The Forgotten Children (16 page)

A ‘widow of Empire’, cottage mother Mrs Hodgkinson, who had been Lady Routledge in India. ‘She was imperious, superior, upper class. We were there to do her bidding; slaves and lackeys on tap,’ recalls former Fairbridgian Michael Walker.

Five days on a train across the Rocky Mountains: Fairbridge children who came the long way round via Canada in 1940. A shy six-year-old Peter Bennett is on the left, obscured.

Gwen Miller as a fifteen-year-old trainee girl. She remembers Fairbridge as a ‘cold, heartless place’ where childhoods were stolen and the word love was never mentioned.

Ten-year-old Lennie Magee (right) at the dairy to pick up and deliver milk.

A report on Fairbridge noted that the beds had no pillows and ‘consist of wire mesh, which tends to sag, on a steel frame, with very poor mattresses. There is no other furniture in the dormitories and the floors are bare wood’.

Lunch in Nuffield Hall, with the boss silhouetted on the stage at the head of the staff dining table.

The trainee girls were inspected each morning before work on the verandah of Nuffield Hall by the Fairbridge hospital nursing sister.

The village bell ruled our lives. A kitchen trainee rings the breakfast bell.

The Fairbridge Farm School aim of training underprivileged British boys to become farmers and underprivileged girls to become farmers’ wives was captured in the Fairbridge school song:

One of the most unpleasant surprises I had on arrival at Fairbridge was the reality of the trainee scheme – effectively a program of hard labour. Most boys and girls were forced to leave school at fifteen so they could work on a rotating roster of jobs around the farm for the next two years. Although they took on the full-time workload of an adult, they were given only a shilling or two a week in pocket money.

The farm of about six hundred and fifty hectares was about two kilometres wide and ran for five and a half kilometres south from the Mitchell Highway and Molong Creek, which formed its northern border. Fairbridge was largely self-sufficient, thanks to its sheep farming, grain growing, vegetable garden and orchard, dairy with about fifty milking cows, piggery, poultry farm that produced up to 200 eggs a day, and slaughterhouse, where up to two dozen sheep a week were killed. All the work was undertaken by the children and only a handful of adult farm supervisors.

However, most boys left Fairbridge qualified only to be farm labourers, and the girls to be domestic servants. Though the Fairbridge scheme operated for more than seventy years in Australia – from 1912 till 1980 – practically no Fairbridge child was ever able to acquire and operate their own farm. As Len Cowne recounts:

When he originally designed the farm school scheme, Kingsley Fairbridge recognised the critical importance of providing capital so that Fairbridge children might eventually be able to own their own farm. In the speech he gave to the Oxford University Colonial Club in 1909 that led to the establishment of the Child Emigration Society he proposed that:

While there were a number of attempts to create loan funds so that Fairbridge children would have access to start-up capital, none got off the ground. In 1939 at a meeting of the London Fairbridge Society it was decided that, in keeping with the ‘ambition of the Founder’, a special fund would be established so that Old Fairbridgians might be able to settle on their own small holdings. The minutes of the meeting noted that, ‘Augmentation of the Fund was one of the most urgent endeavors of the Society.’
³
Unfortunately, the fund was not augmented and no money from the fund ever reached children of the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong.

Another attempt was made almost a decade later, with the help of Her Royal Highness Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, who donated £2000 to Fairbridge in 1948 from wedding gifts from readers of the
Recorder
and the
Imperial Review
when she married Prince Philip. The money, to establish the Princess Elizabeth Loan Fund, was handed over to the chairman of the UK Fairbridge Society, Sir Charles Hambro, at a special luncheon in London. He was told how the princess wanted her money to be spent:

Her Royal Highness also expressed the hope that the Princess Elizabeth Loan Fund would form a ‘nucleus to be enlarged by similar gifts in the future’. The fund experienced no enlargement, and none of Her Majesty’s money reached the accounts of the New South Wales Fairbridge Council or the children leaving the Molong Farm School.

The Molong farm school itself established the Old Fairbridgians Grant and Loan Fund in 1940 with £2002, ten shillings and ten pence.
⁵
The money was not used for the best part of ten years. In its annual report of 1949 the Fairbridge Council announced that it had lent small amounts of money to some Old Fairbridgians:

The following year the fund had barely £1000 after a number of Old Fairbridgians were given small interest-free loans to help buy household furniture. Within two years the fund was exhausted and no further financial capital was made available to the Molong Fairbridge children.
⁷

While the Fairbridge trainee scheme was of little benefit to children after they left the farm school, it was a remarkably efficient arrangement for Fairbridge. Within two years of opening at Molong, Fairbridge was able to boast that with the labour of the trainee children and only five supervisory farm staff, the school was already able to produce almost all of its own food.
⁸

The trainee boys were on a rotating roster, doing twenty-eight days at a time in the dairy, slaughterhouse and piggery, kitchens, bakery, vegetable gardens, poultry farm and laundry, as well as on general village maintenance and work on the principal’s house. For the last three to six months of their time at Fairbridge they were assigned full-time to the farm, where they undertook sheep farming, and ploughing, sowing and harvesting of wheat, oats and barley.

I was lucky in that I was able to skip the two years as a trainee because, after leaving school at fifteen, I left Fairbridge to join up with my mother in Sydney. But, like all the other kids, I was expected to do trainee work in the school holidays from the age of about fourteen. And practically all the children in the village over the age of eight or nine were obliged to help on the farm at harvest time. They would follow the harvester all day, picking up the sheaves of oats and stacking them vertically in piles, or ‘stooks’. We bigger lads would also be assigned to lifting the heavy bales and loading them on the truck to be taken to the barn, where they were stored as feed for the livestock during winter.

At shearing time when I was thirteen years old, I was sent up to the farm every day to help. My job was to pick out the burrs from the shorn fleece and cut away the unusable pieces, or ‘dags’, around the crutch, then pack the wool into a bale using an old-fashioned wool press. The loose wool was manually wound up by turning a big metal handle, then it was lowered and pressed into a tight bale.

One day, when I should have been working, I was playing around with the wool press, and with some great effort wound a full load of wool up but couldn’t get it down. It sat suspended until I could work out how to release the safety clip … but of course the whole bale came crashing down, the big metal handle spinning around, and catching me in the corner of my left eye socket. I was thrown across the shearing shed, the blow knocking me unconscious, breaking the bridge of my nose and opening up a wound that would forever leave a scar up into my forehead. As I came to and staggered instinctively toward what I thought was a door, dazed by the blow and blinded by the blood, I heard two trainee boys laughing uproariously at the scene. Someone gave me a towel to hold over the wound and stem the bleeding as ‘Ripper’ Smith, the farm supervisor, came running, screaming in his soprano voice. He drove me at breakneck speed, first to the little hospital on Fairbridge, then to the Molong hospital, where I was stitched up and kept for a couple of days’ observation.

But the dairy was the toughest place I ever worked. I found it so exhausting I didn’t think I’d survive the experience. Most of the Fairbridge boys dreaded the dairy because the work was unrelenting: more than sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for twenty-eight days straight. And Begley, the dairy supervisor, was a sadist who regularly kicked and punched boys with the least provocation.

I was rostered on to the dairy shortly after my fifteenth birthday, during the winter school holidays. At around three o’clock in the morning on my first day a boy called Norm ‘Goofy’ Bannerman came down from Canary Cottage to wake me to go and fetch the cows for the morning milking. It was pitch black, cold and pouring with rain as we trudged up the hill beside the deputy principal’s house, through the fence and across Martins paddock to find the cows. We had no wet-weather gear and were getting soaked. I couldn’t see a thing but Goofy knew the ropes so I just quietly followed him, slipping and sliding in the mud. It seemed to take ages to get the cows into the milking yard, where the other four boys had set up the machines for milking.

There were about fifty milking cows in the herd, which was one of the biggest in the Central West of the state. The herd had been smaller in the earlier years of Fairbridge but had been increased in size after a donation to Fairbridge of milking machines by the pastoral company Dangar, Gedye and Malloch in the mid-1950s.

There were six milking bails but only four milking machines, so we took turns to hand-milk cows in the two other bails. We also had to hand-milk each cow to fully empty her udder after the machine had taken all it could. If Begley found that you weren’t emptying the cows properly he would switch off the milking machines and make you milk the whole herd entirely by hand.

I didn’t mind hand-milking in the cold early morning. Sitting on the milking stool and nestling your head into the belly and the udders of a cow was the only way to get a bit of warmth. You could also lean forward and squirt the warm milk straight from the cow’s udder into your mouth.

The milking would take a couple of hours. Toward the end, the leading boy of the gang or Begley, who by now had arrived, would begin the separation of the cream from the milk in the separating room, which was next to the milking bails. By sun-up a younger schoolboy would have come up from the village to hitch a cart to the horse. He and an older boy from the dairy would load about three ten-gallon milk urns, a couple of smaller milk urns and the cream onto the cart then head off down the dirt road to the village, delivering milk on the way. The cart’s first stop was Begley’s house near the dairy, then the two farm assistants’ houses, a number of staff quarters in the village, and finally the village kitchens. The horse and cart were left in front of Nuffield Hall during breakfast so the horse could graze.

Smiley Bayliff remembers working as a schoolboy on the dairy cart:

Back at the dairy, the rest of us still had jobs to do after the milking and before breakfast. I was assigned to the piggery and had to go across to feed the pigs the slops that had been cooked up the previous day. As was the case with so much of the trainee life at Fairbridge, I wasn’t trained but was given the barest of instruction from one of the senior boys. I just muddled along and worked it out as best I could.

The dairy team invariably came down late for breakfast, when everyone was finishing up or had already left the dining hall. Before going to Nuffield Hall we would wash up, take off our muddy, shitty workboots and perhaps put on some dry clothing. We got a cooked breakfast, and usually more. The cook usually understood how hard our work was and allowed us to eat breakfast cereal, which was usually reserved for staff, rather than the awful and by now cold porridge. We could also go up on the stage to the staff dining table and drink the left-over staff tea and coffee, which was normally forbidden to the Fairbridge children. It was just as well, because our cooked breakfast was by now very cold. David Eva recalls:

Derek Moriarty remembers getting special treatment in the village kitchen when he was working as a trainee at the dairy: