Although I was concerned at having to by-pass Melbourne, there was still much to do in Sydney. The Observer articles had been reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald and had generated many letters.
We stayed the first night in an inner-city hotel and the next morning David visited Sydney’s Community Services. They offered us accommodation in an old reform school that had been turned into a training centre for social workers. The office and accommodation were under one roof and close to public transport.
One of the letters I had received was from Eric Baldwin, who arrived in Australia in 1939, at the age of eleven.
I had sent Eric a reply and he wrote another short note that arrived in Nottingham after I’d left for Australia.
‘You might be unaware that over the weekend of the 26–27 March, the Old Fairbridgians and their friends will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. We would very much appreciate your presence there at that time, both for your own advantage in the pursuit of your worthy task, and to give some of us the opportunity to personally thank you for your efforts on our behalf.’
I remember sighing when Merv read this to me over the telephone. The thought that I would be a welcomed guest at a Fairbridge fiftieth reunion made me both smile and shudder. I doubted if Eric had any idea what he was doing.
My involvement with the Fairbridge Society had been very limited, but I could recite by rote exactly what Stephen Carden, their UK Chairman, had written in the Observer in response to the first articles about the child migrants.
‘If an advertisement of the kind shown in the article is put in a Sydney newspaper by a social worker responses are likely to be mainly from malcontents …’
I knew that the reunion would be an emotional time for the Old Fairbridgians and I felt that my presence might be unnecessarily provocative. I’d made up my mind by the time we reached Sydney.
‘I’m not going,’ I told David. ‘What purpose would it serve? I’d only antagonize the Fairbridge Society. This is supposed to be a celebration. I can’t go.’
David disagreed. ‘There are people there who need our help. They need the Trust. This is a wonderful chance to meet a large group of migrants. They are scattered across different states but are coming together for this weekend. And anyway, you’ve been invited. It’s not as if you’re gate-crashing.’
‘But I feel that I’m not really welcome.’
Finally David convinced me, but not before I’d called George Wilkins in Melbourne.
‘Eric Baldwin has invited me to the fiftieth reunion of the Fairbridge Society,’ I said, ‘Do you ever go to these things?’
‘No, never.’
‘Oh God!’ I said, ‘Then I won’t have any friends there at all.’
‘No worries, Margaret,’ George said at once. ‘I’ll be there. We’ll drive up and meet you in Orange. I’ll book you into a hotel.’
In the months since the Trust was founded, Mervyn had been spending his spare time researching the child migration schemes for his doctorate thesis. He’d unearthed quite a bit about Kingsley Fairbridge, the founder of the Fairbridge Society. A Rhodes scholar, Fairbridge had a dream of sending the poor and deprived slum children of Britain to the rural idyll of Australia, Canada and Rhodesia.
He was the ultimate empire builder who wanted to populate all corners of the Commonwealth with good, white British stock.
In Australia, the society had established ‘farm schools’, one in Pinjarra, Western Australia, in 1912, and the other at Molong, near Orange, New South Wales (NSW), in 1938.
Orange is a quiet rural town west of Sydney. David hired a car and we drove six hours to get there on Saturday afternoon.
As a courtesy, I informed the Community Services Department of NSW that we were going to attend the reunion, because I knew it was a sensitive issue. They, too, decided to send somebody along to ‘monitor’ events. Child migration had obviously created more waves than I expected, especially in NSW.
The reunion involved a weekend of events including golf, tennis and a ‘Nostalgic Tour’ by bus to the farm school and local landmarks. The Reunion Dinner was in the auditorium of the Orange Ex-Services Club. Drinks at 7.00, dinner at 8.00 and dancing until 2.00 a.m.
I had hardly got inside the main reception area when a woman came rushing up.
‘Are you the terrible woman who wrote all those things?’ she said. ‘You are! You are! Well, you aren’t coming in here. We’re not having journalists in here. No, no, no!’
A man standing near by, hearing the fuss, leaned over and said, ‘It might have happened to Catholic migrants, but not to us. We’re Fairbridgians!’
Others began to take an unhealthy interest in the proceedings and I started to feel uncomfortable. I was standing there trying to smile and wondering what to say, when George steered me into the auditorium.
Among the guests of honour was Miss Judy Hutchinson from the Fairbridge Society in England who had flown to Australia to be at the reunion. She was dressed formally and, by comparison, I felt under-dressed. My fairly plain navy blue silk dress had been in a suitcase for a fortnight and even without the creases wouldn’t have been my first choice for such an occasion.
Miss Hutchinson was inside the door and approached me as George and I entered. She shook my hand. ‘Now, dear, we must have a little word. You must realize that everything that was in those Observer articles was untrue and you must acknowledge now, before you go any further, that it was all untrue.
‘You’re going to see this evening what happy people they are. If you’d been on the bus this afternoon you would have seen their faces. They are so grateful for the opportunities offered and the farm holds such fond memories for them.’
Miss Hutchinson seemed to be almost imploring me to agree with her. I told her, very directly, ‘That’s not right. I can’t agree with you.’
‘But you must, you must …’ she said, growing flustered.
‘I am sorry, but I can’t,’ I said adamantly, quite prepared to walk out then and go back to Sydney.
David sensed the tension and intervened. ‘This isn’t the time or the place to talk about this. What we should do is put some time aside for the three of us to talk together. Miss Hutchinson, I don’t think you’re aware of some of the things child migrants have suffered.’
David changed the subject and began asking about her flight and if she was enjoying her stay in Australia.
I was surprised by how many people were in the auditorium. From what George had told me, the farm school at Molong had taken about 330 children over the twenty-five years from 1938. It seemed that a large percentage had come to the reunion.
George and his wife had organized a table for us and I was relieved to sit down. There were two bottles of champagne on the table. He set one of them in front of me and whispered, ‘It’s really water: you can’t afford to take a drink.’
‘You’re right,’ I smiled, ‘but I’d love a gin and tonic.’
Tables were arranged around the room, some seating more than others, but at the end of the auditorium was a top table with a Union Jack hanging from the front. Miss Hutchinson was sitting near the President of the Old Fairbridgians, Dennis Silver, who was master of ceremonies for the evening. Dignitaries from the Australian Fairbridge Foundation were also at the table.
Before the meal was served, Dennis Silver stood up and said, ‘We’ve got some very honoured guests here this evening,’ and went through a roll call.
‘We’re also very pleased to have with us this evening Margaret Humphreys, a director of the Child Migrants Trust, and David Spicer, a trustee. I wonder if they would care to stand up?’
In a stroke, we were identified to everyone in the room.
Dennis Silver then asked those assembled to rise and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, followed by the Fairbridge song, ‘Follow the Founder’ …
We are Fairbridge folk, all as good as e’er,
English, Welsh and Scottish, we have come from
everywhere;
Boys to be farmers and girls for farmers’ wives,
We follow Fairbridge, the Founder.
As I listened to the words and looked around me, I could see that there was tremendous joy and pride on their faces, but beneath it I could almost touch the pain and denial in some of these people.
Our table was quiet during dinner. We swapped small talk and didn’t comment on what was happening around us. I found it difficult to eat.
After the main course arrived, I saw a woman get up from a neighbouring table and walk towards me.
‘Are you the Margaret Humphreys?’ she snapped, full of anger.
‘Yes.’
‘Look at this then,’ she said, slamming the palm of her hand on the table so the plates jumped. Beneath her hand was a photograph. ‘You want to look at this. This man is a professor and he’s an Old Fairbridgian. Look at how well we’ve done for ourselves. Why didn’t you write about him?’
‘I haven’t written about anybody,’ I explained, trying to be as gentle as possible.
‘Yes, you have.’
I wasn’t going to argue. She had a right to her view. When she left, all of us just looked at each other.
We carried on eating and when the meal was nearly over, Miss Hutchinson was asked to deliver a congratulatory address on behalf of the Fairbridge Society in London.
‘It’s so wonderful to be invited here and to see so many happy faces on this special occasion. I have a surprise – a gift from the London office to mark your fiftieth anniversary. When Kingsley Fairbridge first …’
I wasn’t listening any more. It’s the files! I thought. She’s brought them their files. I knew what that would mean. Ever since these children were sent abroad, Fairbridge had kept a file on each of them. Each had his or her past locked in a filing cabinet 12,000 miles away.
Surely she must have brought the files, I thought. What else could it be?
Finally, as Miss Hutchinson finished her speech, she said, ‘Yes, I’ve brought some photographs. We’ll put them up on the walls and when we’ve finished eating, we can all go and have a look at them. I think you’ll find there will be some wonderful surprises. They are photographs of all of you as children. I’m sure your families will want to look at them too.’
We stayed at the table and later, as the plates were cleared and the band set up their instruments, I noticed people starting to get up and gather around the rear of the auditorium. I heard whispering at first, which grew louder.
David went to investigate.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked him, sensing his disquiet.
‘People are crying,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing. They’re looking at themselves as children and breaking down.’
I suddenly realized what was wrong. Many of these people had never seen themselves as children. They were gazing at small black-and-white images of youngsters gathered on the docks and on railway platforms in England. There were other pictures of them on the farm, sitting on the steps or in the shade of trees. This was part of their past and for the last five decades it had been locked away.
Fairbridge’s gesture appeared to be backfiring.
I had no way of knowing why Fairbridge had decided to open its archives and show the photographs. Perhaps it was always planned as a nice gesture on the fiftieth anniversary; or was triggered, at least in part, by the Observer articles.
‘I think you’d better go over there,’ said David.
The photographs were pinned to a wall. Men and women were leaning close, pointing out faces to their wives, husbands and children.
‘Look. Look. This is me,’ they exclaimed, voices choked with emotion.
To anybody else they were just ordinary snapshots, but to some of these people, the photographs represented a rare and precious link with the past. They wanted copies, but Miss Hutchinson told them that she didn’t have the negatives.
Men and women began coming over to me. Others approached David. We were surrounded by people asking us about the Child Migrants Trust and what it did. For the next hour we answered their questions.
Many wanted to meet me privately and David reassured them that I wasn’t rushing straight back to Sydney and would join them the following day at the reunion barbecue.
Next morning, I interviewed several migrants at our hotel before returning to the reunion. By the time we arrived at the barbecue the tables were set up and hot-plates were being stoked with wood.
It was a picturesque setting, in a large field surrounded by pine trees.
A small girl in a sundress came up and presented me with three pine cones. ‘I want you to have these,’ she said. ‘I want you to take them back to England.’
‘Oh, they’re lovely,’ I told her. ‘Why are you giving them to me?’
‘Because you’re going to help my grandad find his family.’
I recognized many of the faces from the previous evening. People seemed more relaxed in casual clothes. I certainly felt more comfortable.
‘Where am I going to interview people?’ I asked David. ‘I can’t sit in the middle of a field.’
‘Never fear,’ he chuckled.
Sure enough, he produced a table and chair and pointed me towards what looked like a sports pavilion.
You must be joking, I thought, but obediently settled into the room.
Meanwhile, David began mingling with the migrants letting them know that I would see them. People started queuing up.
From the very first interview, I sensed that the Fairbridgians were in a dilemma; caught between a wish to be loyal to Fairbridge and a need to know about the past. They wanted to see me but the reunion was a celebration of their time at the farm school, not an examination of past wrongs. I tried to answer their questions as best I could.
During one interview with a husband and wife, Miss Hutchinson walked in. She saw there was no spare seat and disappeared, only to return within minutes with a chair under her arm. Without being invited she sat down next to me.
‘How could you bloody well do it?’ the wife rounded on her. ‘How could you have done it?’
Miss Hutchinson was shocked. Her whole demeanour changed. I picked up my chair, moved myself to the other side of the room and left her sitting there, totally silent.
‘My husband had nothing, nothing at all,’ I heard the wife continue. ‘Nothing to give his children. How could you have done it? Where are the records?’
There were tears streaming down her husband’s face.
As she held his hand, the woman said quietly, ‘Last night he saw photographs of himself as a little boy for the first time in his life. We cried all night.’
Miss Hutchinson was dumbfounded. She could obviously sense that these people were suddenly turning on her and the Fairbridge Society. She couldn’t understand their anger. ‘Times have changed, now,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like this years ago.’
The woman replied, ‘My husband wants to find his family. He doesn’t know if he has a family. He should have been able to do this years ago.’
I felt Miss Hutchinson was fighting a losing battle. She softened when she saw the tears. Finally she told the couple, ‘When I get back to England, we’re going to do everything we can to co-operate with Mrs Humphreys and get you access to the files.’
By late afternoon the queue of people waiting to see me had dwindled but I now knew so much more about the experiences of child migrants at Molong. I was starting to doubt that any of these children had been orphans when they left Britain.
Some could actually remember parents, and a few, in the early days, had received letters from people who they thought were relatives.
Although I recognized the efforts that the Fairbridge Society had made for the migrants, I could also see that each had lost a part of their lives – it was a loss which, for many, had permeated the years since their departure from Britain.
David and I still had a long drive ahead of us, back to Sydney, and I had notes to write up. While I had been conducting interviews, David had talked to the migrants waiting outside. Among them was the woman who had stormed up to our table the previous night and slammed down the photograph in front of me.
As we packed the car to leave, she approached me. Her demeanour had changed totally.
‘I’ve been talking to David,’ she said. ‘Do you think it would be all right if I wrote a letter to you when you get back to England?’
‘Of course. I’d love to hear from you.’
As we drove out of Orange at dusk, trees were silhouetted across the horizon. I thought of something George had shown me the previous day when we drove along a dusty road towards the farm school.
‘You see that tree?’ he had asked, pointing out a lone gum-tree set back from the road.
I nodded.
‘Well, Margaret, I wanted to show you that tree …’
‘Why’s that then?’
‘I wanted you to see that tree because that’s where I used to sit every day at four o’clock, thinking about my home in Liverpool. That was my childhood in that tree. And I used to walk down this road and think, Oh, please knock me over. I want a car to knock me over. Don’t kill me, just break my legs so I’ll go in hospital. Because then somebody will pick me up … then somebody will hold me.’