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Current Issues
Child Migrants from the United Kingdom
E-Brief: Online Only issued October 2001
David Watt, Information/E-links
Coral Dow, Information/E-links
Social Policy Group
Background to the scheme
Between 1922 and 1967 about 150 000 children with an average age
of eight years and nine months were shipped from Great Britain to help
populate the British Dominions of Canada, Rhodesia, New Zealand and Australia
with 'good white stock'. Estimates of the number of children sent to Australia
vary from 5 000 to 10 000, most of whom were sent to charitable and
religious institutions. The Australian Government welcomed the scheme
and encouraged non-government organisations such as Barnados and Fairbridge
to continue settling child migrants who were regarded as adaptable with
long working lives. However many child migrants later claimed that they
were ill-treated in the institutions to which they were sent.
Child migrants are represented in Britain and Australia by a number of
organisations. The most prominent is the Child Migrants Trust
which was established in 1987 to assist child migrants seeking family
reunions. Child migrants and the Child Migrants Trust have lobbied for
compensation and an apology from governments.
Other bodies which offer assistance are the Child Migrant Friendship
Society, and in Perth, the Christian Brothers' Ex-Residents Services (C-BERS
Services) and the Catholic Migrant Centre.
Australian responses and initiatives
- In 1990 the Australian Government announced financial assistance to
the Child Migrant Trust branches in Melbourne and Perth. This assistance
continues to fund a case worker and counselling services.
- In 1993 the Christian Brothers issued a public apology for the abuses
that they admitted had taken place at their child-care institutions.
They have funded travel by former child migrants to make family reunions.
- In 1997 the Rockhampton Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy apologised
to former residents of St. Joseph's Home, Nerkool.
- In August 1998 the Western
Australian government apologised to former British child migrants
who suffered sexual, physical and emotional abuse in Western Australian
orphanages and institutions. However, the Western Australian government
voted against a proposal to re-establish a select committee set up by
the previous government to investigate the needs of former child migrants,
or to implement the recommendations of the Select Committee's Interim
Report.
- The treatment of child migrants in Queensland was included in the
wider Report
of the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions,
chaired by Leneen Forde and tabled in the Queensland Parliament on 8
June 1999. Following the tabling of the Forde Report, a formal apology
was issued by: the Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie; the Minister
for Families, Youth and Community Care, Anna Bligh; the Catholic Archbishop
of Brisbane; the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane; the Moderator of the
Uniting Church in Australia (Qld Synod); the Territorial Commander,
Australian Eastern Territory, of the Salvation Army; the President of
the Baptist Union of Queensland and the Conference President for the
Churches of Christ in Queensland.
- In 1999, the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy and the Poor
Sisters of Nazareth launched PHIND: the
Personal History Index for former child migrants to Catholic Homes
in Australia.
British Government response and initiatives
- In 1997 the British House of Commons Health Committee accepted that
responsibility for matters relating to the welfare of former British
child migrants rested with the British Department of Health.
- The House of Commons Health Committee chaired by David Hinchcliffe
MP reported on the scheme and welfare of surviving migrants. The committee
took evidence in Australia in June 1998 and tabled its report: The
Welfare of Former British Child Migrants in July 1998.
- In December 1998 the Health Secretary Frank Dobson accepted the report's
main recommendations. He accepted the policy had been misguided and
promised assistance to former child migrants by setting up a central database of
information in the UK to help them trace their records and a Support
Fund of £1 million over three years to help pay for family reunions.
To qualify for assistance under the Fund, former child migrants must
be able to show that they have traced a close family relative, (mother,
father, brother, sister, aunt or uncle), and that they wish to reunite
for the first time, but cannot meet the costs of travel to the UK.
The National Archives of Australia has published a research guide to
archival records on child migration: Good British
Stock: Child and Youth Migration to Australia 1901-83. It includes
an overview and history of child migration to Australia as well as a guide
to the National Archives records. A brief guide is also available in the
National Archives of Australia Fact
Sheet 124.
Child migrant experiences have been portrayed in the television documentary
Lost Children of the Empire, broadcast by the ABC in 1989, and
in the television mini-series The leaving of Liverpool broadcast
on ABC TV in 1994. A number of books document the scheme and tell individual
stories. These include:
- Philip Bean, Lost Children of the Empire, Unwin Hyman, London,
1989.
- Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire: the shocking story of child migration
to Australia, Random House, Sydney, 1997
- Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles: one woman’s fight to uncover
Britain’s most shameful secrets, Doubleday, London, 1994.
- Perry Snow, Neither waif nor stray:
the search for a stolen identity, Universal Publishers, 2000.
A Canadian perspective which is also published on demand on the Internet.
An alternative view of child migration to Australia is presented in:
Geoffrey Sherington. Fairbridge, Empire and Child Migration. University
of Western Australia Press, 1998.
Various ABC radio and television
programmes have covered the issue. Transcripts are available by searching
'child migrants' on the ABC’s search engine.
Organisations involved in assistance to child migrants to
Australia are:
- International Social Service (ISS) with branches in Melbourne and
Sydney. ISS administers claims on behalf of the British Government.
- Child Migrants
Trust with branches in Perth and Melbourne.
For copyright reasons some linked items are only available to
Members of Parliament.
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