The Land of Lost Children, by Susan Chenery, The Age, June 11, 2011

The Land of Lost Children

By Susan Chenery
The Age
June 11, 2011

http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-land-of-lost-children-20110611-1fy4w.html

'I can still hear the screams of these kids being separated': an archival picture of British child migrants arriving in Australia.

Child migrants association secretary Harold Haig in Melbourne.

Thousands of children were shipped to Australia in a shocking tale of betrayal and abuse that continued until 1970, writes Susan Chenery.

IN THE winter the children left blood on the frost. Their bare feet stumbled on rocks that peeled the skin, but they were so numb with cold that they barely felt the pain. They were children forced into hard labour; punished for being born without hope. And punished again if they protested.

"If you complained it was bang over the head, 'You little sook, you little girl'," says John Hennessey, who was one of those children.

On treacherous building sites little boys were flogged if they slowed down, carrying loads of bricks up the scaffolding, lime burns lacerating their legs, hands blistered and cut. This was not Dickensian England; this was Australia and it was happening until 1970.

Hennessey is still, at 75, a noticeably damaged man. He is warmly greeted by everyone he encounters at the Ingleburn RSL club in Sydney, where we meet for lunch. But he is in tears throughout much of our interview. He did not receive a birthday card until he was 62. It was from the mother he had yearned for all his life but had been told was dead.

In 1946, at the age of 10, Hennessey was sent from an orphanage in England to the brutal Bindoon Boys Town in Western Australia. He recalls the arrival in Fremantle for the big adventure that had been promised: kangaroos would take the children to school and oranges would fall from the trees. Instead, they were herded into trucks.

"The brothers and sisters were all together," he says. "And then they started grabbing the girls away from their brothers. I can still hear the screams of these kids being separated. Some of them never saw their sisters again. I still have nightmares."

Life at Bindoon, run by the Catholic Church's Christian Brothers, was a catalogue of cruelty, where beatings and sexual assault were daily events. "Bindoon was nothing more than a paedophile ring," Hennessey says. "Most of the brothers were into raping and molesting little boys, sometimes sharing their favourites with each other."

The boys were put to work building the series of grand buildings that Bindoon became. "It was slave labour," says Hennessey. Many of them are now deaf or partially deaf because they were constantly bashed around the head by powerful men.

He recalls children resorting to stealing food from the pigs they tended - because the pigs were better fed. Brother Francis Keaney, the head of Bindoon, would eat his breakfast of bacon and eggs in front of boys, who were fed porridge mixed with bran from the chicken feed. The boys would scramble to raid the rubbish bins for the scraps from his plate.

Hennessey was the leader of a group of hungry boys who raided Keaney's vineyard one night. The next day the 193-centimetre tall, 108-kilogram priest stripped him naked in front of the others and beat him viciously with his fists and walking stick. Then, as Hennessey lay bleeding on the floor, the priest kicked him out the door with heavy boots. Hennessey has had a pronounced stutter ever since.

When he found a little boy crying because he had been molested, he took him to Brother Keaney for counsel. "He went into a rage, whacked me across the head, whacked the kid across the head and said, 'Don't you ever come into this office and tell me lies'."

The harrowing plight of child migrants such as Hennessey is examined in the film Oranges and Sunshine, which opened on Thursday. The movie focuses on British social worker Margaret Humphreys and her work to blow the whistle on the child migration schemes and help the victims find their families.

One of those victims was Harold Haig, who first started looking for his mother when he was 18. "She was the only woman I ever wanted to meet. She was the only one who could fill the void. If you are told you are an orphan and your parents are dead, there is nobody there. You walk around feeling that you don't belong anywhere. So for years there was a real emptiness in me … We thought we were the only ones."

Haig started his search too late; both his parents had died by the time he located them. But his father had still been alive when he first went looking in England in 1974.

The only family John Hennessey knew were the priests who called the boys "sons of whores". "I thought Brother Keaney was my father," he says. "It wasn't until I was about 19, 20, that I began asking some questions. Surely I must have a family. I didn't know which way to turn. The church wouldn't help me."

Hennessey had no birth certificate or papers, no identity. He later discovered his name had been changed and his birthday altered by three years. When he went to get his records from the Sisters of Nazareth in Bristol, where he had spent the first

10 years of his life, "they denied I even existed".

It was 57 years before Hennessey found his mother in a rapturous reunion. "My mum told me, 'Michael John, you were stolen out of your cradle when you were two months old'. Being born out of wedlock was a mortal sin. We were classed as children of the devil, that was the philosophy they worked on us. My mother was in a desperate situation. She had no support from family and didn't know which way to turn so she went to the nuns." She was an Irish girl, you know, and the nuns told her, 'Mary, you are not a fit and decent woman to have this child. John is ours and he belongs to God. He will be adopted and have a good life.' She went to visit me two to three times but the nuns told her never to come back.

"The priest made her swear on the Bible that she would never tell anybody that she had this child."

Even though he would become deputy mayor of Campbelltown and receive an Order of Australia medal for services to the community, Hennessey, like so many Bindoon boys, was too damaged to marry. "You just have all this shame and guilt."

When bleak postwar Britain answered Australia's call for "good white British stock" to build its population, it saw an opportunity to empty overflowing institutions of the innocent victims of poverty, illegitimacy and broken homes. In the child trafficking that became known as the Child Migration Schemes, it cost £5 to keep a child in care in Britain and only 10 shillings in Australia. Institutions that took children would be paid a subsidy for each. All the reputable agencies - Barnardos, the Salvation Army, the Fairbridge Society, National Children's Home, the Catholic and Anglican churches - colluded in sending children to the other side of the world for "a better life". Children were thought to be a particularly attractive category of migrant, according to a 1945 prime ministerial brief to state premiers, "on account of their easier assimilation, adaptability, long working life ahead and easier housing".

In the past 200 years it is estimated that 150,000 underprivileged British children have been dumped across the globe. Between 1912 and 1970, about 7000 were shipped to Australia. The first big hurt for those children was the rejection. They couldn't understand what they had done that was so wrong their own country didn't want them. They were promised loving families were waiting to adopt them, but they were delivered into institutionalised abuse. Very few of the children were adopted or fostered.

The whole system was based on lies. Most of the children had mothers who were very much alive: women who had been told their child had been adopted in Britain or had died. Many of the mothers had put their children into care until they got back on their feet.

Humphreys, who established the Child Migrants Trust, says the women had no choice. "It could be about the social stigma of being single parents. Some children went into short-term care because of family illness. Mothers went to see them at weekends while they were in short-term care, or arrived to collect them to find that their children had gone."

A blanket policy of concealing a child's history was, as it turned out, a convenient way of covering tracks. Some organisations were so determined these children would never find their way home that they changed their names, and dates and places of birth. It was a cover-up that went to the highest echelons of British society and would have never been uncovered but for the clear thinking of Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, who in 1986 received a letter from a woman in Australia.

"She wrote: 'I was four years old when I left your home town. I was put on a boat to Australia. My name was changed. My birthdate was changed. I don't know who I am. Can you help me?' I looked at this letter and thought this is absolutely preposterous. So I wrote back to her and said: 'Look, you must have been fostered or adopted. You had to have gone there with an adult. Four-year-olds cannot get on a boat and take themselves to the other side of the world'!"

But it was all too true, as Humphreys discovered when she investigated and found the woman's mother. When she started putting the pieces together in 1987, Humphreys could not have anticipated the scale of the deportation. After she placed an ad in a Melbourne newspaper, the letters soon came in a flood. Her husband, Merv, registered at Nottingham University to undertake a doctoral thesis on the history of child migration, knowing it would give him access to archive material. The couple were often in a state of disbelief as Merv assembled a dossier that showed how two governments had devastated families and destroyed thousands of lives. Humphreys says: "This was a group of people who had everything taken from them, their families, their country, their identity, their communities, their extended family, their schools, their little networks. Everything had gone."

Humphreys set up offices in Australia so she could counsel victims. In Britain she was a forensic detective, slogging through church records, phone books, the general registrar office in London and archives for leads. She sought out people who might have lived in the same boarding house as someone's mother years earlier. It was hard on her, too. Humphreys was shaken by death threats and frequently had to leave her own young children to travel to Australia.

In her book, Empty Cradles , Humphreys writes, "to take children from their families was an abuse; to strip them of their identity was an abuse; to forget them and then deny their loss was an abuse. Within this context and within our culture, few tragedies can compare." Now she wants to restore the reputations of the mothers who suffered as much as their children. "The profound loss of mothers. Mothers and fathers but especially mothers, it has been a grief without end, a loss without conclusion."

In Melbourne, Harold Haig, the secretary of the International Association of Former Child Migrants, is full of praise for Humphreys's work. "If it had landed in the lap of anyone but Margaret, they would have gotten away with it," he says. "I don't think anyone else would have had the courage or sense of justice issues, the strength really to be able to carry on."

Humphreys says the organisations involved in the migration schemes were determined to keep their secrets. "Why the records were concealed for so long would be obvious to any of us … the schemes were based on deception that would have been exposed. What they did was eradicate their identities by dates of birth being changed or incorrect or by names being changed or incorrect, so I think that was to take away the child's sense of self and identity. I suppose it is obvious that if you tell a child that its parents are dead … they are unlikely to keep asking for mummy or daddy, are they?"

In middle age, these people slowly began to find out that they did belong somewhere. But for many, as with Haig, it was too late. The closest Tony Costa, a former Bindoon boy, now 70, got to his mother was visiting her grave. When she moved to the US, his mother left a letter at the church with her married name and address. The letter was never passed on, even when Costa went to them looking for her. "Because of the Catholic bigotry and intolerance my mother was hounded to get rid of me by the church."

Marcelle O'Brien was four when she was deported. She had been in foster care. Her foster mother tried to get her back, even writing to the Queen Mother. O'Brien has no memory of the court case that her "Mummy Chapman" lost. "They said I was better off in Australia. I must have been 50 when I found out what happened."

O'Brien was destined to lead a miserable existence at a Fairbridge Farm at Pinjarra in WA, where the girls were told, "You belong in the gutter, you are nothing, you have nobody." Wards of the state until they were 21, the boys were sent out to farms, the girls into domestic service when their perfunctory education finished.

At 16, O'Brien was sent to work for a family. She slept in a shed and, with no one to protect her, she was fair game for the local men. "The sexual and physical abuse went on for a while; it was a farmer from up the road," she says. "You never told anyone, you were just out in the wilderness not knowing anything. I have been pack raped by three lads from a farm." By the time her mother was found she was in a home slipping into dementia. She only had three weeks with a lucid mother. "She looked up at the ceiling and said, 'Praise the lord [you are here], those bastards took you away from me.' She was just poor, a poor lady struggling to look after her children."

Margaret Gallagher, now 70, was 12 when she was sent to Australia by Barnardos, having been told her parents were killed in the war. After an unhappy adolescence she demanded to leave and at 15 was put into a job as a domestic. Soon after, she drank a bottle of cleaning fluid and woke up in hospital. Barnardos noted on her file that she had attempted suicide for "attention". She was sent to an elderly couple in Sydney who said they might adopt her, but she had to say she was their niece and under no circumstances that she was a Barnardos child. "I was made to feel shame. One of the biggest things for me and it has only just healed, is that when I go anywhere and I am in a room I feel like I don't belong, I am not good enough. Not good enough to be here, I don't fit." When she was 30 she found her mother, who had been raped at the age of 14 and whose parents had made her adopt the child out and promise never to tell anyone.

Sitting in an armchair at her home in Woy Woy, Gallagher says she believes in forgiveness, but her anger and hurt are obvious. Her great regret is that her own children bore the brunt of that anger.

Such feelings are to be expected, says Humphreys. "This is generational. It will not stop at this generation of child migrants. The pain will not stop there. As they say to me, Margaret, I live with it every day."

■Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin yesterday announced $3 million for the national Find and Connect service to help "Forgotten Australians" and former child migrants with counselling, tracing their histories and reuniting with family.

Oranges and Sunshine is now showing.