After WWII more than 3000 children were sent to Australia as a part of the child migration scheme. This episode uncovers the story of how these children came to be sent to Australia and what happened when they got here.
When you think child migrants of World War II, you are probably thinking of the children who were shipped out of the major cities during the Blitz or the Jewish children who were smuggled out of Germany, but today I want to tell you about a different group of children, children who were often lied to about their parents being dead and were shipped off to the other side of the world to endure a childhood of punishing labour and a life devoid of both education and love.
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All original music written and performed by Kelly Chase.
Hi, this is Kelly Chase and you are listening to History Detective, a podcast where I delve into the past to uncover the mysteries of history and then I explore how that story might be reimagined through song. This is Case 14: The Child Migrants of World War II.
When you think child migrants of World War II, you are probably thinking of the children who were shipped out of the major cities during the Blitz or the Jewish children who were smuggled out of Germany, but today I want to tell you about a different group of children, children who were often lied to about their parents being dead and were shipped off to the other side of the world to endure a childhood of punishing labour and a life devoid of both education and love. Children who were treated with such neglect that in 2009 the Prime Minister of Australia made a formal apology to the generation he called the “Forgotten Australians”. So, who were these children who were sent to Australia and how did they slip through the cracks of history until recent years?
Just a warning before I go on, this episode mentions themes related to child abuse.
After the end of World War II more than 3000 children were sent to Australia as a part of Child Migration schemes. This practice of sending children to Australia had been going on since the 1920s and it continued until as late as the 1970s, but after the war was when Australia accepted a large proportion of the children who were forced to migrate to Australia. Now if you are thinking that these children were coming with their families or to stay with loving families once they arrived, this was not the case. These children were sent on their own, to charity run orphanages that in many cases mistreated them, neglected to give them an education, forced them to perform laborious farm work, lied about their status as true orphans and in some cases physically, psychologically and sexually abused them.
These children, for some reason or other, had ended up in an orphanage in the United Kingdom. The reasons for getting there were many and varied. Some may have been illegitimate- meaning their parents weren’t married and being a single mother was not socially acceptable at the time. Others may have had a father who died in the war and the mother needed to work to pay for rent - and subsidised childcare was not a thing. Some children may have been abandoned and others placed in care temporarily. But generally, what they had in common was that they were from a disadvantaged background.
The welfare system had not been coping with the number of children who needed care in the UK, so they decided to send them to other countries in the Commonwealth. It was not just Australia, children were also shipped to Canada, Rhodesia and New Zealand. In Canada, the taking of child migrants stopped around the 1930s, in Rhodesia, often because they were white children being sent to a predominantly black African country, they ended up in a more privileged position and in New Zealand the children were mainly fostered to families, however today I will be looking at the children who ended up on the shores of Australia. The children who ended up living in charity run orphanages and working farms where the they were not nurtured, educated nor respected. The children the Prime Minister referred to as the Forgotten Australians in his 2009 speech.
But let’s find out who exactly triggered the uncovering of this scandalous story that was almost lost to history. In 1986 a social worker in England named Margaret Humphries received a letter from a woman in Australia who said she had been shipped to Australia as a 4-year-old orphan and wanted help finding her relatives back in England. This letter sent Humphries down the rabbit hole. How on earth had this woman been sent to Australia as a 4-year-old? She kept digging and after being stonewalled by the government immigration organisations in both the UK and Australia she decided to put an advertisement in the personal section of some Australian newspapers- this is before the internet remember-and she did this to see if she could find other people who had been sent off to Australia as orphan children.
She received a few responses from her newspaper articles and started devoting all of her time to trying to reunite these once orphaned children with their families. This was especially difficult because often the orphanages had altered the children’s names. After a feature article was published about the stories, even more people came forward and then in 1989 a documentary called Lost Children of the Empire aired in Australia and so many more people came forward that she quit her job and devoted her life to reuniting these once lost children with their families. A dramatization then aired on British television, and afterwards the help line received more than 10 000 enquiries. So, the lid had finally been lifted on this shameful part of history and many families were able to be reunited after decades of forced separation. In 1993, Margaret Humphries was given an Order of Australia medal for work dedicated to reuniting former child migrants and their families.
Humphries wrote book about her experiences called Empty Cradles that was then adapted into a movie called Oranges and Sunshine. I highly recommend both the book and the film.
But what happened to these children once they arrived in Australia?
The Australian government conducted an inquiry into the treatment of child migrants and in 2001 they released a report called Lost Innocents: Righting the Record: Report on Child Migration. Even just scanning the subheadings is disturbing. Under the section called “Institutional care and Treatment” some of the headings include; abuse in institutions, depersonalisation, sexual assault, physical assault, psychological abuse, bed wetting, exploitation of children in work and neglect are just a few.
In the section called depersonalisation the report states, “many migrant children made reference to their becoming totally depersonalised in their childhood. Their names were changed, they were lied to about the existence of their parents, possessions were removed, gifts and letters were not passed on, and they were referred to by number and not by name. Children learned to keep their heads down and so reduce the likelihood of a random beating.” In terms of education the report states, “educational standards were so limited or virtually non-existent that some child migrants have progressed through life with minimal literacy skills. This educational deprivation has led to lifetime effects, especially for employment prospects.”
Now that is the what the government report says, but let’s explore some of the evidence about the conditions of these institutions.
In one institution, the Methodist Babies Home in Victoria, there was a sign hung up that stated, “Visitors are requested not to touch the Babies”. But it wasn’t just the visitors who were not allowed to show affection, the 2004 Senate Inquiry revealed the following testimonies about treatment, “We had no nurturing, no love, no hugs, no kisses all necessary in one’s upbringing.” Another former migrant corroborates, “My biggest complaint is that I was never offered or given anything that even vaguely resembled nurturing. No affirmation of the person I was becoming, no encouragement, no warmth, and absolutely no affection, not under any circumstances”. And, “‘I was never shown any love at all you were just a number to them not even a name.”
This concept of dehumanising and erasing the children’s identities seemed to be a common experience. “Our clothes were numbered, and we were not a name just a number. Any names we were given were terrible racist taunts.” A woman tells of her experience as a young girl, “‘They confiscated all my clothes, all my belongings, then used a pair of large black shears to cut off my shoulder length hair… it was HACKED. I was issued with regulation clothing, a number (43).”
Another part of the dehumanising was to completely deny the children any contact with their family back home. One former migrant asked, “Why didn’t they tell me I wasn’t an orphan and that I had a family all along?” This was a common experience among the so-called orphans, “Imagine being told that at the age of five years old that your mother is dead only to find out six years later that she is alive & well and wants to come & visit you.”And another experience, ‘It was during my early primary school days when I was told … that my parents and siblings were dead, having been killed in a car accident. I have since learned from my records that my mother and father and brother had written to me however I did not receive any of these letters.”
As well as this emotional cruelty, the children often experienced physical cruelty in the form of both gruelling laborious work and punishments. From as young a 6 these children, rather than being taught to read and write, were forced to do menial labour. Washing sheets, scrubbing, polishing floors, loading bricks on building sites, working in industrial laundries, milking cows, picking fruit and unloading lumber were just some of the jobs the children were expected to do, and this was at the expense of their education. “Education in the homes was abysmal; when I entered the state school system, I was so far behind my age group I was ridiculed and taunted by both teachers and fellow students; leaving me feeling different, dumb and excluded.” Another former child migrant corroborated, “‘I left [the Home] uneducated and illiterate. I had few social skills, and felt I was a social misfit.”
The punishments dealt out were often severe, “We were belted on a regular basis by the warders. They were savage beatings. Boots and all. Time and time again. It was a nightmare. I often wished I were dead.” And this next punishment is so sad, “The bedwetters received such humiliation, they would have to parade around the room with their wet smelly sheets draped over their shoulders.” Another harrowing mistreatment was as follows, “The punishment inflicted was to have her hair shaved off, and she [a young girl of 7 or 8] was compelled to wear a sugar bag as a dress all day for a period of time.” And “The usual method of discipline was belting the boys around the legs with a string of keys and many times the boys who were hit were left with bleeding legs.” There are just so many awful stories from the experiences of these former migrants and I will not go into depth about the sexual abuse that occurred to both the girls and the boys.
Conversely, I do want to point out that some of the children did in fact have a good experience. However, unfortunately the overwhelming majority of the former child migrants’ experiences were deeply disturbing and many of them suffered from neglect and many forms of child abuse.
I will finish with an extract from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 speech to the then adults who experienced the traumas of the child migration program. “We come together today to deal with an ugly chapter in our nation’s history … To say to you, the Forgotten Australians, and those who were sent to our shores as children without their consent, that we are sorry. 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. Sorry — for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy, of childhoods lost — childhoods spent instead in austere and authoritarian places … Sorry — for all these injustices to you … who were placed in our care …”
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Now I would like to play you a song that I wrote which was inspired by the experiences of the Forgotten Australians.
This Kelly Chase, on the Case.
The sign above the door says
Look, don’t touch
No hugs no kisses
I don’t ask for much
Temporary children with
Temporary lives
Permanent scars and a
suitcase full of lies
Fed me full of shame
Made me wear it as a cape
Took away my innocence
Gave me no escape
Temporary children with
Temporary lives
Permanent scars and a
suitcase full of lies
No-one to read me stories
No-one to kiss goodnight
No-one to call my own
I’m just an oversight
Temporary children with
Temporary lives
Permanent scars and a
suitcase full of lies
Next time on History Detective, we will rediscover Queensland’s first female elected politicians, Mrs Irene Longman.
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