Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (13 page)

‘There were other kids on the boat – they came from Ireland and Scotland and all over England. I made new friends but they too were taken away from me. When we arrived in Fremantle, just south of here, we were split up. Some stayed on the boat and went further east.’

‘They fingerprinted us at the dock as we left the ship. They treated us like bloody criminals. We were innocent little boys.’

Graham had used the word ‘innocent’ five or six times since we began and it was spoken with such conviction that I sensed there was some deeper reason for choosing to repeat it time and again. I wanted to ask him why, but let him continue.

‘The Christian Brothers put us on trucks – some going to Perth and others to Bindoon about 60 miles north of here. The heat was unbearable—’

There was a commotion outside and I heard loud voices – one of them belonged to David.

‘Is this where you come about the kidnapped kids?’ a man shouted. He was furious and extremely agitated.

I went out, thinking this man had come to the wrong place. He probably wanted the local police station.

‘Was it you on the radio?’ he screamed at David. ‘I’ve got a mate who was brought over on a boat and just dumped here by your lot – by the British. I want you to see my friend. I want you to help him.’

‘OK, all right. I’ll see your friend,’ I said, trying to calm him down. David took his details and I went back to Graham who was sitting quietly on the settee.

He continued telling me about the voyage.

‘Before we left Southampton, they gave us a set of new clothes. It was the first time I’d ever had new things. I got trousers and shiny shoes. But when we arrived at Bindoon they took the clothes away. They left us without underwear. It was degrading.

‘I remember standing on the tray top of the truck, before jumping down. I looked up and for as far as I could see there were fields and trees and not a single other building. And I thought, How the hell is anyone going to find me here?

‘Bindoon was like a building site. There was rubble and rock everywhere. We had no shoes. We worked in our bare feet. Every day. Winter and summer. We built that bloody place for them. We ate brick dust with our breakfast.

‘I was ten years old and I used to wet the bed most nights. I was so afraid of wetting the bed that I wet it even more. We used to sleep on mattresses that were stained and soaked with urine.’ Graham looked at me, imploring me to understand.

I told him that I’d be more surprised if he hadn’t wet his bed.

‘We used to live in fear of the beatings. In fear of being noticed or singled out. They used to beat us with belts, thick leather ones with heavy buckles. They’d beat us in front of the other boys. They’d pull down our trousers in front of everyone and give us a hiding. It was so bloody humiliating.’

Graham looked at me. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘No-one could disbelieve your distress,’ I told him.

‘It’s not the worst of it, Margaret,’ he said, using my name for the first time.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The beatings weren’t the worst of it. They were paedophiles and sadists. Some of the brothers got their kicks out of beating us and others got their kicks in other ways. Margaret, you don’t know what it’s like to see little boys woken up in their sleep and taken from their beds. We’d hear a brother coming – his footsteps on the wooden floor – and we’d pray he wouldn’t stop beside our bed. I’d lie there on a wet mattress, praying it wouldn’t happen to me. And then somebody else would be woken and carried from the dormitory to a brother’s room.’

Graham was looking at me. I believe he wanted to see if I was shocked. He wanted to know if I still felt the same way about him; if anything had changed.

Of course it had, but I couldn’t let him see any emotion other than sadness. I was sad for the child and sad for the man. Among the emotions that filled my mind, one of the things that concerned me most was, What will his mother say?

I expected feelings of abandonment and rejection but what I met here were feelings of total alienation and degradation. It was one thing to be talking about governments failing children and families, but Graham was talking about the Christian Church with all its emphasis on caring and compassion and family life. He was talking about men of God brutalizing and violating young boys. The implications were more frightening and far reaching than I’d ever imagined.

I sensed Graham had been abused, although he didn’t say as much. He didn’t have to. I had to make a decision. These were serious allegations, but was it my job to investigate? I was a visitor in a foreign country. Or should I remain the therapist and try to bring some healing into his life? I had only one way of reaching him. I had to piece together what was broken. It wasn’t enough to listen – that was only the start.

‘What is it you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘I want to help. There’s a lot I can do. But you have to help me.’

‘I think I’ve got a brother. I remember him being younger than me. I’m not sure if he came on the boat with me or I left him in England.’

‘Why do you think he’s your brother?’

‘There was another boy at the children’s home and we had the same name. People said we looked alike. And what about my mother? Do you think I have a mother?’

‘We all have mothers, Graham, but I can’t tell you if she’s still alive.’

He grew angry again. ‘What were you lot doing while we were being abused? What were you doing when we were working like slaves?’

I could still hear these questions, long after he’d gone. I didn’t have the answers. It seemed everybody had failed this man, the Government, the Christian Brothers, welfare workers. Through his entire life every single person had failed him. I was determined not to be another one.

At ten o’clock that night David and I were finally alone. We hadn’t eaten all day and the darkness had brought no respite from the heat. Locking up the house, we drove through the empty streets trying to find a restaurant that was still open.

We found a small Italian place and sat outside in the courtyard, thankful for the breeze and the almost empty tables. As I sat down, I suddenly thought how ordinary the scene must have looked. There was a sense of unreality because everything around us remained the same. The world was the same but I was looking at it differently.

Eating for the sake of eating, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to the child migrants. This is the place where children had arrived from another country. Perth held no beauty for me. There were palm trees, white beaches and happy faces, but underneath all of it lay a terrible secret.

‘Are you OK?’ David asked.

I nodded slowly.

‘They were crying. These people were so grateful to see us. It was as if they were waiting for us. I can’t believe it.’

‘It’s going to get worse,’ David said. ‘I’ve been sitting and talking with them all day. Some of the stories are terrible.’

I nodded. ‘It’s not just about being sent away any more. It’s much worse. Some of these children were violated. They say they were abused and exploited by men who preached compassion and caring.’ I shook my head, trying to make the thoughts disappear.

David said, ‘Just because someone is a member of a religious order does not mean they are not child abusers.’

‘But these were young children,’ I murmured. ‘They were alone. They had no-one to run home to when things went wrong. They were so vulnerable.’

David looked up at the darkened sky. The lawyer in him was already hard at work mulling over the implications. ‘Who the hell is liable?’ he asked.

‘I can picture them as kids,’ I said. ‘Whenever they started talking about what happened, I didn’t see them as adults any more, I pictured them as children. I saw them getting on the boats. I saw them in the back of trucks. It was terrible.’

‘But why has it taken so long for this to come out? Why didn’t they say something earlier?’

There were so many questions that troubled me, but there were no answers that night.

For the next eight days, the crush continued unabated. David and I arrived at the house at six each morning to get ready for the first of the migrants to arrive. The sprinklers were already spinning on front lawns, and paperboys weaved through the streets on their pushbikes.

It was the only time of day when the temperature seemed bearable and I was surprised that more people weren’t up and working.

Despite the heat, David continued to wear a suit and tie. I joked to him, ‘I knew when you took your waistcoat off that we must have crossed the Equator.’

Each day was similar to the last. Stories of cruelty and abuse now filled dozens of notebooks, and the pain and misery were relentless. Time and again the name Bindoon was spoken with a mixture of anger and sadness. Every ounce of self-esteem and self-confidence had been taken or beaten from the boys who went there – they felt nothing. The most repeated line in all the interviews was, ‘I’m nobody.’

Men spoke of being flogged with strips of leather, fan belts and axe handles; one told of being made to walk past the crushed body of a young migrant who had died under the wheels of a truck.

They ate thin porridge for breakfast, mixed with bran from the chicken feed, and constant hunger drove them to forage for food.

One man hadn’t shed a tear as he described being raped, but broke down and sobbed inconsolably when he recounted getting on trucks and going to a neighbouring private boarding-school. ‘Margaret, we used to empty their bins. And we used to eat it. We ate their slops.’

That hurt him far more than being violated sexually. What did it tell him about himself, about his worth?

One particular name was repeated with enormous bitterness. Brother Francis Paul Keaney, the former head of Bindoon Boys’ Town, was portrayed as a brutal, sadistic man whose obsession with building projects overrode any sense of caring for the young arrivals from Britain.

Irish-born Keaney, who died in 1954, was so celebrated by the Christian Brothers that the Boys’ Town was renamed Keaney College in his honour.

‘He had this thick knobby stick and he would crack it over our heads,’ said one former migrant. ‘If a skull was split and bleeding, Keaney didn’t care. He just kept hitting. He was the cruellest bastard God ever put on this earth.’

Another described how Keaney would belittle and publicly humiliate boys by having them strip naked and stand on tables.

But the brutality wasn’t confined to Bindoon. Similar stories of varying degrees of cruelty were told by men who went to Clontarf, Castledare and Tardun – all orphanages run by the Catholic Church.

When I set out, I had expected to work with people who felt rejected by their families, but here we were talking about people whose genuine pain and hurt came from having been abandoned by their country. I’d never experienced a hurt so profound. I had begun something that I didn’t know how to stop or control.

Each day we worked at the house until late afternoon and then in the evening went on home visits. Meals were grabbed whenever we could. Clean clothes were in short supply but there was no time to wash them or buy more.

We were already on a tight schedule, but as each day passed nothing became easier. ‘We’ll have to skip Melbourne,’ said David. ‘We can do Adelaide and Sydney, but not Melbourne – not in the time we’ve got left.’

Joanna Mack was due to arrive that Sunday. I was already feeling anxious for her. We were to spend two days with her before leaving her in Perth to fly to Adelaide. I wondered how she would cope by herself.

David and I had relied a lot on each other. What had happened in Perth was so unimaginable that we needed each other to validate the experience. Joanna wouldn’t have that kind of support. She was due to do research interviews for the documentary and I’d told many of the child migrants that she was coming. I was surprised at how many wanted to see her. They wanted to tell their stories.

When we met her off the plane, I didn’t tell Joanna about Bindoon and the Christian Brothers. If the child migrants she interviewed wanted to reveal what happened it was their decision.

We now had a list of some of the charities and the orphanages which had accepted child migrants. David and I decided to make contact with those that still existed. These included the Fairbridge Society, the State government and the Catholic Migrant Centre. The latter is a Catholic welfare organization that deals with all migrants to Western Australia, young and old.

Our main aim was to inform the charities of the existence of the Child Migrants Trust to ensure that as many child migrants as possible knew that a trust had been established specifically to meet their needs.

It was an introductory approach. David didn’t go in asking questions or voicing accusations. Instead, his main purpose was to make sure that everybody who needed our help knew how to get in touch with us.

David also went to see the Community Services Department – the Australian equivalent of our Social Services – and was surprised to find that no-one he spoke to had more than a limited knowledge of the child migration schemes.

One of the officials said, ‘You mean the orphans who came from England?’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘I remember hearing a story about a child migrant who’d been asking for his records for years,’ the official said. ‘He made lots of threats, including one against the Royal family. Eventually he set fire to the Catholic Migrant Centre and finished up in prison.’

Meanwhile, I continued with the interviews.

Over and over, people said to me, ‘We’ve been waiting for you all our lives, where have you been?’

One man said, ‘I waited and I waited, and thought surely someday, someone would come and ask, and today’s our day.’

Among the handful of people who’d written to me from Perth before I left England was Maureen Briggs, a forty-five-year-old who was sent to Australia in 1953. She arrived on the
SS Australia
with a ‘large group of parentless children’. Maureen, along with many others, was sent to a Catholic orphanage in Geraldton, a coastal town five hours’ drive north of Perth.

I took her letter with me, rereading it several times in the days leading up to our meeting.