The Forgotten Children (24 page)

Fairbridge was made aware of the serious failure of its education programs early on in its history. In 1944, in anticipation of the resumption of child migration after World War II, the British Government asked for an assessment of the child-migrant schemes in Australia. An investigation of the Fairbridge Farm Schools at Molong and Pinjarra in Western Australia, and the Barnardo’s Farm Schools, was undertaken by Mr W. J. Garnett, the official secretary to the British high commissioner to Australia.

Garnett reported that there was no real prospect of Fairbridge boys becoming owners of farms, one of Fairbridge’s stated aims. He recommended:

While the Fairbridge Society in London accepted Garnett’s report it blamed the Fairbridge administrations in Australia, at Molong and particularly Pinjarra. The basic farm trainee scheme would continue unchanged at Fairbridge for another three decades.

The local Fairbridge Council in Sydney was aware from a very early date that there was a problem with the education of its children. In February 1944 Sir Percival Halse Rogers, a member of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, wrote to the London Fairbridge Society chairman, Sir Charles Hambro, to express concern about the failed education program at Fairbridge. Halse Rogers was the chancellor of Sydney University and a New South Wales Supreme Court judge, and had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford at the same time as Kingsley Fairbridge.

In the late 1940s, after the resumption of child migration, the population of Fairbridge began to grow again. The little Department of Education school at the back of the village, which taught both primary and secondary students, was soon too small for the number of children.

Fairbridge wanted a new and larger school built on site but the Education Department wanted Fairbridge children to attend Molong Central School. Classified as a junior secondary school, it provided three years of secondary schooling to the level of the Intermediate Certificate, and taught a limited number of subjects. The Education Department argued:

Fairbridge resisted the move: it wanted the children to complete their entire education on the farm. It mounted a raft of arguments, including that the children would no longer be able to have a hot midday meal and that Fairbridge could not afford the bus that would be necessary to transport the children to Molong each day. Notwithstanding Fairbridge’s ongoing protests, the Education Department ordered them to send all secondary-school-age children to Molong Central School from the beginning of 1952.

But even within the Education Department there had been reservations about Fairbridge children going to school in Molong. Two years before the change, the superintendent of Secondary School Education had reported:

Even after 1952 Fairbridge agitated for years to have the Education Department build a bigger school on Fairbridge. Nearly three years after the children began attending Molong Central School the chairman of Fairbridge, W. B. Hudson, wrote to the director of education in New South Wales, Cyril Wyndham:

Had Hudson been successful, Fairbridge children would have spent their entire childhood and youth till the age of seventeen on the farm school. As it was, children usually went to Molong Central School for only two or three years, which meant many children, particularly those who went to Fairbridge at a very young age, hardly ever set foot off the farm school for years. Stewart Lee, who came to Fairbridge as a four-year-old, recalls that prior to going to Molong Central School he hardly ever left the farm school:

In 1955, in the absence of any improvement in the academic achievement of the children, the Fairbridge Council in Sydney established an inquiry to look at education at the farm school.
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A copy of the report, which was never made public, has been locked away in a file in Fairbridge’s Sydney offices ever since. The inquiry was prompted by the high level of academic failure of the children, and a concern that this was reflected in problems such as children running away from the farm, being involved in crime and antisocial behaviour, and failing to hold down employment after leaving Fairbridge.

The preamble to the confidential report lists ten reasons to be disappointed by the outcome of Fairbridge children’s education and training: their poor scholastic record; ‘the limited number who seriously attempt to further their education when they leave the school’ their failure to settle down in steady jobs after they leave; ‘the bad reports on Old Fairbridgians from certain responsible quarters’ (presumably respected members of the society); their standard of behaviour while at Fairbridge, including their ‘sexual habits and relations’ abscondings; police offences and near offences; illegitimate children; the discontent evident in Old Fairbridgians’ replies to questionnaires; and, finally, a rebellious attitude of Old Fairbridgians to some Fairbridge staff members.
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The inquiry found that the educational record of Fairbridge was poor, homework was not being done, children from Fairbridge did fewer tertiary courses than other school leavers and they could not hold down jobs. It also made the observation that happy children would not run away from the school.

Fairbridge in Sydney became even more starkly aware of its poor education standards when it compared the 1954 school performance of children who had left Fairbridge at Molong with that of children who had left Fairbridge at Pinjarra in Western Australia. Fairbridge Molong’s results were much poorer than Pinjarra’s. Fourteen per cent of the Pinjarra children left school before completing the second year of secondary school. Twelve per cent did not complete the first year and the other 2 per cent did not complete the second year. In contrast, half the Molong Fairbridge children who left school did not complete the second year of secondary school. Thirty-six per cent did not complete the first year and the other 24 per cent did not complete the second year.

In 1955, Mr G. S. Le Couteur, a member of the Fairbridge Sydney Council, made a number of suggestions aimed at improving the poor educational performance of Fairbridge children.
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One of his suggestions was that they be encouraged to take up hobbies like other Australian children, and that Fairbridge make facilities available for the children to do this.

Woods said that while it was a good idea, it would require significant additional funding. A bigger problem, he added, was that unlike the children who attended Knox, the private school in Sydney that Le Couteur had used as an example, Fairbridge children worked too hard and had too little time for hobbies. He said:

Woods said it was even harder for the trainee boys because they had to rise early in the morning and by the evening they didn’t have the energy to give much time to activities.

To illustrate how inappropriate it would be to encourage hobbies among the children who could not read or write properly, Woods provided a profile of the boys in Gowrie Cottage as an example:

A manual block had been built on the Fairbridge grounds around the same time as the little school was built by the New South Wales Department of Technical and Further Education, and twice a week a teacher came out to the farm to teach metalwork and other trades to the trainee boys of fifteen and sixteen. The teacher wrote to Fairbridge complaining that most of the boys had left school but were unable to read or write. Hudson wrote a letter to the Department of Education’s regional head in Bathurst saying:

Hudson went on to ask that the local headmaster be allowed to vary the school syllabus to allow the children to be taught basic reading and writing skills. The Education Department replied that the headmaster already had the authority to vary the syllabus to meet the reading, writing and arithmetic needs of these underprivileged pupils, ‘however he is maintaining an educational program which provides for the spiritual, cultural, social and other needs of the child’.
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Stung by this rebuff, Hudson shot back:

The episode did not change the education of Fairbridge children.

From our party that arrived in June 1959, the four primary-school-age children started the next day at the primary school on Fairbridge. Of the secondary-school-age children, two of us, Billy King and I, were sent to Molong Central School, but interestingly, the others, including my brothers Richard and Dudley, were sent to Orange High School. Never before had so many children from a newly arrived party been sent to Orange High School, which offered a wider range of subjects than Molong Central and taught five years of secondary school to matriculation level, rather than stopping at the Intermediate Certificate.

What we didn’t know was that the Education Department had appointed a new local school inspector, Keith Morton. It appears that he had instructed Fairbridge to give more children the opportunity of a high-school education.

After attending Molong Central School with the other Fairbridge kids for a couple of weeks I was pulled out of the classroom by two inspectors from the Education Department and taken to sit on a bench in the playground. One of them asked: ‘Do you want to go to Orange High School to be with your brothers?’ I didn’t. I had found settling in to Fairbridge very difficult and was at last starting to make new friends among the kids I caught the bus to Molong Central School with each day. Despite telling the inspectors ‘Thanks but no thanks’, I was off to Orange High School.

Those of us who went each day to Orange High School were different from the other Fairbridge children. Not only did we leave breakfast early and miss most of the after-school work and other village activity, we also dressed and looked different. Mary O’Brien, who went to Orange High School with me, remembers being regarded as a snob by the other Fairbridge kids.