as a servant and I wasn’t prepared for that either – I expected to be with a family.
[One] Sunday night Mrs Le Coutier said to me, ‘Joyce, would you like to come down and listen to the radio play?’ and I thought, I’ve made it. I’m going to sit in a living room and be with a family. And I came down and she had put a chair outside the living room door and the door was just ajar and she said, ‘You’ll be able to hear it from there.’ And of course, I walked up the stairs and cried my little heart out and thought, How could people be like that?
Gwen Miller remembers the trauma of being sent out on her own to work as a domestic servant for a doctor and his family in the town of Parkes, in the west of the state.
The first night I went to my room for the night was the loneliest I have ever felt in my life – totally alone with two sets of clothes; I remember wishing that I had died with my mother … I was sixteen and three-quarters. I hadn’t turned seventeen … I was a domestic, a cheap servant. And I tell you the first night that I left Fairbridge, I think it affected me deeper than leaving England … They showed me my bedroom and I don’t know what I did between then and going to bed that night. But I remember going back into that room at night and the incredible loneliness. It was terrible.
Like all of us Gwen also recalls that she had few social skills when leaving Fairbridge.
I really didn’t know how to conduct myself or anything … I really didn’t know anything about money when I left … I just didn’t know how to behave in front of other people. Social contact. At Fairbridge … you’d be half grown up and half a child still, but treated like a baby, if you know what I mean.
David Wilson was lonely living and working largely alone on remote farms. On the subject of whether he missed not having a life with his parents he says:
Did I ever think, Where’s my Mum? Not as much as when I left Fairbridge. Because you get lonely out there and you think, jeez, I wished I would have had a parent.
Fairbridge children who found themselves down on their luck after they left had no one to turn to and found little comfort when they approached Fairbridge as a last resort. At one point in his late teens David Wilson was out of work and out of money and called on the chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, Mr W. B. Hudson. With nowhere else to go – and with Fairbridge his legal guardian until he reached twenty-one – Dave Wilson asked Hudson for a train fare back to Molong.
He [Hudson] used to work in Sydney; he was like our father because that’s the only people we ever knew. But then he wouldn’t even help you in the end. I asked him for help. And he said, ‘No. I’m not helping you anymore.’ I didn’t have a job. We were only getting, I think, a pound a week and don’t forget, Fairbridge was taking some of it, too. Because that was part of the deal. All you wanted was a train fare back to Molong and he wouldn’t give it to you.
Smiley Bayliff didn’t wait till he was seventeen to be found a job by Fairbridge: he ran away when he was sixteen with another boy, John ‘Swagman’ Booty. The two boys hitchhiked to the outskirts of Sydney, where they split up. Fairbridge notified the police and Smiley was hunted for several months.
We decided the first place we got dropped off in Sydney, which happened to be Kingswood, I said I’ll go this way and he said he’d go that way. We had enough money for a train trip into town. And I never seen John from that day to this. Almost did once, when he was in the army, but I didn’t get to see him because he was on duty. I still haven’t seen him to this day. Dying to see him and ask him what happened.
Smiley met up with some people in Sydney he had met through the Fairbridge Boy Scouts and worked in a number of jobs under the assumed name of ‘Barron’, but then he had to move on because the police were getting closer.
I went down to Bentley’s Employment Agency in Elizabeth Street. They used to employ people for farms, and I said, ‘I’m after a job – on a farm,’ and she said, ‘Ah well, we’ve got this one at Nyngan.’ So I took the job, got on a train, went up there to a place called The Mole, sixty miles out of Nyngan.
There was no house – the house had been burned down a little bit before in a fire – and I lived in the shearers’ quarters. Oh, jeez, it was lonely there. It was incredible. By the same token, I was out of harm’s way – or at least I thought I was out of harm’s way where I couldn’t get caught and taken back to Fairbridge again.
Nyngan is a small town in the remote north-west of New South Wales and a number of former Fairbridge children worked on the big sheep properties out that way. After a couple of months Smiley went into Nyngan on his day off and was surprised to find that his older brother Syd and a couple of other Fairbridge boys who worked on local farms had also gone to town for the weekend.
They were going over to Western Australia, him and Bobby Wilson and Eddy Scott. [Syd] said, ‘Why don’t you come?’ We drove over to West Australia [in an] old 1938 Chevy, an old black one that broke down along the way, and we had to hitchhike the last few hundred miles. We wanted to catch the S.S.
Arcadia
over to England as stowaways. It was in the dock at Fremantle and we were going to hop on the ship, the four of us, and wait until the ship got way out to sea and if they found us, they wouldn’t throw us back … But we couldn’t get past the gangplank because it was leaving that night and they wouldn’t let anyone on, visitors or otherwise … So we abandoned the plan and decided to come back to the east.We split up and hitchhiked and got a number of lifts … One, the biggest lift we got, was from near Norseman and we travelled with a Yugoslav fellow who picked us up in a 1951 single spinner Ford and took us to Broken Hill, which was a long way. We shared … with the fuel bill and by the time we got to Broken Hill we were absolutely flat broke … [we only had] a few bob just to buy the very basics. Our next lift was on a mail truck that dropped us off at Wilcannia. We stayed for four days in Wilcannia near an Aboriginal reserve and they used to come and bring us a pot of tea out in the morning and some of their bread. We used to buy a tin of bully beef and that was our meal every day.
With nowhere else to go, they hitchhiked back to Fairbridge, where they were given a shower and a bed for the night. After breakfast next morning Woods told Bayliff, who had now turned seventeen, that he could come back and work as a trainee for two months and then be found a job and be provided with an outfit of clothing. Smiley says he would have nothing to do with the offer. Then, as Smiley recounts, Woods ‘called me a vagrant and ordered me off the place, never to return. I think he gave me about a quid. That’s all they gave me out of my bank account.’
