Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  The story is told through the eyes of two children, Bert and Lily – played by Kevin Jones and Christine Tremarco – who meet in the Star of Sea Orphanage in Liverpool in the early 1950s. Bert believes he’s an orphan but Lily has been placed there by her mother, who promises to come back within six months once she is on her feet financially. Before she can return, Lily and Bert are packed off to Australia.

  The first half of the drama follows Bert as he arrives, tired, hungry and frightened, at a rural quarry where he’s set to work cutting and carrying stone that is destined for a new church. Brother O’Neill, the man in charge, is a bully who breeds bullies.

  Although the ABC stressed that the drama was set in New South Wales, the media pointed out the similarities between Brother O’Neill and Brother Keaney of Bindoon, and also the depiction of children hauling stones and making bricks as they had done at Bindoon.

  Meanwhile, Lily is sent into domestic service in the outback, where she is exploited by her employers.

  Sustained by their friendship, both eventually rebel against the brutality and find each other, but their escape is tinged with sadness. Although Lily does eventually find her mother, there’s no salvation for Bert. Embittered and angry, he lashes out and ends up in prison.

  John watched the programme with me and was incredibly moved. Often he shook his head in disbelief. ‘What is this going to do to them?’ he asked.

  I shared his reservations, but told him, ‘We mustn’t look at it like that. It’s not what it will do to them but what it can do for them.’

  Before we left England, John had insisted that during our trip we were going to eat three proper meals a day, sleep regularly and not work too hard. He wasn’t going to let me fall ill again. On the first morning in Melbourne, he went out to buy utensils for the kitchen and stock up the cupboards. I came downstairs and walked into the kitchen to find the table beautifully set with fruit juice in glasses, and bacon and eggs frying on the stove. I couldn’t help laughing.

  It was the last proper meal we had in the next fortnight.

  * * *

  On Friday, John and I flew to Sydney, ready for the launch. I had no idea what was planned. I thought there’d be a few people, the obligatory case of warm white wine and some sandwiches from the ABC canteen. Then I’d stand up and say, ‘Yes it really happened, it’s all true,’ and sit down to watch a preview of the show.

  Not quite!

  The Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney has one of the finest locations in the world. Perched on one corner of Circular Quay, it stands guard over the ferries that fan out across Sydney Harbour. The hotel offers views in all directions; over the Opera House, the Bridge, the harbour sweeping up past Fort Dennison towards Watson’s Bay and Sydney Heads. This is where the ABC chose to launch The Leaving of Liverpool. That evening, a specially invited audience arrived, many of the men in dinner jackets and the women in their outfits from David Jones or the boutiques of Double Bay. There were celebrities, drama critics, ABC executives, journalists, old Fairbridgians and Catholic clergy. John Hennessey was there, a child migrant and former deputy mayor of Campbelltown, he had written to me years earlier. So was Harold Haig, looking decidedly uncomfortable in such a large crowd.

  Stunned by the scale of it all, I was handed a glass of champagne and ushered between fully laden tables. A teenager came up to me with a Liverpudlian accent. It was Kevin Jones, who plays Bert in The Leaving of Liverpool. Many of the cast had been flown over for the launch, and Kevin was very excited.

  ‘Everybody talked about you. I couldn’t wait to meet you.’

  Eventually, I found my place card at a table. I remember sitting down and then glancing at the cards around me. Somebody with a very warped sense of humour or a grasp of the absurd in the ABC’s promotions department had decided, not only to invite a prominent churchman to the launch, but to sit him next to me.

  I thought of Merv, back in Nottingham. ‘Just you wait!’ I muttered. ‘You talked me into this.’

  When Penny introduced me to the minister, she said, ‘This is Margaret Humphreys, the director of the Child Migrants Trust …’ but before she could finish he said, ‘I know who she is.’ He didn’t even raise his eyes to meet mine. That was it. We didn’t exchange another word through a four-course meal and coffees. It felt a little like the Last Supper on our table.

  The ABC were paying and it must have cost them thousands. I just kept thinking about the money being spent and the Trust’s pitiful finances.

  I sat there through this astonishing evening, with people telling me about this wonderful drama that would win all the awards, and all the while I was thinking about what a painful impact it would have on the child migrants. But the show was artistically brilliant, and it was courageous of the ABC to confront the shameful issue head-on.

  Penny Chapman gave a speech about how difficult the programme had been to make and then she said, ‘May I introduce Margaret Humphreys, who’s going to tell you all about it.’

  I could see John looking at me and thinking, Wrong!

  He could see I was angry. I stood there watching all these people drinking champagne, eating their free meals and talking, laughing and joking. Among them, was Harold. Our eyes met and I thought, This is appalling! This isn’t right! This room should be full of politicians not celebrities. We should be in Parliament House in Canberra or the Houses of Parliament in London. Those are the people who should have been watching this drama.

  I cleared my throat and said I thought the ABC had shown enormous courage in making the programme. Immediately, I sensed that the audience understood my disquiet.

  I told them, ‘This would be enjoyable if it were only a drama, but unfortunately it depicts the lives of thousands upon thousands of British children. And although it shows young Lily finally meeting her mother, there are still thousands of people who are yet to meet their families, who are yet to go home, who have yet to get so much as a birth certificate to confirm who they really are. This isn’t a period drama, it’s real. These people are still suffering today.’ I wanted to say, ‘Now get on with your duck and lamb,’ because that’s how I felt.

  As I sat down, the applause carried on and I had to go back up again. I wanted to say, ‘How dare you clap that?’ I wanted to shout: ‘Put your champagne glasses down, get off your backsides and do something!’

  Instead, I strode forward, waited for silence and said, ‘Now, what are we going to do about it?’

  When I got back to the table, I downed a glass of wine to steady my nerves and then noticed that the prominent churchman was finally looking straight at me.

  ‘It was your country that sent them over here,’ he said. ‘What kind of country sends their children over here?’

  I frowned slightly and, as evenly as possible, replied, ‘Well, I suppose it’s the same sort of country that sexually molests them when they get here.’

  We didn’t exchange another word.

  28

  The man’s voice on the telephone was calm, detached and determined. He spoke without a trace of urgency or emotion as he explained how he was going to kill me.

  ‘Leave Perth immediately,’ he said, ‘or you’ll be leaving in your coffin. You have been warned before but you didn’t listen. This time we know where your children are. You’d better find them quickly.’

  The line went dead.

  I had been unable to respond. I felt almost paralysed.

  I’d been in Perth for three days, having spent a week in Melbourne after the launch party for The Leaving of Liverpool.

  I’d left John in Melbourne handling the media. He released the press statements, arranged the interviews and gave nobody direct access to me. I don’t think he went to bed for the first three days but he did the job brilliantly, sometimes literally banging on the bedroom door at five o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Thirty minutes to the first meeting. Get moving, Margaret.’

  In the midst of all this I told him, ‘I must go to Perth. I have to tell some clients
that I’ve found their families. If I go now, I can be back before The Leaving of Liverpool is screened.’

  I went on my own, booking into the Parmelia Hilton. The staff, by now, knew me and made me feel welcome.

  From the moment I got to my room the telephone started ringing. In all the years I had been coming to Perth, rushing in and out, I had never developed any attachment to the city. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel safe or thought it was particularly dangerous – I just hated the place. There were too many ghosts and too much pain.

  Suddenly, in the space of a single phone call, it all changed.

  Somebody had threatened not only me but my children. I went cold, immediately wondering where they were. Was Merv with them? Were they safe?

  Not for the first time, I realized that I was fast becoming a severe nuisance to a lot of people. But this time I was more than uneasy.

  In a hotel room, thousands of miles away from my family, I was vulnerable and angry, but I couldn’t panic; I had no intention of giving in to this faceless, anonymous threat. I had come so far, and still had too much to do.

  At any moment a taxi was due to arrive to take me to the studios of ABC radio for an interview with Verity James. I knew her by reputation to be astute and probing. I needed to set my own agenda but I couldn’t concentrate.

  Instead, I sat on the end of my bed and stared out of the window, gazing over the palm trees towards the sunlight on the Swan River. How did it happen, I thought, this beautiful place, with its awful history?

  Questions flooded through my mind. What should I do? What could I do?

  The phone rang again. The taxi was waiting to take me to the studio.

  I was fifteen minutes late getting to the ABC – the first time I’d ever been late for an interview. I told nobody about the phone call, but as I answered Verity’s questions I wondered if my caller was out there, listening to me.

  When I left the studio, I launched straight into my appointments and it was only late in the afternoon, that it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t in Australia on my own. Why hadn’t I let John know about the threat? He was at Canning Street. Alone. Perhaps he too was in danger.

  ‘Either you get on the first plane to Melbourne,’ he said, ‘or I’m coming over to Perth.’

  I tried to explain that I couldn’t run away; I had to carry on as if everything was the same. Somebody wanted to frighten me.

  Without my knowledge, Verity James had also interviewed Brother Gerald Faulkner of the Christian Brothers and she played his interview after mine. I was surprised to hear him talking publicly but, over the next few days, I sensed that the Christian Brothers had embarked upon a quiet offensive to limit the impact of The Leaving of Liverpool.

  Dr Barry Coldrey had almost finished his investigations. The Catholic Church had flown him to Europe so that he could produce this report. This was not immediately made public.

  At the same time, there had been growing calls from the media and many child migrants for a criminal investigation into the sexual abuse allegations, with mention made of possible compensation.

  Dr Barry Coldrey told journalists that the Church condemned any examples of ill treatment of children, but stressed that the British and Australian governments were to blame for what was a ‘social experiment gone wrong’.

  ‘It is high time the churches stopped taking all the can and the stick for this. The fact is, we are dealing with government policy that our churches co-operated with … government inspections, government supervisions and government subsidies.’

  Brother Gerald Faulkner continued the counter-attack: ‘We are being, I think, unfairly criticized because we tried to do what was thought best at the time, under government supervision …

  ‘We were acting, in a sense, as agents of the Government.’

  The Christian Brothers were obviously trying to deflect the spotlight and the blame away from themselves. Yet their comments did not ring true.

  Over the previous two years, I had been given an enormous amount of historical material which had been collected and collated by child migrants. This consisted of old newspaper cuttings, brochures, books and official histories of the Christian Brothers’ orphanages, published to commemorate anniversaries.

  I now knew far more about the child migration schemes to Western Australia, and I also felt that Brother Faulkner’s and Dr Coldrey’s press statements bore little relation to fact or to their own order’s literature.

  Governments may indeed have been behind the schemes, but the Christian Brothers were eager participants.

  The first account of children being brought to Western Australia by the Christian Brothers was in an article published in the Catholic newspaper, The Record, on 11 August 1938. It announced the arrival in Fremantle of the ship Strathaird, which had left Southampton on 8 July 1938, carrying a party of thirty-seven boys, the eldest twelve and youngest only eight.

  ‘37 Catholic Boy Migrants Welcomed’, declared the headline and I could picture the bewildered children being shepherded down the gangway, clutching tight to their battered suitcases and to each other. A brass band playing, drowning their sobs, I suspect.

  The boys were accorded a civic reception in the Fremantle Town Hall, and were later received at Clontarf Orphanage by an official party, including the Archbishop, a Minister representing the Federal Government, another Minister representing the State Government, and the Leader of the Opposition.

  His Grace the Archbishop of Perth gave an address and thanked ‘the Imperial Government, the Federal and State Governments, which had made possible that immigration scheme.’

  He described it as an historic event in the history of Australian development and one that must exercise a far-reaching influence on the progress of the Commonwealth.

  ‘At a time when empty cradles were contributing woefully to empty spaces, it was necessary to look for external sources of supply. And if we did not supply from our own stock we were leaving ourselves all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming millions of our neighbouring Asiatic races.’

  My blood ran cold. Empty cradles! How empty were the cradles these children had left in England? I wondered. How empty were the hearts of their mothers and fathers?

  The Archbishop continued: ‘In no part of Australia was settlement more vital than for Western Australia, which, while it contributed only one-twelfth of the total population, occupied one third of the whole Commonwealth …

  ‘The policy at present adopted of bringing out young boys and girls and training them from the beginning in agricultural and domestic methods, was a far more common-sense procedure. It had the additional advantage of acclimatizing them from the outset to Australian conditions and imbuing them with Australian sentiments and Australian ideals – the essential marks of true citizenship …

  ‘… those boys who had landed that day, and others who would follow in time to come, would be Empire builders in the truest sense of the word; they would be a credit to the land of their birth and a credit to the land of their adoption.’

  Where was the mention of deprived children, or waiting foster parents? This wasn’t about giving kids a new start in life. It was a blatant piece of pragmatic social and religious engineering to fill rural Australia with bright, white British stock.

  When I first read this story I felt I was suffocating. I gazed out of my hotel room window at the Swan River sparkling in the sunshine and dotted with yachts and catamarans. I wanted to shift the glass and feel the same breeze on my cheeks that filled their sails. It is called the Fremantle Doctor and arrives at about four o’clock every afternoon, gusting in from the sea and cooling things down. Yet, as I turned away, I knew that if I had been able to open the window that day, I would have drawn no comfort from the breeze.

  But there was more – much more. As I read further, it became clear that the Catholic Church actively went looking for child migrants. Its claim that boys and girls were foisted upon them by governments just wasn’t true.

  In 1933,
Archbishop Clune of Perth wrote to Cardinal Bourne of Westminster and suggested the possibility of Catholic children being sent from England to be trained as farmers. Children, he said, were cheaper to transport and transplant.

  The Catholic Emigration Society, based in London, approved of the plan but five years later the proposals were still bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape. Prominent Church leaders in Western Australia then established the Catholic Episcopal Migration and Welfare Association to lobby the British and Australian governments.

  Still the plan moved slowly, until February 1938, when Patrick Aloysius Conlan, a sixty-three-year-old Christian Brother from Perth, was sent to England to cut through the bureaucracy. Conlan had a reputation as an achiever. He got things done, and within weeks of arriving in London he had obtained permission from the British government and arranged passage for more than a hundred boys mainly from the Nazareth Homes.

  On that first morning in Fremantle Town Hall, Brother Conlan was called on to speak, and immediately attributed the success of the migration scheme to His Grace the Archbishop and the Bishop of Geraldton.

  These men of ‘foresight’ had seen it was necessary to people Australia with ‘the right type’.

  He said he could have picked up hundreds of adult migrants but he could not conscientiously encourage them. ‘Their ideas were formed and their sentiments attached to home; but he could recommend English parents to send out little boys under twelve. Some of these were orphans, some sent out voluntarily by their parents to settle in this beautiful country.’

  Brother Conlan went on to describe what awaited the new arrivals, calling it a ‘complete vocational system’.

  ‘The boys were taught religion down to their very souls. Some were selected for suitable trades. Those who had no bent in this direction were sent to Bindoon where the brothers had a property of 17,000 acres. To train boys to take up farming on their own account they must first be educated in history, science and mathematics. It was necessary first to cultivate the mind … History would teach them that there were difficulties in other countries that we do not have here and there were many advantages in Australia.’