The Forgotten Children (10 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
There were fifteen children’s cottages in the Fairbridge village, though not all of them were occupied. For most of the time there were three girls’ cottages and eight boys’ cottages in use, each housing up to fifteen or sixteen children, ranging in age from four to seventeen. For some periods a separate cottage was opened exclusively for trainee boys aged fifteen and sixteen, but the experiment was not very successful, largely because there was no one to keep the cottage clean, as the boys were working long hours around the farm.
Our cottage was fairly typical. There were three boy trainees who were fifteen or sixteen years old, about six of us who were under fifteen years old and attending secondary school, and five more who went every day to the local primary school at the back of the village. Our cottage was named Canonbar after a great sheep station way out in the remote west of the state owned by the Goldsbrough Mort pastoral company.
Those Fairbridge children who were lucky enough to have good cottage mothers are likely to remember their time at Fairbridge far more positively than those who weren’t so lucky. Unfortunately most Fairbridge children remember that from the very beginning they received little love and care from their cottage mothers. Henry McFarlane, who was an eight-year-old when he arrived at Fairbridge in the first group of boys, in March 1938, recalls: ‘There was no love, nobody if you felt a bit down; nobody came around and put [their arm] around [you] and said, “Come on – we’re here for you.”’
Margaret McLaughlan arrived in Australia as a five-year-old in 1939 with her six-year-old brother. They went to the Northcote child-migrant school in Victoria, but were sent to Molong when it was merged with Fairbridge in 1944. Nearly seventy years later Margaret says the cottage mothers were unsuited to their jobs and provided no love or affection to the children:
I think they were sadists and a lot of them were very cruel and you never got a cuddle. No one in my whole life there put their arm around me and said, ‘You’re a good girl, Maggie,’ or ‘Margaret, we do care for you, and we do love you.’ I was never told I was loved until I got married.
David Eva says that when he was at Fairbridge in the 1950s the cottage mothers ‘didn’t know what love was’:
Nobody gave you any affection … a lot of kids wanted affection and they just didn’t get it. I can remember at one stage a kid hearing that his mother was sick … or something had happened. He was really down in the dumps but there was no affection.
Linda Gidman recalls:
There was none of the nurturing … The cottage mother would be so up and down, so militant, she didn’t know how to come and comfort a child in need … So there was none of this, ‘Well, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’
In Canonbar Cottage we had a German cottage mother named Ilse Boelter, who had come to Fairbridge with her husband, Kurt, and their six-year-old daughter, Ulrica. Kurt, a university graduate in agriculture, was the Fairbridge village garden supervisor. His wife was a graduate in literature, including English, and we were all amazed at her grasp of English grammar when we were studying it at school.
I thought Mr Boelter was terrific. I remember him showing us dozens of scars all over his body, which were the legacy of fighting on the Russian front in World War II. We had been brought up on a diet of tales of how England beat Germany, and had hardly ever heard of the far more significant eastern front. I was captivated by his stories: he had been a captain and a tank commander until his tank was blown up by the Russians. He had been left to die as a hopeless case until one of the German doctors decided to try to save him. After he recovered, he served out the rest of the war in the Italian campaign. He was convinced he would not have survived had he stayed on the eastern front, where German losses were huge.
He was stern but never violent, and while many of the supervisory staff at Fairbridge hit the children, Kurt and his wife, who were cultured and dignified, never did. He rolled his own cigarettes, like a lot of people did in those days, and, knowing that we all smoked, tried to tell us how dangerous and addictive it was. Of course, we wouldn’t listen.
Billy King, who was in Orange Cottage, remembers his cottage mother:
Mrs Hatto was under the impression that the kids were there for her. Well, she did nothing. I never saw her iron anything, or cook a meal. We even each had a turn on cottage mother’s quarters – we used to have to clean their bloody quarters as well as our own.
Daphne Brown remembers being one of the other lucky ones when she arrived, being put into a cottage that had a good cottage mother:
I was quite happy. I can remember Mrs Tampling, she was my cottage mother, came and picked us up and took us from the truck to the gate of our cottage … I remember Mrs Tampling being very good to us girls … Her husband had died. She’d apparently married an eye specialist when she was in London and she was a nurse, and she had three children to him and he’d died – he was quite a bit older than her. And so she came back to Australia and she couldn’t get a job because she had three children, and this job came up where she could have her children with her. So she took the job. She was very, very kind and very strict – I was a bit scared of her because she was so strict.
Mrs Tampling left after about three years and Daphne recalls: ‘We had some awful cottage mothers after that … They got people who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else … Some of them were dreadful. Dreadful.’
Joyce Drury remembers having some good cottage mothers, but others who were not so good:
We had one cottage mother – she wore skirts down to her ankles – and she used to cook our evening meal and it was always awful. One night she made, I can’t remember what it was, it might have been scrambled eggs, and the oldest girl, Wickens, said, ‘Don’t eat this, it’s rotten,’ and then she said to the cottage mother, ‘We’re not going to eat this,’ and the cottage mother got up on a chair and screamed at us.
… Then she sent one of the little ones to get the principal, Mr Beauchamp. And Beauchamp came with his little dog and he asked the cottage mother the problem and she told him she’d cooked this and we were refusing to eat it. Then he put some in the dish and said if the dog, whatever its name was, eats it, the children have got to eat it. And he puts the food [down] for the dog and the dog refuses to touch it, and he says to one of the girls, ‘Pack it all up,’ and to the cottage mother, ‘Boil them an egg and toast.’ … She wasn’t there very long.
The fifteen barrack-style timber cottages in the village at Fairbridge Farm were all of a similar design. The dormitory at one end of the cottage had fifteen small, metal-framed beds. They were raised slightly at the end, as we had no pillows. Each bed had a kapok mattress, two ex-army blankets in summer and three in winter, and two calico sheets, one of which was laundered each week. There were no bedside tables and, as I found out on that first night, the windows, which were on three sides of the dormitory, had to be kept open all year round. The reason was that Fairbridge had more beds squeezed into each dormitory than child-welfare regulations permitted. John Ponting, who came with me as a twelve-year-old to Fairbridge, recalls an encounter between a child-welfare inspector and Principal Woods:
I was on boss’s duties one day when the child welfare came calling. I remember this joker measuring the dormitory in Gowrie Cottage; he then counted the beds and decided that it would never do to have that many beds in such a small space. Mr Woods asked what was the reason. The guy said it had to do with each child having x amount of space. Woods showed the guy the open windows on the three sides of the dormitory and this guy nearly had a heart attack when he was told that the windows were never closed.
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In each cottage bathroom there were two toilet cubicles with short saloon doors. Toilet rolls were rationed out to each cottage and, as Daphne Brown recalls, when they ran out of toilet paper the children had to make do with whatever they could find: ‘I can remember we used to get four toilet rolls per month for fifteen children. Four toilet rolls! So we used to use any magazines or anything we had. It was quite horrific.’
The stove in the cottage kitchen was used for the preparation of the evening meal. Again, my brothers and I were lucky for most of our stay at Fairbridge. While our evening meal was often a boring and repetitive version of mutton and vegetables, we were better off than children in many of the other cottages.
David Eva spent seven years in Brown Cottage and remembers some appalling evening meals:
This is true. I’m not making this up … I came home from school and it was the cottage mother’s day off. And normally they used to cook the [evening] meal the day before their day off and all the boys had to do was put it on the stove and heat it up. Now, this day she made this bloody soup. Now, her soup was just throwing the [mutton] flap in the bowl with a couple of onions floating on the top, and boil the Christ out of it, and leave it on the stove. Well, I came home from school this day and I looked in the bloody bowl and the bloody meat was nearly walking out of the saucepan. I took it to Woods, who was running the village work muster with the other children who had come home from school. And I went down there and shoved it in front of him and said, ‘Would you eat this?’ And he took the lid off and said, ‘Oh, extra meat rations!’ Extra meat rations? Maggots were crawling up the sides, they were. She’d just left it on the stove, no cover on it or nothing and the maggots were crawling all up the side and all over the meat and everything.
Before each meal at Nuffield Hall all the cottage’s metal plates, bowls and mugs were brought over to the hall by one of the smaller children, who would set the table. The eating utensils were carried in a dixie, which was a four-gallon oil drum cut vertically in half with a piece of fencing wire attached to each end for a handle. After the meal, the remaining food on the plates and bowls would be scraped into the bin in the kitchen, then taken back to the cottage to be washed.
The scraps in the bin would be taken up to the piggery and boiled up for the pigs. If the food they served us in Nuffield Hall was inedible, we would try to eat as little as possible and scrape as much as we could into the pig bins. But Fairbridge did not tolerate wasted food. On many occasions Woods would inspect the pig bins and if too much food had been thrown out, it was immediately taken back to the cottage table to be served up to the children. It didn’t matter that the mutton might be mixed with custard, or cabbage with semolina.
Billy King recalls Woods forcing a child to eat contaminated porridge and, on another occasion, ordering the children to eat the scraps straight from the pig bins:
I’ve seen him have this kid sit at the table eating the porridge and him vomiting it back up and he had to stay there and spoon it back into his mouth until he ate it. And [another time] Woods went into the pig bins and got a ladleful each because there was too much waste [and] – with all the jelly and custard and rubbish they used to feed us – tip[ped] it all back and made us eat it.
Peter Bennett is one of many Fairbridge children to recall having trouble eating the porridge:
I remember the porridge. I’ll never forget the porridge because the … rolled oats used to come in a big 200-pound bag and by the time it got a third of the way down it was full of weevils. And one morning I was having my breakfast and I wouldn’t eat it.
Principal Woods’s reaction was much the same as it had been to the maggots in the mutton:
‘What’s the matter, Bennett?’
And I said, ‘It’s got maggots in it, sir.’
He said, ‘They’re not maggots. This is the larvae of the weevils. Good protein. Eat it.’
This ‘waste not want not’ philosophy extended to all food grown on the farm. Once, Kurt Boelter, the normally competent garden supervisor, planted an experimental crop of kohlrabi, a type of cabbage, and harvested it later in the season than he should have done. The bumper crop had become wooded. It smelt awful and tasted even worse. No one could eat it. All these years later I still feel nauseated by the smell of kohlrabi. For lunch sometimes a sizeable portion was piled on each child’s plate. It was so disgusting that we hid it in our trouser pockets, hoping to get out of lunch in time to empty our pockets into the gardens before the gravy seeped through our pants and became obvious to the staff. Throwing out food was a serious offence.
On another occasion we had a bumper harvest of cucumbers. When I was rostered to make the sandwiches for the schoolkids I was instructed to give all the sandwiches cucumber fillings. Nothing else, just cucumber. When we arrived back at our cottages at night for the evening meal we were each expected to eat another cucumber; this went on until the crop had been eaten.
