The Forgotten Children (26 page)

Camping out was the most enjoyable part of being in the Scouts. Typically in winter, we would load up the old Fairbridge bus or a truck with all our gear and head off for the weekend to some remote spot. A particular favourite was out near the old nineteenth-century gold-mining site of Ophir, where we would pan for alluvial gold. At night on these camps patrols would be pitched against one another in what Woods called ‘wide games’. The object of the game varied but always involved securing or holding some territory or some object against the other patrols, and always involved a physical contest between the boys, which Woods loved, as did we.

In addition to the Scouts and the Guides many of the children were members of the Molong Fairbridge Junior Farmers Club. One of the functions of the club was the preparation of an exhibit of all the produce of the farm that would be displayed at the annual country shows in various towns around the district. Some of the kids took the Junior Farmers seriously but most of us saw it as an opportunity to occasionally get off the farm to travel to some country town, assemble our exhibit and have a good time. The Junior Farmers Club gave out certificates for various things and I remember being given a Lamb and Sheep Breeding Certificate, although I had absolutely no idea what any of it was about.

Most of us loved sport and there was a lot of it at Fairbridge. We played every Thursday afternoon on the Fairbridge sports fields and again on Saturday or Sunday afternoons against competition in the surrounding towns. The main winter sport was Rugby League for the boys and hockey for the girls, although the boys also played hockey. Quite often we would travel to Orange to play one sport in the morning and another in the afternoon, when Fairbridge children fondly remember each being bought a meat pie from the Golden Key café for lunch. We also played soccer at Fairbridge and each Easter staged the inter-cottage Fairbridge athletics carnival. In summer we played cricket and competed in the inter-cottage swimming carnival.

Horse riding was popular but there was only a handful of horses available at Fairbridge. A few of the children were members of the local Molong Pony Club. The trainee boys did most of the serious riding when they worked on sheep mustering at the farm.

An annual sporting highlight was the Forbes football carnival, a day-long knock-out Rugby League tournament for hundreds of boys’ teams from all over the west of the state. The Forbes football carnival was a major event on the New South Wales bush calendar for most of the twentieth century. The teams were not determined by age but by weight. Teams in the lightest weight division, whose players were under five stone seven pounds, were known as the 5.7s. Then there were the 6.7s, the 7.7s, the 8.7s, the 9.7s, the 10.7s, and finally the open weight division. Forbes was about one hundred kilometres from Fairbridge and we would leave in the early-morning darkness to drive the back bush roads through Eugowra to be weighed and have our weight limit stamped indelibly on our foreheads. Woods liked to have all the Fairbridge children weighed in early before taking us to the local Mum and Dad Café, where we were allowed to gorge ourselves on a huge cooked breakfast of sausages, bacon, egg and baked beans. Any advantage from playing with a bit of extra weight was offset by the fact we staggered out to play our first game of the day with a stomach full of undigested food.

We never did that well at the carnival because at some stage we would meet a well-organised team that had been properly coached while we had only ever been told to grab the ball and run hard when we were in possession, and run and hit the other guys hard when they had the ball. Some of the Fairbridge boys, however, remember their teams doing well at Forbes. John Wolvey recalls playing at Forbes in a very successful Fairbridge team in the early 1950s.

Winning at sport was important to most Fairbridge kids – particularly against ‘town’ kids, to whom we felt socially inferior.

Most former Fairbridge children say that the best thing they remember about their experience was the bond they had with other children; and for many this camaraderie has survived since they left the farm school. Asked what were the highlights of Fairbridge and what he enjoyed the most, David Wilson, who spent ten years at the farm having arrived as a six-year-old in 1951, says:

Cigarette smoking was one facet of bonding at Fairbridge. Nearly all the boys and many of the girls smoked, even though it was a serious offence that would attract a severe caning and the loss of privileges. Woods absolutely detested smoking and it seemed to flourish in almost a direct inverse proportion to his determination to stamp it out. Most of the children began smoking regularly at around twelve or thirteen years of age and typically left Fairbridge at seventeen years of age with an addictive habit.

Woods’s efforts to stamp out smoking were all the more in vain because smoking was not then considered socially undesirable and it was perfectly acceptable for women and men to smoke in just about any social situation. Woods’s added difficulty was that practically every staff member, including the cottage mothers, smoked, some of them very heavily.

Given the shortage of money on the farm, cigarettes became valuable in their own right as a currency with which you could buy almost anything from other children. We smoked when we thought we were safest from detection, often sneaking out of our cottages at night, in defiance of the village curfew. Most of the Fairbridge children had worked out the habits of their cottage mother and had a fair idea when she was likely to have settled down in her quarters and be less likely to be patrolling the kids’ end of the cottage. But Woods would often patrol the village at night and, being a nonsmoker, in the clean country air could smell a cigarette from a long way off.

Amongst most of the children at Fairbridge it was also acceptable to be a thief. You could steal money, food, cigarettes or whatever you could from wherever you could, so long as it wasn’t from another Fairbridge kid. We would break in to buildings if we thought there was something worthwhile to steal.

Once, on the way back from church in Molong on Sunday morning some of us discovered that we could slide out a few glass louvres at the back of a service station, crawl in and steal cigarettes and chocolates. It was a lucrative source and we never got greedy, only ever taking a few packets of cigarettes at a time so that it would not be too obvious to the owner when he opened the store on Monday morning. Eventually, other Fairbridge children found out and went overboard, killing a good thing. The owner couldn’t miss seeing that so much of his stock was missing and reported it to the Molong police, who in turn notified Woods. From then on the store was made more secure and a watch was kept on it over the weekends, making breaking in a more dangerous proposition.

Those of us who attended Orange High School were acutely aware that the Orange kids always had money and we had none. To generate a bit of extra income we worked out how to break in to the stationery store at Fairbridge, which was a tiny room at the back of the small guesthouse next to the principal’s house. We would load up our school cases, which we called ‘ports’, with purloined pens, pencils and pads until they were bulging and then sell them to the Orange High School students at attractively discounted prices. The enterprise meant that we could supplement our unpalatable Fairbridge sandwich lunch with a cream bun or something else exotic from the Orange High School canteen. Unfortunately, the Fairbridge bursar, Harry Harrop, could not but notice the dramatic shortage of stationery in the store and moved to make it more secure. We were lucky it was Harry and we escaped the inquisition and retribution that would normally follow such a discovery.

For some years a number of Fairbridge kids were aware of a small hole in the wall that separated the bakehouse from the village store. The hole had been deliberately made into the back of a locked store cupboard that housed the chocolate and other sweets that were brought out on Saturday afternoons for sale at the village tuckshop. The hole was kept secret from the staff, hidden behind the big bakehouse trough in which the yeast, salt, flour and water were mixed to make the village bread. By moving the trough away from the wall we could reach through, stretch and just manage to get our fingers on the booty.

To start with, access was limited to the boys who were rostered to work as trainees on the bakery, but over time more and more of us used it, provided the trainee on duty would let us into the bakehouse. Over time the hole in the wall was made bigger and bigger as boys tried to reach further and further into the cupboard. Eventually, Harry noticed that whole shelves were bare – and then he noticed the hole. Legend has it that the day he found the hole in the cupboard a hand belonging to bakehouse trainee Brian Osbourne was groping around in the cupboard and Harry grabbed it, and that was the end of that.

One of the boys’ biggest thievery campaigns continued for some years and the target was the village pocket money supply. Every Saturday after lunch in Nuffield Hall the boss came round to each cottage table with a little notebook and a metal cash box filled with coins. He would put the cash box in front of one of the older boys, stand behind him and call out the names of the other cottage children one by one, and the amount they were each to be paid. As Woods called out a name the boy with the cash box would take out the designated amount of pocket money and pass it down the table to the grateful recipient. At the same time, he would steal as many coins as possible and pass them under the table to the boys sitting alongside him. Outside after lunch they would divide the spoils. The scam, involving a number of cottages, seemed to go on for years and could only have continued undetected because Woods was a careless administrator who never attempted to reconcile the little notebook with the money left in the box.

Occasionally boys – and on the rare occasion, girls – would run away from Fairbridge. It was practically impossible to escape for long because the police would immediately be alerted. Eventually the boys – with no money and, more importantly, nowhere to go – would be found, brought back to Fairbridge, punished and have their privileges withdrawn for long periods. Nonetheless, some of the boys would run away again – and the more they were punished the higher they were regarded by the other children.

Usually someone ran away every few months. As in a jail full of prisoners, the whispers would swirl around the dining hall at breakfast the next morning that such-and-such a cottage mother had reported that so-and-so had not slept in his bed and couldn’t be accounted for. The news that someone had escaped caused great excitement and we would all speculate on where they had gone, which direction they were heading and how long they might be able to elude their captors for.

Derek Moriarty ran away from Fairbridge on a number of occasions.

When runaways had stolen food, money or a car they would end up in the children’s court, where they might be sentenced to serve a period in the boys’ prison at Mount Penang at Gosford, north of Sydney. Even when a child had not committed a criminal offence he was sometimes sent to the boys’ prison simply for running away and becoming a ‘neglected child’ under the Child Welfare Act.

Generally children ran away in groups of two or three. Once, six boys ran away and somehow stayed together till they were all caught north of Sydney more than a week later. Sometimes a boy ran away on his own, such as Alan ‘Eggy’ Taylor from our cottage. He was away for about a week and when he returned he fascinated us with his stories of survival in the bush. He told us that when his meagre escape rations ran out he survived on bush tucker; he didn’t even have matches with which to light a fire to cook on. We didn’t believe him when he said he had caught blue-tongue and frill-necked lizards and eaten them raw, so the next Saturday afternoon he brought back to Canonbar Cottage a live lizard to prove his point. With all of us standing around in a circle in the cottage bathroom he swung the lizard by its tail and smashed its head on the laundry tub, sliced open its belly, turned it inside out and nibbled at the meat inside. I believed everything Eggy told us after that.