British boys growing up in an Australian bush orphanage

After WW1 the British government started taking a proactive approach to their social problems. Prominent clerics supported the idea of removing street kids out to the colonies – the colonies would benefit and so would the children. So some 10,000 young children were taken from British orph­an­ages and sent to Australia to help boost British population there. The programme ran from 1922-1967.

These children were given little reliable identification, presumably to make tracing by their biological families very difficult. And presum­ably the officials within the Department of Immigration who dealt with the “orphans” had to have been corrupt – why else (historians have asked) would they have allowed young children to be shipped off, without the biological parents’ consent. Not for personal gain, of course, but to strengthen the Empire.

Cover of John Hawkins' book

Note Tardun in the background

According to the book The Bush Orphanage (Port Campbell Press, 2011), John Hawkins’ Irish mother gave him to the Sisters of Nazareth as a baby, with the goal of putting him up for adoption with a stable English family. But it did not happen. When he was just starting primary school in 1953, John's world was thrown into confusion - he was about to be sent to Australia as a child migrant. He became seriously ill with a mental breakdown and spent a year, on and off, in a British hospital.

Finally removed from normal life in Britain in 1954, the little boy must have been very confused indeed when he landed up in a remote Western Australian orphanage. [I've spent most of my life in Australia and had never heard of Tardun, a sleepy town in the Mid West region of Western Australia].

Tardun Farm School had been established by the Christian Brothers in 1928 as St Mary's Agricultural School. After WW2, Tardun admitted wards of the state, child migrants, orphans and private admissions. Australian boys, and British and Maltese child mig­rants aged from 12-16 years lived at Tardun. In 1967, the Farm School became an agricultural boarding and day school which operated on the site until the end of 2008. Some children continued to be placed at Tardun by the state government child welfare departments.

What were the lives like for orphans such as John Hawkins? Loss of their biological families, hard labour, physical abuse from some of the Brothers, sexual abuse from some of the Brothers and endless neglect. At times there were inadequate meals, little water and only weekly showers.

But John Hawkins said for the most part he had good exp­eriences and close friends at the school. Some of the caring Brothers took them hunt­ing, bird nesting, to the Mullewa Agricultural Show, campfires and picnics on the beach.

The boys had to quickly learn who was to be feared and who was to be enjoyed. It was a tough and unpredictable childhood, but in some ways not far worse than many of my male school friends experienced in the 1950s. Except for the sexual abuse.

The book The Bush Orphanage could by itself have been the basis for the exhibition On Their Own – Britain’s Child Migrants. And the film Oranges and Sunshine, which starred Emily Watson as Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys  and was directed by Jim Loach. What started out as a programme of new and hopeful young lives ended up as one of Britain's and Australia’s shameful colonial secrets.

The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Australia's forgotten children, including Britain's child migrants, in 2009. Then the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised to the victims of the scheme, which resulted in thousands of children being sent to Australia and other British countries.

Tardun: 

a public hearing into the experiences of former residents at four WA Christian Brothers homes

The West Australian Newspaper, 5th May 2014 

At a reunion of the ex-students in 2009, Hawkins explained he had become one of the founders of the Tardun Old Boys Association to ensure ongoing support for a generation of child migrants. Their objective was to preserve their unique legacy and keep safe a network of childhood friends who had clung together over the decades. Together these friends set up the Australian Child Migrant Foundation in 1995, raising hundreds and thousands of dollars to help reunite child migrants with their families. 

Hawkins said himself that this new and alien world was filled with heartbreak and hardship but also adventure, lifelong friendships and ultimately a happy life. “I have no regrets about my life or any animosity towards those who sent me to Australia. They were misguided and captivated by self-interest to serve a higher goal in the service of God. But they genuinely thought, for the most part, that they were helping British orphans who needed the Christian charity offered freely by Australia”.

Hawkins was actually quite generous. If I had known that some of the Christian Brothers had been beating, underfeeding or sexually abusing young lads in their care, I would have wanted those Brothers gaoled for life where they could be beaten and sexually abused by bigger cell mates.


**

I have not reviewed the last section of the book that described Hawkins’ attempt to find his biological mother and others back in Britain. The British Child Migration Scheme comes up smelling badly, avoiding their legal responsibilities to the so-called orphans and blocking every search for accurate documentation. But so do the State Governments in Australia, and the churches who were willing partners in the heartbreaking child migrat­ion programme.

The publishers said that John Hawkins was a forced migrant child from Britain who told about the “crimes against humanity” that were committed by both British and Australian government authorities and social workers at Australia House in London. The authorities were engaged in criminal neglect in the frenzy to get British children to fill Australian orphanages, fast.

But the publishers are being ridiculous. In August 1945 during WW2, the USA drop­ped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagas­aki. The two bomb­ings, which killed at least 129,000 adult, teenage and infant civilians, was a crime against humanity. The Nazi exterm­ination camps that killed 6 million Jewish civilians were a crime ag­ainst humanity. The genocidal mass slaughter of 500,000-million Tutsi Rwandans by the Hutu majority in 1994 was a crime against humanity. Taking young children from their families of origin and institution­al­ising them on the other side of the world was brutal, but it was not a crime against humanity.