Cheap (white) labour for the commonwealth
Apparently the British government after World War II deported a lot of children to Australia without their parents’ permission. I did not know this.
On arrival in Australia, the policy was to separate brothers and sisters. And many of the young children ended up in what felt like labour camps, where they were physically, psychologically and often sexually abused.
Did they indeed – well doesn’t that sound familiar.
In testimony before a British parliamentary committee in the late 1990s, one boy spoke of the criminal abuse he was subjected at the hands of Catholic priests at Tardun in Western Australia. A number of Christian brothers competed between themselves to see who could rape him 100 times first, the boy said. They liked his blue eyes, so he repeatedly beat himself in the hope they would change colour.
The dear Christian brothers – how they do keep turning up in these stories of bullying and abuse.
But what I don’t understand is why these children were deported in the first place. The story says ‘The British government saw them as a burden on the state’ – so I suppose they were in foster care or institutions? Separated from their parents for various reasons? It must be something like that…but to move from that to deportation…yikes. And this was presumably Attlee’s government. Yikes again.
There’s a short history at the Child Migrants Trust but it still leaves out some vital facts – it doesn’t even make it clear whether or not all the children were already separated from their parents or not. It seems clear that all the parents must have been very poor and very powerless – it seems impossible that any of them could have been rich or influential or even middle class enough to make an effective stink.
I have been saying all along that the British government and media have remained almost silent on the Irish industrial schools debacle, and the subsequent Ryan/Laffoy Report. It had something to hide of course, ie… its own present murky child migrant controversy.’
BBC Inside Out -6 Mar 2006 …
“They were sent to populate a nation with what was called at the time …”good white stock.”
Is in not ironic that the “good white stock’ were selected to be transported to Australia from Britain’s poorest and defenceless quarters.
Some of my Goldenbridge compatriots, after their incarceration period was up at sixteen years of age actually chose themselves, thank goodness, to go to Australia. At the time, during the late sixties and thereafter; there was a ten pound passage ticket that one could purchase. They mostly did very well in their adopted country.
However, it is another kettle of fish, when little children are torn from their parents/siblings/friends/culture or who were in British residential care, are forced to go to a new country. No permission asked – just snatched away from their country.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/eastmidlands/…/week_nine.shtml
I am this minute watching a programme of a Cork member of an old Irish showband, called “The Dixies.” He had a large family of eight boys only and was desperately wanting a girl. Nonetheless, when nothing was materializing on that score the couple decided to apply to the adoption services for a little girl. Alas, they were turned down on the ground of being too young. Anyway, what possessed me to tell this story is what happened sometime afterwards. The family were told by ‘Radharc,’ a religious-run TV set-up – that if they agreed to do an advertisement with the priest in charge that they could have a baby girl.
I absolutely saw red, when before my eyes I witnessed a little baby girl being handed over to the loving couple, by none other than a nun in a black habit and the priest filming the whole scenario.
This wee baby was obviously going to a loving home – but that is not what was screaming out at me – it was the trading of the baby!
Five years ago, Canada also publicly acknowledged that it was performing exactly these forms of colonisation on the Aboriginals throughout the 20th century. The Vatican made an apology for their part in it earlier this year as well.
Yet Canadian politicians have recently been keen to inform us that “Canada has never been a colonial power”. I don’t exactly blame them; Canadian history is formidably boring. But you’d think they’d be able to retain a five-year memory span at the very least.
Let’s hear it, as well, for Margaret Humphreys – the only time I’ve ever come across of a social worker doing anything useful.
Her book, “Empty Cradles” is a compelling read.
Benjamin, thanks for the two Canadian links. I shall read them in more depth, another time when I have more privacy. I am currently in the library and I cannot afford to be seen by staff, or other attendees, making banging noises at the computer table, in frustration at the “student” terminology employed over and over again by the government in its apology statement to victims and survivors. Too many clanging bells are ringing in my ears. “Students” being, undoubtedly a euphemism for child labourers, in my ‘book’!
Thanks for that book recommendation, Tingey, I shall watch out for it in the book-shop.
The deported children in question in OB’s informative post have been seemingly so seeking justice for nigh on over a decade. Some of the children, from what I read in an old BBC online newspaper were apparently told they were going to Australia for a holiday. Thousands of them were deported to Australia by British charities after the Second World War, often under false pretences and without their parents knowing.
According to the BBC News as far back as ’98 “Some of their stories were also heard over a decade ago by a delegation of British MPs who travelled to Australia to investigate how the British government could help the deportees. It was obviously all talk and no action.
It sickens me to the stomach to learn from the same source that “The child immigration scheme, was mainly organised by the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Nazareth, the ethos intended was to bring “pure white stock” to former colonies, and ran from about 1850-1967″. Not in the slightest bit unsurprising – given the stories one reads in the Ryan Report.
The full details of the scheme are only now emerging. It has become clear that about 85% of the children were not orphans at all. Does this too not ring a bell with respect of Goldenbridge?
Their parents were told by the church and state authorities that they had been adopted by middle-class parents in Britain. The children were unceremoniously told that their parents were dead. The religious were very fond of telling big whoopers – I wonder what the Bogie-man would make of that as children in Goldenbridge were invariably told that if they lied the bogie-man would get them and he would make their tongues black. :<(! The Sisters of Mercy orphanage in Neerkol publicly apologised for the cruelty it inflicted on hundreds of children, many of them from Britain.
I believe the children were of single mothers, who violated sexual morality and were poor, and therefore could not be tolerated.
Chalk up another victory for religious patriarchy?
Not all of them – some of them were just poor, or just poor and orphaned, or variations on that. I’ve just been listening to a wrenching piece about it on the CBC’s ‘As It Happens’ – beginning with an extended statement by an Australian woman…about how miserable their lives were and how they want to go back now to find their families and get to know them. Her voice was far from steady when she got to that part.
[pause]
Then they talked to a Canadian woman age 93 – her mother died when she was 2 and her brother was 6, they lived with an aunt for awhile but then she couldn’t take care of them any more so she put them in an orphanage. Just poor and alone, that’s all they were.
I hope when they do go back to find their families that the latter treat them with dignity and kindness and make them feel wanted. The families will have to see beyond the outside of these mostly broken very angry people – who feel that they have been dreadfully hard done by – by their original country.
I remember as a very young child, a foreign family, I think American, who were apparently doctors’ by profession, coming to Goldenbridge to adopt a black child. She screamed and bawled to be left alone and even hid in the cupboard; under no circumstances was any Sister of Mercy going to hand her over to strange people. Crikey, she could have done terrifically well, emotionally – with having a stable family to care for her. I heard recently that she went on to educate herself after leaving Goldenbridge. She thankfully did well on that front, despite not having had the first chance at education.