It has been a frantic old week and I was looking forward to a lot of
relaxing this weekend.
Trouble is, I wasn’t banking on feeling as awful as I do today.
I have such a bad cough and a tight feeling in my chest that I just
know is going to develop into a stinking
cold and a chesty cough. In the night, unbeknown to me, someone snuck in the
bedroom and rubbed my throat with quite coarse sandpaper and must have hammered
my head with a mallet a fair bit too, judging by the headache. Consequently I
have ‘flopped’ all day and achieved little except feeling relatively sorry for
myself. Not my usual style.
It has, however, been nice to have a somewhat unexpected visit with
family for a couple of days. My cousin Sandra and her husband Derek have been
doing another of their world tours. We knew they were coming but they don’t
make firm plans and whilst we knew we would see them at some point we didn’t
know when. Turned out it was Thursday and Friday this week. It was a lovely surprise
and a great chance to catch up. Sandra is a fair bit older than us. Her Mom was
my Daddy’s older sister and so she remembers a lot about the family long before
I was ever born. It was fab to hear her talk about my Daddy when he was young
and to hear about my grand-parents. My Nana, who I look so much like, helped
raise Sandra and her twin brother, so she was able to tell me so much about my
Nana and Grandad. My Nana dies just a few weeks after I was born and I never
got to meet here. I did meet my Grandad a few times but he died before I was
two and so I don’t remember him either. My Aunty Thelma and Uncle Len (Sandra’s
parents) emigrated with their young family in 1953, setting off for Australia.
Aunty Thelma had four children and sadly Sandra is the only one still alive
now. My Mommy and Daddy were booked for the trip of a lifetime to visit Aunty
Thelma and Uncle Len in Australia in April 1990. Mommy died suddenly in March
of that year and so never got to go. It was one of the hardest things my Daddy
ever did when he went to visit his sister in Australia 18 months after Mommy
had died. He went for both of them.
Her husband Derek’s story is both fascinating and tragic. Derek
was one of the ‘Lost Children’ … supposed orphans who were shipped out to
Australia in the 1940’s and 50’s. Although he was perhaps luckier than many in
that he was cared for, it was in an orphanage miles from anywhere where he and
the other 200 children were ‘trained’ to be farmers to populate this developing
country. He ran away twice and was worked hard. He believed he was an orphan.
He wasn’t. This trip home he met a sister in her 80’s he had never met before
and he over the years of painstaking research he has found out he did have a
mother and a father still alive. He was lucky. Many of the lost children had
their names changed and have no way of every finding anything out about their
families. He had no idea where Australia was. He had no say in what happened
when he was taken away at 7. He had no say what happened to him once he was
there. It is just so hard to believe this was sanctioned by the government.
I have copied the following from various websites. It is a
chilling story that deserves to be re-told.
Between 1947 and 1967 up to 10,000 children were shipped to
Australia. They were sent to populate a nation with what was called at the time
"good white stock". Parents weren't told the truth. Their children
lost their real identities and were told they were orphans going on holiday to
a place where the sun always shines. The policy was endorsed by Government of
the day. It was cheaper to send children to Australia than care for them on
British soil. It cost £5 a day to care in the UK but only 10 shillings in
Australian institutions.
Hard labour
Those who suffered the harshest treatment were the boys sent to
Bindoon, an isolated institution north of Perth. The Catholic Christian
Brothers ran it. Children built it. British children were forced to do hard
labour until they were 16-years-old. Some of them had unimaginable abuse
inflicted on them.The practice continued until 1967 when it was stopped.
It was a Nottinghamshire Social Worker, Margaret Humphreys who
uncovered the scandal and the scale of Britain's child migration. Twenty years
ago she established the Child Migrants Trust, a charity which helps to reunite
and support long lost families. It's a charity which values its independence
from the agencies which sent the children away.
I took the following from THIS WEBSITE
The story begins in Britain after
World War II - a nation victorious but battered, broke, and burdened by
overflowing children's homes. Many of the kids were put there by families too
poor to raise them… as was Derek’s case. What happened next is almost
unfathomable in civilized countries or in modern times.
The British government, in
collaboration with churches and charities, developed a secret plan to clear out
these children's homes; a plan which has only recently been uncovered. The kids
were told that they would be adopted by loving families in Australia. And they
were shipped off by the thousands. It was as simple as that.
The first ship to sail in 1947 was the SS Asturias. Cargo: 147 boys and girls.
John Hennessy, 11 years old at the time, was one of those children. Only a few
weeks before it sailed, some priests and bureaucrats showed up at his
children's institution in England. They were rounding up kids to go to
Australia.
"We thought Australia was down the street or it was around the
corner," says Hennessy. "How did we know it was on the other
side of the world? Well, anyway, they, they came with the stories, you know,
that there's fruits there, plenty of fruits."
Like many children, Mary Molloy didn't quite grasp what was being proposed: "I
just thought, you know, we're going away for a while."
All across Britain, at children's homes and institutions, kids were being told
the same thing: you're going to a new land, a new life, a new family. Many were
illegitimate children. Many were dropped off by single mothers who'd fallen on
hard times.
But that's not what the kids were told. Tony Jones, who at the time was in a
boys' home in Malvern, England, was told that his parents had died: "They
said, 'You're an orphan now.' And I was an orphan."That's what they
told all the kids, that they were orphans. That there was nobody for them in
Britain.
Over the next 20 years, 10,000 children, somas young as 3, none older than 15,
would depart unaccompanied for their new homes in Australia.Six weeks and
12,000 miles later, the children arrived at the Fremantle docks in Western
Australia. They looked around for the fruit trees, the kangaroos, the adoptive
families they were told would be waiting for them. But there was none of that
here. There was something quite different.
Not long after they disembarked, they received a lecture from a man in black,
the archbishop of Perth.Hennessy remembers the man's speech: "He said,
'We welcome you to Australia. We need you for white stock.' Because at this
stage, the 'white Australia' policy was on. And we didn't know that we were
part of the scheme to - to populate Australia with the - the white people. And
the archbishop says, 'The reason why we do [is] because we are terrified of the
Asian hordes!' Course, we didn't understand that."
These children were a commodity to a continent that was terrified of being
overwhelmed by Asia. They had, in essence, been exported by a nation that had a
surplus of white people.
Afterwards, the children's fingerprints were taken and they were herded into
lines. Says Hennessy: "They grabbed the girls from their brothers.
Brothers from their sisters, screaming. And I can still hear the screams
today."
These children, who'd been plucked from institutions in Britain, were now
trucked to all over Australia. Where? To institutions. No parents were waiting
for them - just picks and shovels.
John Hennessy was sent to a place called Bindoon, an institution run by the
Christian Brothers, an order of Catholic monks 60 miles from civilization in
the sweltering bushland of Western Australia. Bindoon was a home and school for
boys. But this was no Boys Town, and education was not the priority.
The priority was construction. Brother Francis Keaney, an imposing,
white-haired Irishman who ran the place, was obsessed with building the largest
Catholic institution in Western Australia. He used his charges as labor. From
sunrise to sunset, the boys built Brother Keaney's shrine, with no shoes, and
no questions asked.
Bindoon is a real school now, an agricultural college. But it's still run by
the Christian Brothers. And old boys are not welcome, particularly not when
they're accompanied by newsmen. When Bob Simon went back with Hennessy, who helped
build Bindoon, they were kicked off the premises. The Christian Brothers are
not eager to showcase their past as users and abusers of child labor.
"They got us dirt cheap," says Norman Johnston, another boy
who helped build Bindoon. "We might as well have been slaves. And, you
know, we endured all of that when we didn't have to."
For these children, there was nowhere to run. At the Fairbridge institution,
sponsored by the Church of England, Tony Jones tried to escape whenever he
could. He once made it as far as the docks where the children had first
arrived.
Says ones: "I got down to the beach. I remember looking all over the
ocean, and I asked this couple, 'Which way is England?' If there was land all
the way across, I would have walked there. I would have walked there."
The food at the institutions seemed to have been cooked up in a Dickens novel.
At Bindoon, the boys were so hungry one Sunday, 12-year-old John Hennessy led a
raid on the vineyard out back. They enjoyed their grapes, but after mass the
next morning, Brother Keaney was in a rage. He'd learned of the raid, and he
called out for his leading suspect.
Then the man whipped him. "He stripped me naked," he says. "In
front of 50 boys, put me across the chair and nearly flogged me to death. I've-I've-I've
got medical advice that that's where I got the stutter from." He had
never stuttered before that day, and has ever since.
The children say that floggings and beatings were part of a daily routine. The
nightly routine with the Christian Brothers included priestly visits to the
children's beds. The brothers were taking away boys who were less than 10 years
old.Hugh McConnell was 9 years old. One night, a bad storm hit Castledare, his
children's home run by the Christian Brothers. Terrified that the world was
coming to an end, Hugh ran outside and hid under a tree, where a Christian
Brother found him. The man invited McConnell into his bed, where the boy fell
asleep quickly. Later that night, the priest raped him.
There was no one to go to. Certainly not the Australian government, which was
the legal guardian of the children. "The state supposedly were to be
looking after us," says Johnston. "In the nine years I was
institutionalized in Australia, I have never been spoken to by a child welfare
officer. These Christian Brothers had us for what they wanted in those
institutions. And they did with us what they would."
The head of the Christian Brothers in Western Australia, Tony Shanahan, admits
that there was abuse, but he also suggests that some of the stories may have
been exaggerated. A British government inquiry last year was more critical,
saying that what happened at institutions run by the Christian Brothers in
Western Australia was of "a quite exceptional depravity."
In 1993, the Christian Brothers, responding to a lawsuit, officially apologized
to the child migrants and paid reparations totaling $2.5 million dollars to 250
who'd been abused at their institutions. The girls, who'd been sent to
different places, suffered very little sexual abuse compared to the boys, but
many were beaten, and all were exploited as free labor. The shipments of both
boys and girls stopped suddenly in 1967. The British simply didn't have any
more children available for export.
But the 10,000 already in Australia? Only five - not 5,000 - were ever adopted.
Few had birth certificates or documents of any kind. It seems their motherland
wanted them to disappear without a trace.Mary Mollogrew up in an institution
outside Sydney. When she graduated into the real world and applied for a
passport, she was in for a surprise.
"The only way I could get a passport was to become a naturalized
Australian," says Molloy. "I thought I was. Now, to me, that
was crazy. I've been out here since I was 9. I was brought out here. And yet, I
wasn't acknowledged as an Australian. And yet, according to Britain, I didn't
live there anymore. So, where was I?"
For decades, Britain was able to forget about the children it threw away. For
decades, the children believed what they were told, that they were orphans. But
just a few years ago, these lost children - now lost adults scattered all over
Australia - were stunned to learn that none of this was true. They weren't
orphans at all.The governments of Great Britain and Australia, the Catholic
Church and the Church of England had not only exploited and abused these
10,000. They had conned the kids for 50 years.
Nigel and I listened enthralled
to Derek’s story last night. It was riveting, but most of all it was horrific.
Because it was true. Because it happened to him. Because he had his identity
and his heritage and his roots stolen. Derek ended up making a good life in
Australia, in spite of the awful start he had until he was 17. He was worked
hard as a boy, was often beaten, was given little opportunity but would never
give up. But it was hard and it is only now that he is able to discover who he
was and where he came from.
My LSNED for Thursday was all
about Sandra and Derek.
Today’s is about my cough (little
else to write really)
Barb, I have a Peugeot exactly
like the one in the picture for Friday’s LSNED. The lion emblem on the front is
the Peugeot symbol. It is a French make and I guess you don’t have Peugeots in
America.
I hope you have a fab time when
you meet the friend you are travelling to see.
I also have another page to share
and it is another Pickle Barrel Page.
Do go to Pickleberrypop and stock
up on some of the fab stuff they have in this month’s Pickle Barrel
celebration.
This time I used a collection by Linday Jane called Halloween Candy Rush
Today I am thankful for
- Covonia
-
- Microwave warming sacks
