Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
The Forgotten Children (29 page)
Smiley and Bobby Wilson went down below the farm school and bivouacked at Molong Creek, and Bobby’s younger brother Ronnie, who was still at Fairbridge, supplied them with stolen food.
And then Bobby and I hit the track for three months after that, you know, just bumming about. We got the track ration and all, the swagman’s special track ration. You got thirty shillings of groceries … you couldn’t buy booze … it was a voucher. You could buy a tobacco pouch and papers … Thirty bob was a lot of money when you didn’t have to pay for accommodation … You could get the vouchers once a week from the town police station but if you went to the police station in the next town two days later you could get another voucher.
Eventually Smiley met up with his brother Syd again.
So I went to Wollongong and I got a job with Syd in the coalmines down at Port Kembla. It was all horsedrawn … Four ton of coal behind a horse. About three to four miles underground … I went to the steelworks after that.
When he was twenty years old Smiley was one of a number of Fairbridge boys who were conscripted into the Australian Army in the late 1960s and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. After the army Smiley worked as a coach driver, a bus conductor and a prison warder. His second wife, Kerry, encouraged him to enrol in the course that helped him read and write properly.
For many years now, Smiley has been helping Old Fairbridgians to search for information about their long-lost families and fill out the necessary forms. There are many cases where children have spent years, even decades, trying to find their parents, with a lack of cooperation and occasionally some resistance from Fairbridge.
John Brookman was sent to the Northcote home in Victoria as an eight-year-old in 1939 and was transferred to Fairbridge at Molong in 1944. He had no brothers or sisters or any other relatives in Australia. He began asking Woods about his family in the UK when he was fourteen, and started searching for relatives when he was twenty-one years old. After more than thirty years, and with the help of a genealogist, he finally tracked his mother down. She had died the year before. John complained that he received no help from Fairbridge in his quest to find his mother:
I was the one who suffered most as I was institution-alised up to the age of seventeen years and left the institution [Fairbridge] not knowing anyone whom I could contact regarding my family. For years I tried many times to trace my family, mainly through the Fairbridge Farm School Society in London or through Fairbridge Farm School Molong, without avail.
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John was never to experience family life. After spending his entire childhood in institutions he left Fairbridge aged seventeen and drifted from one labouring job to another. He never married. For many years he worked as a farm labourer at Peak Hill in the west of the state and returned to Fairbridge at twenty-one to live and work as a labourer on village maintenance. He also worked as a train guard with the New South Wales railways and for many years lived in a caravan working for the New South Wales Department of Main Roads, travelling around and camping near the available work.
John was never to develop friendships or relationships outside of the Fairbridge network. He spent most of his holidays back at Fairbridge Farm because he had nowhere else to go. He stayed in Gloucester House, which had been built to accommodate visiting Old Fairbridgians. For most of his life he lived alone, although he did flat with some other ex-Fairbridge boys in Sydney for a while in the 1960s, and would sometimes spend weekends with an ex-Fairbridge boy who had married and started a family. Some boys who were at Fairbridge after John say that when they were conscripted into the Australian Army and sent to Vietnam he regularly posted them newspapers from Australia.
When Brookman, as a fourteen-year-old, first asked if Woods could find out anything about his family, Woods wrote to the Fairbridge Society in London, who in turn wrote to the children’s home John had come from in 1939. They were told: ‘I very much regret that we can obtain no information.’
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When John returned to Fairbridge to work as the village maintenance man he again sought information but was only able to track down some photos taken of him at the children’s home before he left England. For the next few years he made inquiries at the church where he was baptised in Brighton in the UK, the Salvation Army Missing Peoples Office and the Red Cross, all ‘again to no avail’.
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In 1979 he planned to go back to England with another Old Fairbridgian, Syd Lee, to carry on the search, but he was unable to obtain an Australian passport because he had difficulty tracking down a copy of his birth certificate from Fairbridge. Disheartened, Brookman let the trail go cold until he was put on to the Australian Society of Genealogists in Sydney, who in 1983 put him in touch with genealogist Peter Bennett in Southampton, England. In April 1985 Bennett was able to tell Brookman:
I have now completed your researches, except for the difficult task of relating the story. Briefly, I have discovered your cousin and he cared for your mother until she passed on last year.
The cousin, also named John Brookman, was to provide a great deal of information, and had written a short history of the family. John Brookman in Australia corresponded with his cousin and planned to visit him in the UK. However, his cousin died unexpectedly in his London office on the eve of his retirement, so the two never met. The surviving John Brookman was given a copy of the family history written by his cousin, and it revealed his mother had an equally tragic life to his own. Dorothy, known to the family as Dolly, was born in 1895:
A pretty child with fair hair, it would seem that of all the people her life was going to be a happy one. But unfortunately it was not so, and the tale that unfolds shows that her life was a very sad one.
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During World War I Dolly was a nurse. She was to marry an officer she had met at the military hospital but was prevented from doing so at the last minute by her stern Victorian father.
His main objection was that Dolly, having had TB should never marry, though the family considered this merely as an excuse so that he could tie her to the family, where she could keep house with her mother, and also look after her [mentally retarded] sister May. Dolly remained a spinster.
A decade later Dolly was helping with the running of the family’s guesthouse in Cavendish Place, near the waterfront at Eastbourne, when she had an affair with a married man who worked at a chicken farm up on Beachy Head. She became pregnant and her father ‘went berserk. He ordered her to get out of his house immediately and never come back, and within hours she was out’. Help came from her brother Leonard and his wife, who lived across the road in Cavendish Place and secretly took her in.
Dolly had to remain hidden inside all day every day, but could take walks out along the promenade after dark when no one would recognise her. It must be remembered that Eastbourne was a town where Victorian people and Victorian morals ruled supreme, and the shame that would have descended upon the Brookman family were the truth to come out would have been horrendous.
How could she keep the baby? Her father would never have her back home, and there was no man to support her. In the end she had only one choice – to have the baby adopted or put in a home.
And so on a cold wet day in November 1930, Leonard took his sister to a maternity home in Brighton, and on November 10 – Dolly’s 35th birthday – she gave birth to a son. Six days after the birth of her baby Leonard again made the trip to Brighton and brought her back to number 3 Cavendish Place, but without the baby.
Back at No 8 Cavendish Place [the family’s guesthouse], for some time Emily Palmer [Dolly’s mother] pleaded the case with Thomas to take his daughter back, and at last he relented and took her back. But only on one condition, that she never spoke to him, or he to her and for eight years that condition was religiously kept.
And so apart from the father and the daughter not speaking to each other, everything turned back to normal at No 8.
And so the 1930s passed uneventfully. Dolly worked hard at No 8 Cavendish Place, managing all the upstairs rooms and also helping to look after her sister May.
During World War II, Dolly worked in a munitions factory, then moved back to the guesthouse as guests began returning after the war. Dolly’s father died in 1957, May had a series of strokes, the guesthouse was sold, and Dolly and May went to live in Westbury, where May died in 1976.
Although Dolly missed the company of her sister, she took on a new lease of life, and now 72 years of age she was at last free of encumbrances. She got out as much as possible to her friends and friends visited her. For two years she continued happily in this way, but it was not to be for long. Happiness was never to be for long where Dolly was concerned.
One cold night in early December 1969 a neighbour happened to get out of bed in the early hours of a Monday morning, and looking across the road at Dolly’s house noticed a white light in the front-room downstairs window. He dressed and crossed over to see what it was and it appeared to be a television set left on. When they broke in they found Dolly unconscious on the floor of the lounge, and she was rushed to hospital. A brain haemorrhage was diagnosed, and it was thought that she would not live.
But Dolly did not die then, though perhaps it would have been kinder for her if she had done so. She was taken from the little cottage hospital at Westbury to St Johns at Trowbridge, and here she lived for a further 14 1/2 years until her death in 1984. From the time she was taken ill until her death she never spoke again, nor could she comprehend anything.
Former friends of Brookman say the revelations about his mother and a trip he took to the UK in 1988 to fit the pieces of his past together were devastating for John. ‘He was never the same when he came back,’ recalls Syd Lee.
It was often the case that Fairbridge children, after decades of hoping and searching, found the reality disappointing and unfulfilling. Brookman was like a lot of Fairbridge children who felt incomplete until they reconnected with their family. Yet what Brookman discovered were a couple of surviving distant cousins who had little knowledge of the family history, no knowledge of John and little in common with him. He learnt that his mother had led an altogether tragic life; and the one person who had some empathy for the story, his cousin John, had also died before he reached England. There was no one there for him.
Brookman returned to Australia, where he was living alone in a small apartment in Orange he had bought with a payout from the Department of Main Roads following an injury to his back. He was drinking heavily and died in his sleep in 1991. He was only sixty years old.
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A
GAINST THE
T
IDE
At the start the Fairbridge scheme was enthusiastically embraced by the British ruling elite who thought it was virtuous for rescuing destitute children from their impoverished backgrounds and providing them with a fresh start, and for strengthening the British Empire by sending out white stock to populate her colonies. Its standing was further enhanced by the public and financial support it received from the British aristocracy and royalty.
Yet the day the school opened in 1938 its founding principles were already looking dated. Within five years a continual stream of internal reports and official investigations began to make Fairbridge’s failings at Molong apparent.
Throughout its history Fairbridge repeatedly rejected criticism and resisted change, even where reform would have improved the welfare and prospects of the children. When confronted with evidence of brutality it ignored the information; it took no action against staff it knew were guilty of committing terrible acts against children. Whenever it was seriously tested Fairbridge was able to muster enormous power and influence in high places.
One of the early attempts to persuade Fairbridge to address the flaws in its scheme was made by E. R. Heath, who went to Fairbridge Farm as the farm supervisor when it opened in 1938 and became its principal in 1940. When he resigned in 1943 he wrote a special report highlighting the failure of the Fairbridge trainee scheme, which he said placed too much emphasis on the use of the children as farm labour and provided too little training and learning.
After nearly five years at the Fairbridge Farm, Molong and before relinquishing control of the School there are several matters that I wish to bring before the notice of the Council. During my association with Fairbridge, its failures as well as its virtues have become apparent to me and I offer these suggestions briefly but frankly in the hope they may be of some use to the Council in future planning.
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The report, which has never been made public, went on to say that more adult supervisors needed to be employed:
Too much stress has been and is being laid on the ratio of staff to children and a wrong but general feeling seems to be that all or most of the work should be done by the children. They do it now to the detriment of their training. So much time is spent in doing routine work and there are so few instructors that there is little time in which to learn. This applies to the farm as well as the village as there the stress is laid on the amount we produce rather than on the course of training we give.
No changes were introduced as a result of Heath’s report; the use of trainees as cheap farm labour continued unchanged for the life of Fairbridge.
Fairbridge was again made aware of problems with its scheme a year later due to a far more substantial investigation by the British high commission in Canberra. In October 1944, Mr W. J. Garnett, official secretary to the British high commissioner in Canberra, wrote a comprehensive forty-page report titled ‘Report on Farm Schools in Australia’.
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Garnett argued that the pause in child migration caused by World War II provided an opportunity to reassess the farm-school system.
The date when the migration of children can be resumed is still uncertain and the time is therefore opportune to review the purpose and results of the schemes and to consider what, if any, changes are desirable when they are in a position to resume operations.
Garnett studied the Fairbridge farm schools at Molong and Pinjarra, the Northcote School in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, which was based on the Fairbridge model, and the Barnardo’s Farm School at Picton, New South Wales. Most of the detail of the report dealt with the Fairbridge schools. The report was given to Fairbridge but not made public.
Garnett said there was ‘conclusive proof’ that Fairbridge had failed in its basic aim of converting child migrants into successful farmers and that such an aim was, in reality, unachievable anyway. He believed that Fairbridge was out of date and fundamental changes needed to be made to the future operation of the scheme.
The experience gained from the working of these schemes in the past and the change in social consciousness in regard to the education and treatment of children suggest that some modifications in the basic principles underlying the schemes are overdue.
Boys trained on Farm Schools cannot look forward to becoming farmers on their own account save in exceptional cases …
At the time Kingsley Fairbridge commenced work in Western Australia [1912] farming conditions were such as to justify the hope that a boy properly trained and placed in employment as a farm worker would, if industrious and thrifty and after gaining practical experience, have a reasonable prospect of becoming a farmer on his own account … This hope has not been realised and only a handful of boys have succeeded in establishing themselves on their own account.
Garnett argued that the fault lay in the farm schools and that they should provide better education and training to equip children with a wider range of career choices.
The primary aim and object of the Fairbridge Schools has been to train boys and girls for rural employment and the farm schools have not the facilities themselves save in exceptional cases to assist promising children to qualify for and enter other forms of employment … The scheme should be modified so that, while the primary purpose of the Farm Schools should continue to be to train children for primary employment, it should be possible for children to exercise some choice of occupation and for boys and girls who show themselves to be specially qualified to follow the other occupations to receive the necessary training.
The report also dealt with the recurring problem of poor staff at Fairbridge, particularly cottage mothers, who in the main lacked qualifications and the sensitivity required to meet the needs of the children:
They do not appear to have made sufficient allowance for the classes of children with whom they are dealing, amongst whom a number of cases requiring patient and sympathetic treatment are bound to arise.
Garnett also highlighted the problems of isolation and loneliness experienced by Fairbridge children that arose from ‘segregation in isolated communities’.
In a comprehensive point-by-point response to the report in August 1945, the secretary of the Fairbridge Society in London, Mr Gordon Green, agreed with most of the points made by Garnett and painted an even bleaker picture of Fairbridge’s record.
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Green agreed that Fairbridge children rarely managed to become farmers in their own right and went further, suggesting that Fairbridge children tended to become underpaid labour, destined to be despised as an underclass and left to a life on the fringes of society. He admitted that on the whole it appeared that the main product of Fairbridge was unskilled cheap labour. ‘For the boys, attainment of an economic status which would warrant marriage and a family, was extremely difficult … They have remained the underprivileged class.’
Much of Green’s understanding of Fairbridge came from discussions he had with former Fairbridge children who had joined the armed services and were serving in Europe during World War II. A number of them had visited the Fairbridge offices while in London and complained to Green that they ‘found themselves despised as outcasts from Britain’ working for lower wages than Australians doing similar work.
Green went on to argue that the Fairbridge farm schools compared unfavourably with the Roman Catholic Christian Brothers School in Bindoon, Western Australia, which he said was ‘wise as well as just and should be emulated by Fairbridge’.
According to Green, the Fairbridge Society in London, though being responsible for recruiting children for the farm schools in Australia and providing a large part of their funding, was not responsible for the failures pointed out by Garnett and were powerless to fix them. The fault, he said, lay with the local management running the farm schools. He commented that the London Society had attempted to be involved in governing the farm schools but had been defeated in Western Australia by the incorporation of the Perth committee by Kingsley Fairbridge and in New South Wales by the Sydney committee’s insistence on autonomy. He conceded: ‘But undoubtedly the interests of children would have been best served if no such total surrender of right of direction of a Farm School had been made by the London Society.’
Despite acknowledging the failures in the Fairbridge scheme Green rejected the need for a fundamental rethink of the ‘basic principles’, as advocated by Garnett. He reiterated that the basic principles underlying the Fairbridge scheme remained those established by Kingsley Fairbridge.
Certain children are by misfortune denied the security and fostering of a normal family life. They need care and protection. The illegitimate child and the child of lawful but irresponsible parents has much to expect from Fairbridge if by the transfer to Australia or Canada it can be free of its disabilities. There is that benefit to the child and if the work of fostering and educating the child is properly accomplished, the community where the child is, in time, settled in Australia or Canada, has the profit of a good citizen, healthy, confident and stable. This basic principle remains.
So change was again resisted and Fairbridge did not embark on the fundamental reform. Over the next few years the Fairbridge Society in London was able to negotiate formal agreements with the Fairbridge bodies in New South Wales and Western Australia that clarified their respective powers and responsibilities. However, the farm school scheme continued much as before.
The next serious challenge to the Fairbridge scheme came with the Curtis report into child welfare in Britain in 1946 and the Children Act in 1948, which together caused a fundamental shift in child care away from institutions toward foster care, and away from benevolent volunteer organisations to the state taking responsibility for the welfare of children. The childcare professionals replacing the volunteer amateurs became increasingly opposed to child migration and child-migrant institutions.
Central to the change in approach was the belief that if children were unable to be properly cared for by their natural parents they should be cared for in environments that resembled homes. Fairbridge had never considered the emotional or developmental needs of the children and was modelled on the provision of discipline, hard work, only elementary schooling, a roof overhead and food. But now the days of the large, impersonal children’s institutions seemed to be over: the future demanded that children be afforded affection and understanding. The British Government encouraged the volunteer organisations and charities to restructure their homes. Fairbridge was one of the institutions that resisted change the longest.
In April 1948, while the new Children Act was being drafted in Britain, sixteen British welfare organisations protested about the continuation of Fairbridge and other child-migrant institutions. They called for a government commission of inquiry into the condition of the children. The group of welfare organisations was headed by the British Federation of Social Workers and included the Association of Children’s Moral Welfare Workers, the National Association of Probation Officers and the London County Council Children’s Care Organisers. They were concerned that the new life promised the children was worse than the one they had left behind and that the child-migrant institutions were more poorly run than institutions in England.
The London
Daily Mail
reported the story under the headline ‘Anxiety for 300 Child Emigrants’. An official spokesperson for the group of welfare organisations told the paper:
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Our members have heard disturbing reports about the children who have emigrated through voluntary organisations. Some will get nothing better than elementary education and, whatever mental ability they show, will have little chance of raising themselves above the standard of domestic servants and agricultural labourers. Our greatest fear is that the population needs of the Dominions are being put before the welfare of these children. The children must be safeguarded.
The paper reported that the organisations wanted the inquiry to investigate:
The conditions under which these British children were selected for emigration; what happened to the children overseas; what safeguards there are for their well being; how they can be protected from ‘blind-alley’ jobs.
They also wanted child migrants to be selected more carefully, and offered to participate in the process, but the London Fairbridge Society dismissed the offer. In a letter to Lord Scarborough, the acting general secretary of Fairbridge, H. L. Logan, wrote:
It requires an almost inordinate amount of self-esteem not to say ‘effrontery’ to suggest that the mere participation of their members in the selection of children constitutes ‘the first attempt in this country to create a systematic method of selection and to gain the confidence and goodwill of the child’.
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In 1951 the British home secretary pointed out that a number of national children’s institutions in Britain had already been closed and that the Children Act recognised it ‘was generally accepted’ that boarding children out with foster parents was the best form of care because it ‘approached normal home life’. The best new children’s homes, he said, were of the ‘small family type’ of ‘varied ages and both sexes’ and most importantly, children ‘brought up away from their home needed not only decent material conditions but a home in the true sense where he could find understanding, interest and affection and the security that these brought’.
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