The Forgotten Children (25 page)

If at Fairbridge I felt set apart from the other children because I went to Orange High, at Orange High I felt like an undesirable social outcast from the ‘institution’ out on Molong Road. Until we Fairbridge kids were able to somehow get hold of second-hand Orange High School black blazers with gold trim, and long grey trousers, we stood out from the thousand other students at the school in our grey woollen coats and short grey trousers.

Derek Moriarty, who had arrived at Fairbridge eight years before me, recalls that he enjoyed going to Orange High School:

Laurie Field, who arrived at Fairbridge as a fourteen-year-old, describes how difficult it was being a Fairbridge kid and going to Orange High School:

Mary O’Brien has similar memories.

My school results at the end of the first year were a disaster but Orange High School and Fairbridge made allowance for the fact that my year had been disrupted by migration from England, and the challenges of settling in to a new school and a different education system. However, over the next year my school marks continued to plummet and I became less and less engaged by schoolwork. I was far from alone: many Fairbridge children’s school performance declined the longer they were there. Bob Stephens is still upset about it:

Mary O’Brien says, ‘I had done well in school until I went to Australia.’ At Fairbridge her school results slipped, and she feels that this damaged her self-esteem, which was already suffering at Fairbridge. ‘It was just another sort of nail in the coffin of damaging my self-esteem, which took years to recover from.’

At Orange High School I became increasingly rebellious and antisocial. I regularly played truant with a few other Fairbridge boys, even though we had no spending money so there wasn’t much to do. We hung around the parks in the town until it was time to catch the school bus back to Fairbridge. Meanwhile, both my brothers were making a better go of it. They were fitting in, developing friendships and performing better in exams and extracurricular activities, particularly sport.

At the start of my third year at Orange High I was summoned to see the legendary principal Leo ‘the Lion’ O’Sullivan, whom I knew well from my regular visits to his office for a caning. He seemed to enjoy telling me that I was being thrown out of the school. ‘We deem you to be uneducable,’ I remember him saying.

‘Don’t you mean “uneducatable”?’ I asked, not realising that ‘uneducable’ was correct.

I hitchhiked back to Fairbridge Farm that morning, to be confronted by an angry Woods, whom O’Sullivan had phoned with the news. Woods was waiting to berate me for the huge and wasted cost to Fairbridge of sending me to the high school for the best part of the last two years.

Because I was only fourteen, still below the minimum school-leaving age, Woods couldn’t put me to work full-time on the farm as a trainee. The next day I was back at Molong Central School.

I didn’t feel like such a social outcast at Molong Central, where the Fairbridge kids had security of numbers. David Wilson, who was close to my age and went to Molong Central with me for a while, remembers how we Fairbridge kids stuck together there and kept pretty much to ourselves: ‘I always remember we had what we called “the pub”. It was a corner of the playground and that’s where all we Fairbridge kids sat at lunchtime.’

Molong Central School was less challenging than Orange High; I swapped French, physics and chemistry for woodwork, art and biology. Later that year I passed the Intermediate Certificate, which I remember the Fairbridge deputy principal, Harry Harrop, discounting as ‘something they hand to you on a plate’.

But I was luckier than most other Fairbridge children because I had been allowed to stay at school a few months beyond my fifteenth birthday to sit the Intermediate Certificate exams. Looking back, I think Fairbridge was more generous in regard to the education of those children who had parents following them out, or whose parents were already in Australia.

Ultimately, Fairbridge would blame the poor education results on the children – whom they would officially describe as ‘retarded’ – and on their deprived backgrounds and failed education in Britain before they came to Australia.

At one stage the Sydney Fairbridge Council invited the headmasters of Fairbridge Primary School and Molong Central School to their meeting to discuss the continuing poor education results of Fairbridge children. The minutes of the meeting record:

The description of Fairbridge children as ‘retarded’ is a continuing theme in the explanation of their poor educational results and was at one stage included in the annual report of Fairbridge Farm School Molong.
²⁷
This explanation is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the children who fared better at school while at Fairbridge tended to be those who came out to Australia at a later age, having spent more of their childhood in England and less time at Fairbridge. The children who left Fairbridge with the poorest education tended to be those who had come to Fairbridge at a younger age to spend a larger part of their childhood and schooling at Fairbridge and a shorter part of their childhood in Britain.

In its ongoing campaign to recruit British children Fairbridge gave no hint of the unhappy state of its education record. At the end of the 1950s it was still promoting education and career training. In 1959, the New South Wales Fairbridge Council said:

The pledge to help Fairbridge children who earned scholarships to university was a fairly easy promise to keep since, at that time, none of them had.

The failure of Fairbridge to deliver on its promise of a decent education was one of its most serious shortcomings. Having already endured years of social isolation and a childhood of emotional privation, the typical Fairbridgian also had to contend with leaving the farm school at seventeen years of age to confront the world with no educational qualifications.

Beneath the strict routine and discipline at Fairbridge we did manage to build our own world, whose value system was at odds with the official order. Particularly among the boys, misbehaviour, smoking, stealing, defiance of authority, bullying and absconding (with police in pursuit) were all part of life on the farm.

We gave one another nicknames, usually based on physical characteristics or distinctive behavioural traits. ‘Stumpy’ was squat and nuggety; his younger brother ‘Runty’ was small for his age; and I was ‘Faddy’ because I was overweight when I arrived at Fairbridge. Other fatties at Fairbridge included ‘Tubby’ Walker and ‘Fatman’ Sinclair. No one was actually overweight at Fairbridge so they too probably acquired the epithets when they first arrived. ‘Muscles’ had a body builder’s physique and ‘Shark’ had fine, shiny teeth. Gwen Miller was known as ‘Mini’ and Geraldine Winn as ‘Jellybean’ because they were so tiny. ‘Whoopee’ could fart at will, ‘Bean’ had an extremely long nose and ‘Swagman’ was extremely untidy. As a little boy, ‘Bubbles’ had bubbles of snot coming out of his nose and ‘Goggs’ had big round eyes. ‘Snowy’ and ‘Flossy’ both had mops of very blond hair and ‘Smiley’ simply had a happy face. One boy was called ‘Maggot’ because from the time he arrived at Fairbridge as a four-year-old boy, he ate anything and everything he could. ‘Whopper’ was notorious for telling lies and ‘Eggy’ had a pronounced egg-shaped head.

The most enjoyable times were when we were able to escape from the farm and its strict routine. On Sunday afternoons it was possible to seek special permission – first from your cottage mother and then the principal – to leave the farm and go down to Molong Creek. As a treat you could take a small ration of tea-leaves and sugar and some milk, light a fire and boil a billy. In the warmer months we would strip off and swim in the creek, although at the risk of getting a nasty bite from a yabby, or attracting leeches. On a typical Sunday afternoon there might be half a dozen fires alight along Molong Creek below Fairbridge Farm.

Rabbit hunting was also very popular, especially before myxomatosis was released in the 1950s to cull the rabbit population, which had reached plague proportions and caused terrible damage to farming land across Australia. By the time I arrived in 1959 the disease had dramatically reduced rabbit numbers. When we were out hunting we could easily tell which rabbits were infected because they were so sick it was easy to run them down and they had ugly red sores, particularly around their eyes.

Rabbiting was more than recreation: the catching of a rabbit meant a nice stew back in the cottage that evening, which was a delightful change from the monotony of mutton. Before the 1950s rabbiting was also a way for Fairbridge kids to earn a bit of extra pocket money. Peter Bennett recalls the rabbit plagues before myxomatosis:

In the early days guns had sometimes been used for rabbit hunting but were forbidden following the suicide of two boys, Peter Johnson and later Joey Smith, who both used guns to take their lives. Rabbiting would have been easier with dogs but dogs were also forbidden at Fairbridge. For a while a few of us secretly kept one in the paddock down behind the village school but it became increasingly difficult and dangerous for us to steal the meat for its food. In the end we had no choice but to let it go; we released it out of the farm to fend for itself and had no idea if it managed to survive.

For a while some of the boys kept ferrets, hiding them in the wooden lockers that ran around the wall of each cottage dining room. The increasing smell forced them to get rid of the ferrets before it became too obvious to their cottage mothers. In some other cottages the boys had permission to own ferrets, and they were kept in special little pens a safe distance from the cottages.

Michael Walker, who was at Fairbridge for ten years after arriving as a six-year-old with his five-year-old brother in 1950, remembers the joy of free afternoons and going rabbiting.

A lot of Fairbridge kids were taken in by local families for part of the Christmas holidays and a number of them had a wonderful time, going back year after year to the same family. Many kept in touch with their adopted holiday parents for decades after leaving the farm school.

However, those of us who were not sent to stay with an Australian family felt no loss, because the highlight of the year was the annual summer holiday, when we were taken camping for a fortnight at Gerroa beach on the coast of New South Wales, south of Wollongong. The yearly trip to Gerroa was regarded by Fairbridge kids as one of life’s great adventures. Sand, flies, mosquitoes, sunburn, heat, humidity and sleeping on the hard ground in old canvas army tents may sound unpleasant but we loved every minute of it.

As Michael Walker recalls:

At the start of the holiday we loaded the tents and marquees, pots and pans, food and clothing into the old Fairbridge bus, then drove 200 miles, over the Blue Mountains. On the steepest slopes we were ordered to walk behind the overloaded bus. Once we had crossed the mountains we stopped at Penrith, on the outskirts of Sydney, where the local Rotary or Lions Club put on a lunch; we would eat town bread and enough free ice-cream to make ourselves sick. Then we headed south through Wollongong, Kiama and Gerringong to Gerroa, where we set up camp.

In those days, before Gerroa became a popular and crowded caravan park, we had most of the campsite to ourselves. In contrast to the regimentation of Fairbridge, we could do pretty much what we wanted, with a minimum of supervision. We all have memories of the boss when we were at Gerroa because he became far more relaxed and better humoured than he was back at Fairbridge. Almost every day there were organised events but they were not compulsory and most of the time we preferred to do our own thing. Within about a week, in the absence of enforced rules, we began to become increasingly feral, taking on the appearance of the choirboys in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
.

We were particularly excited about going out to play at night-time, either canoeing on the lagoon or sneaking up on other campers hoping to catch sight of any young girls who might be staying there, although at thirteen and fourteen years of age and socially clumsy we wouldn’t have known what to say to them if they had spoken to us.

We had very little money to buy ice-creams, soft drinks and sweets but quickly discovered a way to get some. In those days you paid a deposit on a bottle of soft drink and were given a refund when you returned the empty bottle. There was a little kiosk on the campsite and all the empty soft drink bottles were stored behind a high wooden fence at the back. Notwithstanding the barbed wire on top of the fence, we managed on most nights to scale it and cart off as many empty bottles as we could carry, returning the next day to collect the refunds.

Kids above the age of about twelve were rostered to help with the preparation of the food and the washing up, though most of the work was done by the girls. Lennie ‘Moon’ Magee and I were assigned to make sure our campsite had enough fresh water for drinking, cooking and washing up. At least twice a day we would take a ten-gallon milk urn that had been borrowed from the Fairbridge dairy about half a kilometre to the camp tap. Bringing the water back was incredibly difficult for a couple of thirteen-year-olds. We staggered only a few feet before having to put the heavy urn down for a rest – and it would have been much harder for Lennie, who was nowhere near my size.

We spent most of our days playing around, mostly without hats or sunscreen, swimming in the notoriously rough surf of Seven Mile Beach, or fishing off the rocks. There were no lifesavers there then and it is a wonder that no one was lost in the sea over the many years Fairbridge children went to Gerroa.

The boys and girls had separate tents, and we slept on the ground. It was too hot at that time of year to sleep under any covers, and we would roll up the flaps on the side of the tent in the hope of attracting a little breeze. The camp was pitched close to the lagoon and many of the kids were covered in mosquito bites, but nobody seemed to mind.

We were happy at Gerroa and were very sad to leave. The long trip home up over the mountains taxed the Fairbridge bus, and the return journey was never without incident, as the old machine huffed and puffed and overheated. On one trip back to Fairbridge something snapped in the gearbox and we were all left in a bushland park at Lawson in the Blue Mountains in the searing heat, with no water, for four to five hours while they went to Bathurst to find a new part.

At Fairbridge most of the boys joined the Wolf Cubs and later the Boy Scouts; the girls joined the Brownies and then the Girl Guides. Though not compulsory it was expected of the children and actively encouraged by Woods, who was the Scoutmaster and Wolf Cub pack leader while his wife Ruth ran both the Guides and the Brownies.

The Scouting and Guide movements reinforced Fairbridge’s association with Britain and the Empire. Their founder, Baden-Powell, had been a champion of the Empire, serving in the British Army in India, Afghanistan and South Africa, where he became every British boy’s hero for his leadership in the seven-month siege of the British-held town of Mafeking during the Boer War. The Scouts’ Oath, which we were expected to recite at every meeting, was:

In the Wolf Cubs we recited:

To most Fairbridge boys the Scouts provided an opportunity for adventure and an escape from the drudgery and routine of the farm school. While normal Boy Scouts earnt merit badges for such things as stamp collecting, cooking or even gardening, the Fairbridge troop – with encouragement from Woods – was hardy, outdoorsy and tough. Most of us only acquired one merit badge, the ‘Backwoodsman’. To earn it you had to survive in the bush for a couple of days with limited food, build and sleep in your own bivouac, cook a meal without utensils, and kill and eat some wild animal.

The Fairbridge kids loved getting this merit badge because it meant a weekend at Molong Creek, where it was easy to collect branches and bark to build a shelter, fresh water was plentiful, and the yabbies were easy to catch using a bit of old mutton tied to a line of string as bait. Some of the kids who couldn’t catch rabbits caught magpies instead. They propped up a box with a length of wood that had a string tied to it, and placed a bit of mutton on the ground underneath the box. When the bird went under the box to eat the mutton they pulled the string. Woods would come down on Sunday afternoon to inspect our endeavours, so we had to be careful to hide any cigarettes and contraband food.

The boss was proud of his Scout troop and was always looking for ways to demonstrate that we were better than the many other troops in the district. He had the Scouts and Guides thoroughly practise marching so that when we attended the annual cherry blossom parade or the ANZAC Day memorial parade in Orange we would be the smartest of all the outfits. We normally felt like second-class citizens when we went to local towns so we were happy to show we could do something better than the town kids could.

Before the Orange Country Show one year, Woods took us into the bush west of Larras Lee, where we camped and cut down gum trees. We constructed a big bridge over the local creek with the wood, held together with diagonal and square rope lashings. The following week we turned up at the Orange Show with a truck full of tree trunks and ropes, and within a few hours were able to construct the bridge again in front of a large, admiring crowd.