The Forgotten Children (20 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
Baker made a number of recommendations to improve the food, which could be introduced ‘efficiently and quickly’ and be achieved with ‘very little added expense’.
Notwithstanding Miss Baker’s assurance that she did ‘not think individual officers can be held responsible’ for the poor standard of food at Fairbridge, the cook and his wife immediately quit following the submission of the report. Principal Woods was livid. Rather than accept the report and its recommendations, he attacked Miss Baker. In a seven-page response laced with sarcasm he said:
This cook and his wife have in fact now resigned as a result of this report from Miss Baker, since they felt that more has been asked of them than was in reason. Miss Baker has offered to help us in the matter of food and kitchen work. Perhaps she would be able to find us a cook and an assistant who can do all that she feels they should do.
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While Woods wrote in his response that he agreed with some of Miss Baker’s recommendations, he made it clear there would be no significant changes at Fairbridge. He was unconcerned about the contamination of food caused by ‘young and inexperienced’ trainees. He acknowledged that they sometimes failed to wash the vegetables thoroughly enough, resulting in ‘slugs and snails’ in the greens, or ‘overlooked’ sheepskin finding its way into the stew. Nor did Woods dispute that the kitchen utensils were dirty:
As to the kitchen utensils being dirty, the cook agrees that they probably were so, since he had a weak team of trainees to help him, and he just could not do his and all their work as well.
Nor did he refute Baker’s claim that the kitchen walls were dirty. He said they would not be fixed in the foreseeable future, because the painting of the kitchen was ‘fairly far down on the list of maintenance work to be done in the village’.
In response to the suggestion that cottages were given insufficient food rations, Woods demanded that Baker name those cottage mothers who had made the claim:
I personally questioned seven of our eleven cottage mothers, and none of these seven admitted to have made any such statement, and all expressed themselves as satisfied with the rations, and preferred to have them given out monthly.
Woods explained that the chops had been fatty because the boy doing the butchering that morning was ‘very new to the work’. The stronger and more experienced boys were up on the farm helping with the harvest and the cook was having his day off.
He rejected the suggestion that the children should be served eggs or the same cooked breakfast as the staff, on the basis that it would cost too much:
The children do not normally have eggs in the main dining hall, since the inception of the school the children have only had porridge or cereal and bread and butter etc … Should it be desired to serve the children with a second cooked dish as well, the budget will have to be considerably increased to allow for the increased consumption of food.
While Woods agreed that the milk was sometimes sour, he suggested Miss Baker may have been mistaken because in November, when she was conducting her inquiry, the cows had been fed on fresh green lucerne pasture, which gives milk a ‘sharp tangy flavour which to the uninitiated is always taken for sour milk’.
Woods did not accept Baker’s claim that there was too little variety in the fresh vegetables served to the children, calling it ‘a gross misstatement’. It was ‘senseless’, he added, to expect tomatoes in winter or cauliflowers in mid-summer.
He said that flies had always been a problem at Fairbridge:
This cook, and all previous cooks before him, have every year had to wage the battle of the flies, and as the present cook is a New Australian, he had still to learn the menace that the Australian blow fly can be.
The fly problem, he suggested, was made worse by the design of the village kitchen, which provided numerous ways for flies to get in:
These include the vegetable door, the coke yard door, the bakery and store door, the milk and meat doorway and two servery doorways. Added to this, numerous children come in and out of the kitchen before and during meals.
Finally, Woods disabused anyone who thought the Baker report would result in more or better food at Fairbridge:
I fear that many of our staff had presumed – quite wrongly – that Miss Baker’s findings would necessarily result in everyone getting more food supplied them in all forms, and so there was the very evident attempt made more or less surreptitiously to paint as black a picture as they could for Miss Baker’s benefit …
I had forewarned the staff not to attempt to do this in a written instruction to them before I went on holiday, but had asked them all to observe the status quo, and in no way to attempt to prejudice or bias Miss Baker’s mind and opinions.
In any event, the Baker report did not result in any significant changes, and the range of food and the way it was managed remained virtually unchanged for the next twenty years.
The first principal of the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong, Beauchamp, was criticised for not enforcing sufficient discipline. It was not a criticism that could be levelled against Principal Woods.
Woods, whose temper was legendary, wouldn’t hesitate to strike a boy down in a fit of rage – something he had been ordered not to do some years before. Most punishments were administered in his office. You had to bend over his desk as he brought the cane down across your backside with as much force as his huge frame could muster. Lennie Magee remembers one of the occasions he was caned in Woods’s office:
I could hardly breathe. Fear like a vice had squeezed all the air out of me. He rose up to his full height … ‘Bend over, you scoundrel.’ … Then thwack. The pain was brilliant white and jagged and it shot from your backside to the top of your head, rebounded off the inside of your skull and sprang straight down to your feet. ‘Stand still, you scoundrel.’ Whack. Because I’d lost my grip on the desk (and life itself) the combined force of twenty stone wielding a stick drove me over the desk and onto his wooden chair.
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Eddie Baker went to Fairbridge as a six-year-old in 1948 and speaks quite positively about his experiences there. He remembers that Woods was so busy running the farm he sometimes caught up on a backlog of punishments by going round the dormitories caning children in the middle of the night.
I quite admired him, because he was a man that probably got along on two or three or four hours’ sleep, if that – and he would be in his office at early hours in the morning doing reports and so forth. But if he had to chastise a child, he would have it in his notebook … Eventually he’d get round to it and it didn’t matter whether it was midnight, one or two in the morning … He’d get everybody out of bed in the dormitory, simply because he had to catch up with what he had to do in his notebook … He brought the canes in under his arm. You’d all be shivering a bit, not knowing which one was going to get it … Then when you were all out of bed … the particular child would be dealt with and then you could get back into bed.
A very special status was afforded those children at Fairbridge who defied authority, and being beaten or having your privileges suspended was considered a badge of honour. This was particularly so for boys who received a public thrashing in Nuffield Hall. Public thrashings, which were illegal, were conducted for particularly serious offences, such as running away from the school, and in cases where Woods wanted to set an example for everyone else. His intention was also to humiliate the child. The public thrashings probably did deter us from misbehaving but they did not humiliate those being punished: to the children of Fairbridge, being publicly thrashed was like winning a special bravery award.
Billy King, who was about the same age as me and came out to Fairbridge on the S.S.
Strathaird
in the same party of children, recalls the public floggings:
What put the fear of God into me was when Woods announced there would be a public thrashing … I still have flashbacks over those episodes and [how] everyone used to gather in the [hall], because I’d never – even over in England – I’d never been beaten or hit or anything like that. And when you came out and had to see something like that – I just couldn’t cope with that at all. I was absolutely terrified.
I often used to think, I’m going to run away from this place, and then the public thrashings used to come into it and that used to stop me from … It was fear; it was just … I just couldn’t handle it. I just couldn’t cope at all.
Michael Walker also remembers being upset about the public thrashings.
When a public thrashing was announced it had a terrible effect on me. All boys had to attend. We all gathered at Nuffield Hall at our cottage tables. Then he [Woods] made each boy [being punished] bend over, hands on knees, while he gave them six of the best. When he had finished, he was breathing heavily and he was a big man anyway, looked ferocious.
I was publicly flogged once, because four of us were caught stealing fruit from the Fairbridge orchard one Thursday afternoon on our way home from school. The Orange High School bus had dropped us off below the farm, on the Mitchell Highway, and as we walked up Amaroo Road we helped ourselves to some overripe pears that hadn’t been harvested. We should have been more careful. Across the paddock, up at the sports field, Woods was sitting on an upturned petrol tin umpiring a game of cricket. He spotted us and within minutes a boy was sent, panting, down to intercept us. As we came through the village gate the boy met us and told us we had to go and see Woods.
The boss went into his customary rage, called us ‘scoundrels’ and said we were to be punished. Usually Woods inflicted punishment pretty soon after the offence, so I was filled with a sickening dread when a couple of days went by. That Saturday at the village lunch he announced that for our dastardly crime we were to be punished that night in the hall, in front of all the boys.
I never fully understood why Woods was so upset about us scrumping a bit of overripe fruit. There were far worse crimes at Fairbridge, such as running away and being brought back by the police, or being caught breaking in to a building and stealing. I had been caught smoking numerous times and been caned, but almost always in Woods’s office. I thought it ironic that I should be punished for doing what the Fairbridge salespeople in England had told us we could do when they were painting Fairbridge as the Promised Land: eating plentiful fruit from the tree.
Woods faced a problem with this particular public flogging: he could belt only three of us. The fourth was a boy named David Newell, the son of a cottage mother who was a tough old bird. Woods would never hit a child of one of the staff members – and certainly not this one’s.
When Woods announced at lunch that the three of us were to be disciplined, my older brother, Dudley, who was never to forget or forgive the incident, was outraged. At the end of our lunch he dragged me to stand and wait with him at the foot of the stage until the boss, who was sitting at the head of the staff table, finished his meal.
‘Would David Newell be given the same punishment, Mr Woods?’ demanded Dudley. I shrank in fear, believing that the confrontation would only make Woods angrier. It did.
As was customary for Woods when he was angry, perspiration appeared on his top, quivering lip. He bawled out my brother with exclamations such as ‘How dare you?’ and ‘Impertinence!’ But Dudley wouldn’t accept Woods’s line, which was that David Newell would be punished by his mother. He insisted that Woods should apply the same punishment to each boy.
I just wanted Dudley to shut up because an angry boss would only hit me harder. I spent an uncomfortable, unsettled, gut-wrenching afternoon anticipating the beating I would be getting that night.
After the evening meal all the boys shuffled over to Nuffield Hall. I remember the silent understanding on the faces of the other kids forced to witness the event. In the hall, Woods lectured everyone about what a terrible crime we had committed and said we now had to be severely punished. When it came time for Woods to flog the three of us I was anxious to get it over with and pushed in front of the others, even though the conventional wisdom was to wait until last because Woods put so much effort into his striking that we thought he would begin to tire himself out. God it hurt. There was an unwritten law that you weren’t to scream out. While many kids let out involuntary yelps, I was so proud that I didn’t make a sound. It also helped that Woods only gave us four cuts each rather than the regular six, which suggests that my brother Dudley’s intervention may have helped after all.
We were lucky to be hit with a big stick or a cane. Woods beat Fairbridge kids of earlier years with a sawnoff hockey stick. Henry McFarlane, who arrived at Fairbridge in the first party of boys in 1938, remembers when eight boys who had run away were publicly flogged with a hockey stick. There were so many boys to be beaten that the work was shared by Woods, the deputy principal and the headmaster of Fairbridge Primary School.
And they caught them and they gave them a public flogging. To me that was wrong … He [Woods] was a pretty brutal bloke … and he was about twenty-one stone – whoosh, whoosh … It was brutal. And it was wrong. They wore themselves out beating those boys. And what was the headmaster of the local school doing getting involved? It had nothing to do with him.
… And you’d always see the kids, when they were having their shower, and when the bruise comes out, it comes out purple and after a while it goes sort of yellow, you know, on the outer. It wouldn’t be allowed today.
