Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  Elsewhere, and similarly out of my control, a storm was brewing over child abuse and the clergy. It was already headline news in America, where the Archdiocese of New York was being sued for telephone number amounts. There were similar allegations in Britain against a handful of clergy.

  Victims were accusing Church leaders of shielding offenders from the law. Some suspects were simply moved to another parish. There were allegations of delays, threats and bribes.

  At first, reports and documentaries were picked up from America, and then Australian journalists began looking to see if they could find any home-grown examples. It wasn’t hard. Support groups like ‘Broken Rites’ and ‘Project Anna’, both Melbourne-based, had been formed to provide counselling to victims, and in Perth a lobby group called VOICES (Victims of Institutionalized Cruelty, Exploitation and Supporters) had been established to put pressure on the police and politicians to investigate the abuse allegations.

  Two current affairs reports on events at Bindoon thirty years earlier were prepared: the Sixty Minutes special, aired one Sunday night, and Inside Edition on the following Tuesday. One man described being raped at the age of nine and a half while at the Castledare Boys’ Home. He was sodomized twenty times in the following twelve months.

  Another, was penetrated eighteen nights in a row and had to plead with the brother to stop because he was falling asleep in school.

  ‘That’s him. That’s the bastard,’ he said, looking at a recent photograph of a former Christian Brother. ‘If I saw him now I’d put a bullet in his guts for what he did to me.’

  The Sixty Minutes documentary revealed that in the 1940s this particular brother was moved from Western Australia to an orphanage in NSW because of complaints made against him by a boy. He was later allowed to return to Perth but in 1956 the Christian Brothers transferred him again, this time to a South Australian orphanage, because of further complaints.

  Brother Gerald Faulkner was questioned about the wisdom of such a decision.

  ‘I didn’t hide the problem. My Order hid the problem,’ he said. ‘The way of dealing with allegations then was quite different. People assumed that a new start in life at a new place would bring about a different sort of life.

  ‘It is silly in our circumstances or with our knowledge now, but it was not quite as silly in 1950.’

  Brother Faulkner complained that the term paedophile was ‘thrown around too loosely’. When asked for his definition of the word, he said, ‘A paedophile is a person whose sexual love is expressed in terms of interfering with children.’

  When the journalist quarrelled over the use of the word ‘love’ to describe sex with an eight- or nine-year-old boy, Brother Faulkner eventually conceded that he should have said ‘sexual appetite’.

  Eventually, however, a semblance of the truth seemed to emerge.

  When asked how many Christian Brothers had sexually abused child migrants, Brother Faulkner said, ‘It seems to me from our research that it’s probably nine or ten but they fall into different categories. Some of those – three or four – are dead.

  ‘I have a great feeling of sorrow for those who have suffered, and for the fact that some of my confreres in the past have betrayed the trust that was placed in them.’

  I, too, felt some sympathy for these abusers. I regarded them as victims also. These were young men with no training in child care. How could they possibly be expected to meet the most basic needs of young boys who were already traumatized by the time they arrived in Australia? That does not forgive or excuse the abuse. Nor does it exonerate the decisionmakers – whether in the Church hierarchy or governments – who put them in positions of trust.

  Brother Faulkner now seemed to be speaking in quite a different tone and with a different attitude. He seemed more willing to accept the terrible reality of, at least, some of the claims of sexual and physical abuse made by those previously in the care of the Christian Brothers.

  Perhaps this new acceptance might lead to a better climate. Yet despite his admission there wasn’t even the hint of an apology. If Brother Faulkner was ashamed and repentant, it didn’t come across. The following week, on the front page of The Record, he launched an attack on the media’s portrayal of the Christian Brothers.

  ‘They are determined to portray some alleged occurrences as proven evidence of widespread and continual and systematic abuse throughout all of our institutions over their long history.

  ‘There is no excuse for abusing children. There is no condoning of criminal offences.

  ‘Nor, on the other hand, ought we to condone the power of the media to discredit the work and dedication and reputation of a group of men – literally hundreds of brothers who have worked in WA – because of the behaviour of some of their confreres forty or fifty years ago.’

  It was a passionate article, but it could not exonerate the Order for having spent years seeking to discredit the victims of abuse rather than acknowledging their suffering. And how did it intend to deal with the issue now?

  When the phone rang early on a Saturday morning in February, I half expected another threat. Thankfully it was Merv, which was unusual because he normally called during off-peak hours.

  ‘I’ve got a letter for you. It’s from the Australian High Commission.’

  ‘Oh God! What have I done now?’ I replied.

  ‘Do you want me to open it?’ he asked. ‘I could read it to you.’

  ‘No. No. Give me fifteen minutes. I need a coffee and some music.’

  I put on Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and boiled the kettle. The coffee was strong and as I nursed the cup I suddenly wondered what I’d said or done to warrant a letter from the Australian High Commission.

  When Merv called again, I told him to open the envelope.

  ‘I already have,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better sit down. It’s a letter from the Deputy High Commissioner.’

  Dear Mrs Humphreys,

  I have the honour to inform you that your name is being considered by the Australian government for submission to Her Majesty the Queen, Sovereign Head of the Order of Australia, for an award of Honorary Medal in the Order of Australia (OAM). The proposed award is for your service to the community, particularly to child migrants …

  I am therefore requested to ask whether this proposed honour would be acceptable to you, and if you would indicate your wish by completing the attached confirmation of acceptance.

  Please treat this matter as confidential until confirmation of your proposed honour is received from the Queen and formally announced by the Governor-General.

  I was speechless.

  ‘Are you still there, Margaret? Hello. Hello. Are you still there?’

  ‘Only just,’ I murmured.

  Merv couldn’t hide his excitement. He was thrilled; but I didn’t quite know how to react. I needed time to think.

  Of course, I could tell no-one about the proposed Honour until it was announced officially by the Governor-General of Australia, Bill Hayden. For the next few weeks I got on with my work in Dalkeith Road pretending nothing had happened. Yet inside I had this huge secret.

  In the meantime, there were more child migrants to see, some of whom I’d never met before. Despite having heard hundreds of stories about their childhoods, I could still be shocked. One man described how he arrived in Australia as a young lad, but had fallen ill on the voyage and was taken by ambulance from the dockside to a hospital in Perth. For the next twelve months he remained there and not once did anybody visit him. He was seven years old.

  ‘They forgot about me, Margaret,’ he said, without hiding his anguish. ‘Even the nurses didn’t know where I was supposed to be, or if I belonged to anyone. Eventually, a truck turned up and I was put on the back tray and taken away by the Christian Brothers.’

  Another very sad story emerged through a telephone call I received from Marcelle, a child migrant, who had news about a mutual friend named Tony Jones. Tony had first written to the Child Migrants Trust in 1988. He had
left England in 1950 and was nine years old when he arrived at the Fairbridge Farm School at Pinjarra, Western Australia.

  His childhood was lonely, but he thought the ‘cottage mothers’ at the Farm School were caring people who did their best in difficult circumstances. If they beat him, it was normally well deserved.

  ‘I didn’t understand why I was here, so I kept running away. I couldn’t settle down,’ Tony told me. ‘I was a loner who never fitted in with the regime.

  ‘As I got older, I wanted to know about my past, but all my efforts failed. Sometimes I’d actually pick up the telephone directory and begin calling all the Joneses to see if I could find a relative. Somewhere I had to be related to somebody.’

  This desperation to find his family never left Tony. He could remember little about his time in England and had few details to help with the search. Matters were made more difficult because Jones is such a common surname. The London telephone directory contains four thousand Joneses, and nationwide the figure runs to tens of thousands.

  It took almost three years of painstaking work and many false leads. When I visited Perth, I would reassure Tony that we hadn’t forgotten him and show him details of the search. Finally, late in 1991, I told Tony that his mother was alive and he also had brothers and sisters in England.

  There is no way of describing his joy. It was absolute.

  Tony has only one kidney, and survives on a modest invalidity benefit. He didn’t have the money for an air fare, so desperately began saving. He was prepared to go without everything to get home to his family but still couldn’t raise the money. In the meantime, he and his mother exchanged long letters, filling in the details of their years apart.

  In his first letter, Tony wrote:

  My Dear Mother,

  Please, Mum, read this letter and give me the chance to get to know you again. Mum, I love you and always will. You have been in my heart for forty years. All I remember was a funeral, then I was taken away. I was told you were dead. I will not forgive them for that.

  Please, Mum, write to me. Please give me the chance to prove to you that there is no hurt in me towards you.

  I have a lovely wife Sue and she has been trying to find my family for twenty years, but the homes would not tell her anything. It was Sue that found Margaret Humphreys from the Child Migrants Trust. When they told me you were alive and well, I was over the moon. But I was very sad when I was told that you broke down and cried.

  Don’t worry about all the questions of the past. The only things you have to tell me, the things I have waited forty years to hear, are that you love me and you will write to me. And please let me have a photo of you to put on my bed so I can say to my kids and anyone I see, ‘That’s my Mum and I’m so very proud of her.’

  Mum, I’m going to close for now because I keep getting tears in my eyes. I’m lost and I really do need your love to fill that hole in my heart. Bye, Mum.

  Your loving son,

  Tony.

  The love was reciprocated and they began corresponding with each other as Tony continued to save money.

  The phone call I received at Dalkeith Road early in January was to tell me that Tony had just stepped on a plane to England.

  I immediately assumed that over Christmas he must have somehow found the money to buy a ticket.

  ‘It’s dreadful, Margaret,’ Marcelle said. ‘Tony had a phone call in the middle of the night. His mother is dead. That’s why he’s on the plane. His brother sent money from England so he could be at the funeral.’

  I was absolutely horrified. My worst fear had been realized. Here was a child migrant who had been deprived of his mother for all these years; then they started to write to each other and the pain of a lifetime began to melt away; but suddenly it was all taken away from him. Forty-three years Tony had waited, but instead of a joyful homecoming, he returned to find his mother in a coffin.

  Tony met the rest of his family during his time in England but nothing could lessen his bitterness at having missed out on his greatest wish. Like all child migrants, he had left Britain with no return ticket. It was a one-way journey.

  When Tony returned to Perth, he didn’t try to hide his sorrow. He told me that his mother had died in an armchair and on the floor beside her was a letter from ‘Your loving son, Tony’.

  I flew to Sydney on the day the Order of Australia award was to be announced. There was work to do and journalists, who had had several days’ notice of the award, were already beginning to call. I didn’t tell any child migrants, I wanted them to read it first in the newspapers.

  I stayed in Sydney for several days and kept wondering if the news had reached Perth. It had certainly been heard loudly in Nottingham, where the team at the Child Migrants Trust was ecstatic. They told me that at Nottinghamshire County Council, Joan Taylor was called out of an executive meeting to be told of the honour and rushed back inside to share the news.

  My hotel room in Sydney overflowed with flowers and cards.

  When I got back to Perth, I took a taxi from the airport and arrived in Dalkeith Road shortly before 3.00 p.m. As the driver stopped, I thought I was looking at the wrong house. There were balloons hanging off the trees, the windows and doors. A poster draped across the door said: ‘Congratulations’, and there were flowers and cards filling the veranda. The answerphone was clogged and fax paper overflowed on to the floor.

  The messages were all the same – a remarkable outpouring of goodwill, warmth and enthusiasm.

  VOICES wrote an editorial in its newsletter declaring that the OAM ‘will be enthusiastically applauded by all those Australians who believe in justice and who admire courage and dedication …

  ‘VOICES is proud that our Australian government has recognized an issue which for so long has been shrouded in official deceit and even fraud. The British government, for its part, is refusing to accept its share of responsibility in an infamous scheme which inflicted so much misery and hardship on thousands of innocent children. Congratulations, Margaret – Well done, Australia – Shame on you, Britain.’

  Alan Osborne rang and asked me to dinner. ‘Just a quiet meal with my wife and me,’ he said and stupidly I believed him. I should have known something was planned when he told me not to dress too informally.

  When we arrived at a hotel in Fremantle, I saw Eileen and Jackie in the foyer and still didn’t grasp what was happening.

  I walked into the main restaurant and there, at a long table, a group of very familiar faces greeted me. The warmth and friendship of the occasion was overwhelming. There was a sense of pride and a feeling that the child migrants were now being given recognition.

  Two speeches were made, both brief but not lacking in depth or humour. The sentiments expressed were memorable. Desmond said that I was like a sister to them; the sister they had never had.

  Maureen Mac spoke on behalf of the women who spent their childhoods at Nazareth House, Geraldton. ‘Margaret, you treat each and every one of us as an individual.’

  Words like these are not said easily. We were all working together and we shared respect and trust for each other. I remember looking at the faces around the table and thinking what a remarkable journey we had all taken together.

  That night I decided I wanted to arrange a celebration, of sorts, for my friends in Perth. But there were so many and I felt the same about all of them. I knew that the garden at Dalkeith Road couldn’t cope with more than sixty people, so I left the invitations to Desmond, Eileen and Alan.

  In the six years that I’d been visiting Perth I had never been to a traditional Australian backyard ‘barbie’, but a fortnight later, on a Saturday evening, a large crowd gathered at Dalkeith Road where the garden had been transformed by fairy lights, balloons, tables, chairs and music. Child migrants had come from everywhere – men and women from all the schemes, many of whom had never been gathered together before.

  I had a large cake made – a replica of the one which launched the opening of the Child Migrants Trust
office in Nottingham, with the flags of all the countries involved in the child migration schemes.

  During the evening, the Geraldton women sat in a row and sang the songs from their time together at Nazareth House. Many were the same songs that the boys used to sing and some grew misty-eyed at the familiar words.

  The child migrants shared their different experiences; some talked of having returned home to meet their families, sharing the pain and the happiness. We weren’t there to fight governments, or to talk about compensation; there was no bitterness or rancour. Instead, only genuine regard and affection. It was a tribute to how they had survived.

  The Order of Australia medal was recognition for them. It was an official acknowledgement that the child migration schemes had taken place. At last, their voices had been heard.

  Four months in Perth had extended to almost five months. Everybody had worked together, and my time away from home had been worth while. I managed to interview hundreds of child migrants while the team in Nottingham worked tirelessly to find their families. Telephone calls and faxes were flying backwards and forwards both day and night.

  Leaving Perth was never going to be easy. Normally, I prefer leaving Australia without emotional farewells. This time we said our goodbyes at the barbecue, with the singing of ‘Now is the Hour For Me to Say Goodbye’. The song had become almost our theme tune.

  As my sixteen bags and boxes were stowed on my flight, I was happy to be going home and satisfied that the Child Migrants Trust was no longer a distant office in a distant land. It truly belonged to the people it served.

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  I had missed my family, friends and colleagues dreadfully, and when I got home I wanted Ben to recite every detail of his day at school; to catch up with Rachel’s life.

  I spent a week immersing myself in family life and becoming part of their daily routine again. The house looked different; not in any specific way, just different – I’d been away a long time.