Joanna Mack managed to give me a month’s notice that Lost Children of the Empire was being broadcast in Australia. Thanks to the Trust’s anonymous benefactor, I flew into Perth two weeks beforehand.
I wanted to be early because I had news for many of the people that I had met in Perth the previous year: birth certificates for some, for others whole families. I was going to be able to tell quite a few of the Nazareth House girls that I’d found their mothers, brothers and sisters, and was carrying letters and photos for some of them.
Penny and John had booked a holiday abroad, but they cancelled it just before I left England.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because we’re coming to Australia,’ said John. ‘Thought we might be useful. If not, we’ll work on our suntans.’
My past experiences of Perth filled me with a sense of foreboding but at least this time I had some good news for people. Perhaps it would ease the burden.
The last thing I expected to receive on my second day there was an invitation to a meeting with various representatives of the Catholic Church, including a member of the Christian Brothers. I knew little of this Order and this would be my first personal contact.
A telephone call to my hotel invited me to a lunch time meeting.
Penny commented to me, ‘This could be a difficult meeting, Margaret.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, but it could also be constructive. I think you’d better come with me to take notes.’
It was a fiercely hot day but we decided to walk. Fortunately, the venue, an office on Hay Street, was only a few minutes from our hotel.
It was a large building, in a high-rent area of the city centre. We arrived at midday and were ushered into a large room where a small group of men, one or two of whom seemed elderly, were sitting on straight-backed chairs around a table. Some wore a solemn uniform of black suit, black socks and black shoes as they sat quietly throughout the meeting.
I anticipated that they had probably seen the documentary. A copy may have been sent from England. I approached the meeting with a very formal attitude and asked for example how long the meeting would last, who was the Chair, and whether I could have a written copy of the agenda. It was clear that my request for formality was not appreciated.
‘What agenda? You’ve been invited to come here for a discussion.’
This reply surprised me. For some reason, it sounded like I had called the meeting. I hadn’t asked to come. I sat there, wondering what would happen next.
There was a long pause before one of the men broke the silence.
‘We wanted you to come here to tell you, in our view, that these outrageous claims of physical and sexual abuse are unfounded. It is all grossly exaggerated. There are many students who are very grateful for the time they spent here. This has been blown up out of all proportion.’
I had a familiar feeling that I was being brought to account. His tone of voice was belligerent, but, unless I was very much mistaken, I detected an underlying defensiveness. I sensed that the men present, perhaps because of the lives they’d chosen, did not know how to relate easily to women. They had spent their lives in a closed, predominantly male environment. In my view this was part of the problem. The Christian Brothers should never have been allowed to look after child migrants because the schemes they ran lacked the full and active involvement of women.
He concluded by saying, ‘This television programme is not balanced, you know. It’s been sensationalized.’
I felt at this point that the meeting was more about shooting the messenger than addressing the issues that the documentary raised.
We were then joined by two professional workers from the Catholic Migrant Centre, and our conversation shifted from abuse to the important issue of the child migrants’ records. I was assured that the Migrant Centre had little information on the child migrants; I was told categorically that records did not accompany the children from the UK. Some files had been burnt, and the remaining files had little useful information about the migrants’ families. Finally, I was told that the brothers had dedicated their lives to looking after these boys under difficult conditions.
I was not asked for my opinions, I therefore said nothing. Indeed, there were times when I felt I was there to be seen but not heard. This was not the constructive discussion I had hoped for.
At one o’clock a tray of sandwiches and drinks arrived and was offered around. Penny gave me an enquiring glance.
I gathered my thoughts and said, ‘I have come here to meet with you because you asked me to, but I didn’t expect to have lunch. If the discussion has finished I have important work to do elsewhere.’
Outside in the fresh air I turned to Penny and said, ‘Well, what do you make of that?’
She smiled. ‘Margaret, I think they call it the Inquisition.’
I was surprised by what I believed to be a basic lack of the compassion that I automatically expect from those associated with the Church. Even if the allegations of physical and sexual abuse were not accepted, it must surely be recognised that these men had suffered a great injustice. It seemed as if their case could neither be seen nor heard such was the strength of the denial. I was also asked why the child migrants were revealing these things now after all these years. I was saddened that the question was spoken in such a disbelieving tone.
Unfortunately, few of those at the meeting seemed to be familiar with the idea of long-term trauma. I was given the impression that the years of silence suggested that the abuse had never happened, whereas I, on the other hand, wasn’t surprised at all that it had taken so long for victims to speak out.
This kind of sexual abuse leaves the victim with the guilt and the shame, not the perpetrator. It seemed to me that, regrettably, the Christian Brothers were going to suffer a great deal of pain and soul-searching before they accepted the accounts of the child migrants.
As Herbert Agar said, The truth which makes men free is, for the most part, the truth which men prefer not to hear.
Back at the hotel, John asked me if I’d heard of someone called Peter Couchman.
‘No, why?’
‘Because you’re the special guest on his television show. It’s just been advertised on the television.’
‘That’s news to me,’ I said.
By the time Lost Children was released in Australia, it had won a gold medal in New York and been nominated for a Bafta award. Joanna was very excited. Again, the publicity barrage was launched.
Couchman was recorded the day before the show and went out immediately afterwards. It was to be recorded in front of a specially invited audience. Peter Couchman forewarned me that there would be a large number of Old Fairbridgians in attendance.
Despite my visit to their reunion, there were still some child migrants from Molong who resented any criticisms of their beloved founder and were angry at some of the media reports.
I was told the Couchman show was a debate-style programme, sometimes quite confrontational. The last thing I wanted was for the tragedy of child migration to become a bitter, point-scoring argument.
The Fairbridgians were, indeed, well represented. So many turned up, that not all were allowed into the main studio. They watched from a special ante-room. Couchman wasn’t impressed. He had wanted the audience to be representative of all the migration schemes, some Catholic, some Fairbridge, some Church of England.
Harold and Pamela were there, and I recognized some of the faces from the Fairbridge reunion: it was clear the audience was predominantly from the farm school, and included the president of the Old Fairbridgian Association, Dennis Silver.
The audience was shown Lost Children of the Empire and I could see from their expressions that it was a painful experience for many.
Then the screen went blank and the cameras turned to Peter Couchman. He gave a very powerful introduction, summing up the legacy of the child migration schemes.
After asking me several questions, Couchman opened the discussion to the audience. There were some very pertinent comments but then the discussion was set alight by the intervention of Dennis Silver.
‘While I admire tremendously the work of the Child Migrants Trust,’ he said decisively, holding aloft a sheet of paper, ‘I found my own family. I have interrogated and found them.’
When Peter Couchman turned to me for comment, I simply told him that the Child Migrants Trust did not ‘interrogate’ people. ‘Families and parents in the UK are very caring people, who have had very traumatic experiences in losing their children.’
Dr Ron Sinclair, a former child migrant, said, ‘The search for identity is very important. If you look at the sort of techniques used in concentration camps, they were designed to take away people’s identity. It is the ultimate indignity. So when a person has no identity, this search needs skilled intervention.’
David Hill, the head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and himself a former Fairbridge migrant, was sitting in the front row.
‘Fairbridge never thought this far ahead,’ he said. ‘The schemes were horribly misguided and we will have to pick up the pieces and do the best we can.
‘This awareness is thirty years too late. We are being called the lost children of the Empire, but, in fact, we are the forgotten children.’
Mr Hill then posed the question, Why had it taken a British woman to bring the child migration schemes into the open?
The following night, Lost Children of the Empire was screened across Australia.
We were ready. Telephone help-lines were open from the moment the show finished.
We took hundreds of calls that night. The phones rang until 4.00 a.m. and would have kept ringing but the decision had to be made to turn them off.
There was obviously a huge need for on-going support lines, which the ABC couldn’t provide. Thankfully, ever since my first visit to Sydney, I’d had good relations with Barnardo’s, Australia, and it helped find us accommodation and telephones.
John and two other counsellors answered calls from eight the next morning, and they were still there at midnight.
Calls were coming in from all over Australia, hundreds from former child migrants who had been told they were orphans. Extremely distressed and very angry, they wanted immediate answers about whether their parents were alive or not.
A man rang from an oil rig in Bass Strait. He said, ‘Tell me it isn’t true. I don’t bloody believe it. If somebody tells me I’ve got parents after all these years, I’ll bloody shoot myself.’
Others spoke about horrendous acts of physical brutality at Bindoon and other orphanages. There were also calls from men and women who were not migrants but who had also suffered sexual abuse in institutions in Australia.
Ordinary Australians were outraged by the documentary. They couldn’t believe that their country could have imported children in such a way. They were ashamed. Others were incensed and distressed that religious orders were implicated.
Over the following days, as I gave interviews to the media, journalists told me that ‘this country is in a state of shock’.
Although the main aim of the phone lines was to get a name and address from each caller so we could get back to them, we had to counsel some for long periods. And the stories they told were often so graphic that the counsellors found it hard to cope.
By the end of the week everyone was exhausted. I didn’t know how I was going to get home. I still had to travel to Adelaide and then back to Sydney. Life got very difficult. If I went to a restaurant, people would come up to me and say, ‘You’re that woman who was on the telly last night. We watched you tell Pam about her mother.’
I had to send Penny out when I needed to buy some new clothes because I was being stopped in the street. I didn’t appreciate the notoriety, but at the same time, getting the story into the open and seeing the truth becoming more widely acknowledged, was long overdue.
In what was described as a positive response to the documentary, Catholic diocesan welfare agencies throughout Australia offered their services to anyone involved in the child migration schemes who had lived under the ‘auspices of the Catholic Church’.
A statement released by the Australian National Catholic Association of Family Agencies said it had been approached by the Catholic Welfare Council in Britain to be the first point of contact for those people who wanted to trace their natural families.
The association’s chairman, David Cappo of Adelaide, said the documentary offered a sobering reminder of the ‘values which prevailed in the area of child care as recently as twenty years ago.’
‘Many of the children who were abandoned to British orphanages were admitted in haste and secrecy, without any professional assistance or advice,’ he said. ‘The British government which was recovering from World War Two, did not recognize the need for quality counselling or other forms of assistance in the decisions to separate children from their origins.’
He said the involvement of Australian government officials and charities like the Catholic Church had been at the request of the then British government. It was the British government’s solution to overcrowded orphanages.
I had one last, and very important, interview to undertake before I went home.
A surveyor from Adelaide had read a copy of the book of Lost Children of the Empire and suffered a nervous breakdown.
In hospital he pleaded with doctors, ‘Get hold of this woman Margaret Humphreys. I want to talk to her.’
When I got to Adelaide I went to the hospital and found Walter sitting on the veranda, looking out on the gardens. He told me a story that had been bottled up inside him for the best part of thirty years.
At the age of three he was told his parents were dead, and he was taken from a children’s home in Scotland and put on a ship to Australia. He grew up in an orphanage along with other child migrants.
Walter developed a wonderful voice and when he was seven, a dentist and his wife asked the orphanage if Walter could sing for them on Christmas Eve. They would keep him over Christmas and buy him presents. Much to his delight, Walter was collected by car and taken to this home to join the festivities.
In front of the family and all their friends, Walter sang Ave Maria at midnight. Afterwards, three men took him to the bathroom and sexually abused him in turns. He cried and screamed so much that they decided not to keep him over Christmas as promised and instead took him back to the orphanage. They left him on the doorstep. Walter was still crying the next day – not so much because of what had happened, but because he hadn’t received the Christmas presents they had promised him.