The British and Australian Governments have been called upon to start high-level talks on helping the 10,000 child migrants who were brought to Australia after the war as part of a populate-Australia-with British stock scheme.
The plight of the migrants became publicly known seven years ago with press and television programs, but governments and the responsible charities had done little to help. Many of the migrants still did not have birth certificates or got close to reunion with relatives, and many were still suffering social dysfunction.
The head of the Child Migrants Trust, author and social worker Margaret Humphreys, said this week that the children, mostly in their 50s “”are facing reunions in Britain at gravesides, if at all, because of lack of money”.
She said, “”It is the governments’ responsibility because they supported the schemes and the charities who ran them.”
Children had been taken out of homes in Britain and sent to Australia fromthe mid-1930s to 1967, invariably to institutions which mistreated them, and usually without parental permission.
Children had been lied to by being told they had been orphaned by war or car accidents. Parents, usually single mothers, had been lied to by being told their children had gone to foster homes when they had been sent to institutions where many had been made to labour, denied proper education and denied contact with family. They had been kept in the institutions by the charities because the charities had been paid a per head charge and used the children’s labour.
Ms Humphreys is in Australia on one of her regular trips to help the migrants and this time will launch her book (ital) Empty Cradles (ital) which describes how she had uncovered the child migrants’ story.
She set up the Child Migrant Trust. She said she had got no financial help from the responsible charities in Britain: the Catholic Church, Bernardos, Fairbridge and the Salvation Army. For a long time the charities had refused to admit or had under-played past misdeeds.
The charities and the British Government had put obstacles in the way of getting files and information. The British Government’s financial contribution was limited to one-off grants. The Australian Government had contributed the salary of one social worker, for which the trust was grateful, but it was not enough.
“”And it was no good passing it to the charities to help the children because you don’t send the abused back to the abusers,” she said.
If high officials of both governments could get together to create the misguided schemes in the name of the Empire, “”it should be simple enough for them to sit down with us now and find out what needs to be done and get on with it.”
“”No other country has done this to its children.”
The trust’s social worker in Australia, Colin Peach, said, “”This is shaping up to be a major human-rights issue.”
He thought that, aside from the moral issue, governments were stupid not to deal with it because they would be sued. One child migrant had already been granted legal aid to sue the British Government.
However, the trust thought revenge and blame were not helpful. It preferred to deal with the present at the human level with information retrieval, searching for relatives, counselling, preparation for reunion and help with social and psychological problems caused by institutional childhoods.
But thousands were seeking the trust’s help and it did not have the resources to deal with the cases quickly enough.
“”The first question is why it happened in the first place,” he said. “”But the important question now is what are the governments doing to alleviate the suffering of those they had mistreated.”