It was while I was out on a book tour in Australia some fifteen years ago that I first heard about child migration from Great Britain to Australia after the Second World War. The children who were sent away – banished, exiled, call it what you will – were all vulnerable. Some were orphans, some simply unwanted in this world. Homes were found for them across the seas in Canada, South Africa and Australia. It was thought that in these far-flung places they would find a fresh start, a new family, happiness. The way to hell is very often paved with good intentions.
For some of these migrant children, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to them. But many of them ended up with broken hearts and broken lives. They were often appallingly treated, exploited for their labour, and suffered great cruelty and abuse. One later wrote, “We were stripped of a nationality, culture and birthright. Many of us were stripped of our family name and even our birth date. We were stripped of our personhood, human rights and our dignity. We were referred to as migrant boy number ‘so and so’ or migrant girl number ‘so and so’. And so we arrived, strangers in a lost land and with no way back.”
Such words stirred in me the idea that maybe I could trace in a story the life of one of these migrant children from on board one of the ships at Liverpool in 1947 to a farm in the outback of Australia, where he struggles to survive and find himself, as he tries to build a new life and have at last his own family and some happiness.
The main problem I had in dreaming up the story in my mind was that I knew Australia – its people, its language, its history and its culture – only as a visitor, a researcher. I could find no way to get closer to my story. I was a stranger to it, too much of a stranger. I put the story on the back burner, as I so often do. I came quite close to abandoning the idea altogether. Then, quite out of the blue, I got lucky, twice – which enabled me to write two Australian stories. First, I met a man, an Australian of my generation – old, that is – both of us then the wrong side of sixty – a real live ancient mariner whose extraordinary ocean adventures gave me the key to my migrant story. His name was Alex Whitworth, his fellow ancient mariner, Peter Crozier, also well into his sixties. Their boat was called the Berrimilla. Remarkably, I was able to follow these two adventurers online, as it happened, reading their log as they sailed around the world.
So here is their story in a nutshell. And, in truth, their yacht was scarcely bigger than a nutshell! Just thirty-one feet. They set sail from Hobart, Tasmania, in 2004, their aim to sail around the world to England and back. On the way, Alex would run the marathon in the Falklands, reach England and compete in the Fastnet Race, then once they had sailed back home to Australia, take part in the Sydney to Hobart Race. And, he said, I could follow them if I liked, on the Berrimilla website, where their progress around the world would be updated daily. This I did, checking their site, catching up from time to time on everything that was happening to them. Much of it was technical, and since I’m not an ancient mariner myself, not of great interest to me. But other details most certainly were. Their bulletins gave us wonderful insights into storm and calm, into cold and wet, into moments of high drama (being knocked down by huge waves, and recovering). Their courage and extraordinary powers of endurance were utterly amazing to me, and their modesty too. And I learnt so much as well of the mundane but important and constant business of repairing the boat, keeping it shipshape.
It was in the Southern Ocean that there began a happening so unlikely that it only could belong in the pages of fiction, and fiction that strained credibility at that. But this happened, really happened. Sitting on deck one night Alex and Peter spotted a moving light in the sky, not a shooting star, something else. Their first thought was that this was the International Space Station flying overhead. One said to the other as they sipped their Guinness, “Be good to talk to those guys up there. What do you think?” So they emailed HQ in Hobart, asking if it would be possible to be put in touch somehow with the astronauts up there. The reply was: “Why not? No problem. We’ll ask NASA.” So they did. The astronauts came back: “Great idea.” There then followed an email and satellite radio conversation lasting some weeks between those two old Australian blokes in their tin can of a boat sailing around the world, and these rather younger astronauts flying around the world in their tin can of a space station. All adventurers, kindred spirits, enduring great hardships and danger, and dealing with it as best they could. Comradeship, friendship grew between sea and space, between old and young, between yacht and space station.
Weeks later, after a stop in the Falklands for repairs and to replenish stores – and of course to run the marathon – the Berrimilla finally arrived at Falmouth in Cornwall, in the pale light of early morning. No one there, no press, no fuss, none of that. It wasn’t a race. No big deal. This was just two old fellows doing their thing. They tied up and on shaky legs were making their way down the quay when they saw figures walking towards them, a family. It was the American astronaut, Leroy Chiao, with whom they had struck up such a close relationship during their epic journeys. He had since landed and had brought his whole family over from the US to Falmouth to welcome his new Australian friends in the Berrimilla. They are still friends, all these years later. And if you’re wondering, yes, they did complete the Fastnet Race – did well in it too, and, shortly after, sailed all the way back to Australia, where they competed in the Sydney to Hobart Race as well. All true, all remarkable and all so unlikely, I thought, which was why it was so perfect for my story. Alex helped massively with my research, even drew the Berrimilla for the book.
It was this real-life adventure that gave me the idea to have a return journey of some kind in my child migrant story, so that the story would be circular, the journey of the migrant boy in 1947, and then a lifetime later, his daughter’s return journey, sailing single-handed, fulfilling a wish and a longing.
My other Australian inspiration came from a lady who I went to stay with while I was on that book tour of Australia. She ran a project in the bush outside Melbourne, where city kids would go to live the life of pioneer Australian children a century or so before. They cooked for themselves, grew food, explored the bush, lived uncomfortably. I stayed there a couple of nights, read War Horse to the children round the campfire and bottle-fed a wombat on my lap. And this wombat was special, so special I wrote a book about him, Wombat Goes Walkabout. But that’s another story! This extraordinary lady, at the same time as looking after all these city children during their week’s stay, used to go out in the mornings and rescue surviving marsupials – possums, wombats, kangaroos – from the roadside. Often, the mothers were dead, run over, the babies still alive. She would bring them back, feed them, care for them and then, when they were strong and grown, take them back to the bush. The old wombat I fed was the only orphan she had not managed to return to the wild. I think he was too fond of her and the good life. That amazing and eccentric lady found her way into Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, became a vital part of it, of my migrant child’s life.
With all this in mind, I could begin my story. The title comes from the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I had to learn the whole poem when I was a boy at school. Much of it I had forgotten, but not the albatross that is killed by the ancient mariner, and not the line, “Alone on a wide wide sea”. The poem itself is in my story, vivid in Alice’s memory, as it is in mine, connecting her so strongly to Arthur, her beloved father, the migrant boy. He had taught her about sailing boats, building boats; he had taught her his favourite poem too.
And so I could become my migrant boy, endure with him the journey to Australia, the hardships of life in the outback, live his life, his sorrows and joys, then become his daughter, and sail with her back to England, retracing her father’s journey, an epic voyage of discovery, to find his roots and hers.
We had been travelling through hilly country for a day or two now, and Big Black Jack was finding it very hard going, and not just because of the hills either. We knew already that kangaroos made him nervous, but there hadn’t been many of them until now. Now they were everywhere, and he was not happy. In the half-dark we could see their shifting shapes, and so could Big Black Jack. We could feel him tensing beneath us. We’d talk to him to try to calm him, smooth his neck, pat him gently, but nothing seemed to work. His ears would be twitching frantically. He’d toss his head and snort at them. Worst of all, he’d just stop without any warning. Falling off was all too easy. It amused the children hugely, but was painful for us. In the end Marty and I decided it would be better altogether, and safer too, to give Big Black Jack a rest, and walk. So during the last couple of nights of our journey we walked with the bushmen, one of us leading Big Black Jack. He seemed happier that way. He puffed less and snorted less. The last night we were with them I felt as if I really was one of them, sharing the silence and the stars.
The next morning at sun-up we were coming to the top of a high hill. It had been a long steep climb. Below us was a wide green valley with a stream running through, and trees, more trees than I’d ever seen in my life. In front of us on the crest of the hill the bushmen had stopped and were talking among themselves. I thought we’d be resting here for a while, and was only too happy about that because my legs were tired, and I was longing for food and for sleep. I sat down to investigate a thorn in my foot which had been troubling me. Beside me Big Black Jack was cropping the grass contentedly.
Suddenly Marty called out. “They’re going! They’re leaving us!” Sure enough, the bushmen were walking away from us back the way we’d come, the children looking over their shoulders at us from time to time as they went. We called after them again and again, but they didn’t stop. Then they rounded the side of the hill and were gone.
“Why?” Marty said. “Why here? Why did they leave us here?”
We stood there in silence, each of us trying to make some sense of what was happening to us, of why they had treated us this way. We felt utterly bewildered. The parting had been so unexpected, so sudden and strange. No goodbyes, not even the wave of a hand.
That was when Big Black Jack began snorting again. I looked around for kangaroos. There were none, not that I could see anyway. But Big Black Jack had stopped eating in mid-chew. He had his head up now and his ears pricked. He whinnied loud and long, so that the valley rang with it. He was lifting his nose, sniffing the air, and listening. We could hear kookaburras and galahs, all the cackle of the bush at daybreak, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. But then we heard the sound of whistling, of someone singing, a woman singing, and with it the tread of a horse in among the trees below us, of a saddle creaking. Big Black Jack whinnied again.
A great bay horse was coming out of the trees and up the hills towards us, on its back a rider in a wide-brimmed straw hat. But it wasn’t the horse or the rider that we were looking at so much as the cavalcade that was following along behind, a cavalcade of creatures, all of them infants: wombats, wallabies, joeys. And as the rider came closer I could see there was a koala clinging on round her neck, looking at me over her shoulder. She rode right up to us, let the horses touch noses and check each other over. Meanwhile she took off her hat and looked us up and down. I haven’t forgotten the first words she spoke to us:
“Strewth,” she said. “Look what the cat brought in. But maybe it wasn’t the cat, right? How’d you get here?”
“It was the bushmen,” Marty told her.
“I thought as much. Are you waifs and strays then? They only bring me waifs and strays. They know I collect them, see. They don’t eat the little ones, not unless they’ve got to. Good people they are. Just about the best, I’d say. Where are you from?”
“England,” I said. There was a wombat rooting around my feet now.
“S’all right. He won’t bite,” she told me. “You’ve come fair ways then.”
“We were at Cooper’s Station,” Marty said. “We escaped.”
“I know Cooper’s Station. Mr Bacon’s place, right? Where’s he’s got all those orphan kids.” She looked us up and down.
“He used to be the preacher in town before they moved out there,” she continued. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s fanatics of any kind, and religious ones are the worst of all. Running away from that place seems a pretty sensible thing to do. You’ll be looking for somewhere to stay then.”
Marty and I looked at one another. She was turning her horse now and walking away from us, her little animals following her. “Well, are you coming or aren’t you?” she called out. “If you are, then bring the poor old black horse with you. He needs feeding up by the looks of him. Come to that, so do you. Couple of raggedy little scarecrows, that’s what you are. I’ll soon fatten you up. Come along if you’re coming. Don’t spend too long thinking about it. Haven’t got all day.”
Australia was one of the most distant parts of the British Empire. For generations, successive British governments used their Empire as a dumping ground for the unwanted and dispossessed in Britain. Transportation to Australia was initially to build a population in a distant possession and to get rid of criminals, many of whom would have otherwise been hanged for their crimes. In early times these unfortunates could even include children as young as seven who had been convicted of minor crimes.
From 1618 until as late as 1970, about 150,000 children, who had committed no crimes, were transported to British colonies, mainly Canada and Australia, as part of official “child care” practice. Britain is the only country in the world to have done this over a sustained period, rather than as a policy of last resort during times of war or civil unrest.
These children were poor, unwanted, orphaned, or just “difficult”. It was thought that children who were not part of conventional families posed a danger to society as well as to themselves. Many responsible for their deportation persuaded themselves that it was a better future for the children than staying in care homes in the UK. But, in fact, it was also cheaper to send children to Australia than to care for them in Britain. In 1950, children cost five pounds a day in the UK but only ten shillings in Australian institutions.
Voluntary societies engaged in child deportation were given UK government sanction and support. The Australian government also provided subsidies. Australia was desperate to expand its workforce, wanting – in its words – “good white stock”. The Bishop of Perth stated in 1938: “… it is necessary to look for external sources of supply. And if we do not supply from our own stock we are exposed to the menace of the teeming millions of our neighbouring Asiatic races.”
In the days before telephones, computers and world travel, children shipped overseas were permanently separated from everyone and everything they knew. When they reached Australia, they were housed in residential schools, or with host families, until they were of employment age. They experienced a harsh climate, long hours of hard physical work, loneliness, lost identities and the pain of living with a family but not being of the family.
In 1956, British officials went to Australia to investigate. Their conclusions were damning. One home was described as isolated with “deplorable conditions”, and the boys “appeared unhappy”. Accommodation at another was “primitive”, with managers “rigid and narrow in outlook”. Although ten of the worst places were blacklisted, more children were sent to them while the government debated what to do with the damning report.
The scale of deportation was later brought to light by a Nottinghamshire social worker, Margaret Humphreys. She set up the Child Migrants Trust in 1987 to assist separated families, and to pressurize governments to investigate. Many former child migrants began to draw public attention to their distressing experiences. Their pain, hurt and anger was clear.
Although a few migrants did exceptionally well, all experienced trauma and many were abused. Tony Jones was told by the Church of England that he was an orphan. He wasn’t. The authorities assured him there were no records. That was another lie. His mother was too poor to look after him and placed him in a children’s home. She did not consent to his deportation; indeed, she was never asked. Tony arranged a reunion, but his mother died two weeks before he arrived: “I saw my mother in the coffin. It’s the most heartbreaking time of my life. They knew she was alive.”
Tony Costa said, “I still wake during the night in a cold sweat, in a state of night terror featuring the monsters of my childhood – though it was never any kind of childhood. I was desperately trying to understand what crime I had committed to warrant such a heinous punishment.”
Child-care charities and governments finally started to condemn what they had once so enthusiastically endorsed. In 2009, the Australian prime minister apologized: “Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. We look back with shame that so many of you were left cold, hungry and alone, and with nowhere to hide and nobody to turn to.” Sometime later, the British prime minister also apologized. The work of reconciling lost children with their families overseas still continues but will soon end as those affected are now so old.
