Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (28 page)

I would sit with them, trying to explain that a nun or priest or bureaucrat or welfare worker had signed for them.

Inevitably, their next question was: ‘Is that allowed? Can somebody just send me away from my country?’

For four years I listened to these questions, not just from child migrants, unable to answer.

The stories of their parents are just as tragic. The mothers of Madeleine and Pamela were both led to believe their daughters were in England, adopted by loving families. The truth was very different, yet there were even more appalling lies. Some mothers who returned to children’s homes to collect their sons or daughters were told that their child had died of a disease or in an accident. They grieved forty years ago for a child they thought was dead. Now they had to face the truth when they were elderly and vulnerable.

This silent group of people who lost their children to a scheme and a political cause would ask me: ‘Who gave them the authority? Who sent my child away?’

I couldn’t answer their questions. I simply didn’t know.

At the same time, David Spicer was receiving letters from child migrants asking if there was any legal action they could take over what had happened to them.

David could only advise them to seek independent legal advice. I wasn’t satisfied with this. I wanted to be in a position to answer such questions. I was tired of floundering when journalists persistently asked about the legality of the child migration schemes and possible compensation.

David contacted some of his barrister colleagues and asked if they would help us find some answers. It was an area of the law in which very few people have experience but there were a surprising number ready to give it some serious thought.

Eventually we gathered one Saturday morning at the Doughty Street chambers in London – a group of eminent barristers and solicitors, along with David and myself.

We sat around a brilliantly polished conference table, dotted with jugs of water and legal pads. Around the walls stood glass cabinets stacked with legal texts.

The lawyers and QCs who came that day shared an interest in human rights issues and wanted to explore the legal dimension of the child migration schemes. All had read and viewed
Lost Children of the Empire
and a pile of press cuttings. They had all done their own homework.

I sat opposite them taking notes and clarifying dates. I kept wondering what it would normally have cost to gather so many brilliant legal minds in one room for an entire Saturday.

During the course of the day, the lawyers discussed slavery law, shipping law, the Children’s Act and the stature of limitations. Every so often, somebody would get excited and follow a strand of argument while the others raised objections or singled out possible flaws.

The statute of limitations was a stumbling block – dictating that legal action had to be taken within a set number of years of an alleged offence having taken place. Depending on the jurisdiction, it was normally within three or sometimes six years.

It seemed ludicrous that such restrictions could apply to child migrants. Many had only recently become aware that they had families. Until I found their relatives, they hadn’t fully realized what they’d lost or been denied.

When the day finished, I still didn’t have the answers. Some lawyers were very confident that the child migrants had a case while others wanted to do further research. From my point of view, I was simply delighted that for the first time a group of people with some expertise had sat down and thought about the child migrants. It was an historic event.

Some months later, I heard that a London firm of solicitors, Leigh, Day & Company, had been instructed by a former child migrant to act on his behalf. The news caught me by surprise but the possible ramifications were obvious.

None of this was my concern. I had to deal with the search to find families while there was still time and I couldn’t afford to be diverted into other areas.

But I wasn’t surprised that child migrants were considering legal action. When somebody discovers that they have been denied their family for decades, their anger and sense of injustice is understandable, and it is not surprising that they should wish to seek legal redress.

Although no precise date can be put on it, there was an important sea change beginning to happen around the world, involving the clergy and allegations of abuse and betrayal. It was to have a profound effect on the child migrants who experienced the horrors of Bindoon, Clontarf, Castledare and Tardun, in Western Australia.

Clergy at the very top of their respective churches could no longer ignore the growing number of complaints about physical and sexual abuse against their priests and ministers. Lawsuits had been lodged in America, particularly in New York and Chicago, and the Catholic Church was under attack for having allegedly covered up allegations and hampered police investigations.

Bishop Peter Connors of Melbourne was appointed by the Australian Catholic Church to manage the paedophile issue. This included taking out an insurance policy against being sued for ‘any actual or attempted sexual activity with a child’ and the drawing up of a draft protocol for dealing with such incidents. These details were not made public.

Several other churches were looking at similar schemes. There were no such overtures from the Christian Brothers, however, who seemed to ignore any calls for public inquiries, apologies or possible compensation. Their one concession had been the appointment of Dr Barry Coldrey to research the allegations of child abuse and prepare a history of child migration to Australia.

I expected our paths to cross. Surely, I thought, Dr Coldrey would want to talk to the Child Migrants Trust. But for some reason Dr Coldrey proved to be rather reticent about meeting me.

I learned that he was in Nottingham, not five minutes from the offices of the Trust, researching the child migration schemes and he failed to visit us.

In fact, I only learned of his trip to Nottingham when he rang me from London four days later.

‘I’ve been to Malta researching the migration schemes for the Christian Brothers,’ he said. ‘I was in Nottingham last week. It was suggested that I give you a call, although I can’t see why I need meet you. No idea, really. Can you think of any reason why we should meet?’

I was so astonished that I simply said, ‘Whatever you think is best.’

I thought it strange that a man would come 12,000 miles to investigate child migration and fail to visit the one agency in the world that deals specifically with the subject. I could only shake my head in disbelief and speculate on what sort of ‘history’ this man intended to write.

Desmond McDaid was two years old when his mother left him with the nuns at Nazareth House, in Termonbacca, Ireland. ‘The penguins’ – as he calls the sisters – and the teenage girls would come in and care for the toddlers.

‘I remember one day this girl had a few of us lined up and she began picking us up and throwing us into the air and letting us fall to the floor. I remember the floor was waxed and I sat there, waiting to be picked up and dropped again. I was resigned to it.’

Desmond retained many such memories from his childhood – disjointed images and sensations that flashed back to him as he talked.

Between the ages of four and eight, Desmond lived in another institution, sleeping in dormitories run by older boys and nuns.

‘There were twenty-five to thirty beds with one bucket at the end of the dormitory for a night toilet. And when we had a bath, the nuns made us wear a slip covering our genitals, for modesty’s sake.’

From Monday until Friday Desmond walked the mile and back to Bishop Street School. The first lesson was Catechism, where the nuns told him that he was a ‘soldier of Christ, fighting the good battle’. He had food in his stomach, clean clothes on his back; what else did a soldier need?

‘Some nights I remember leaning out of bed, almost falling out, hoping that one of the nuns would see me and put me back in – just to have someone hold me – to touch me,’ Desmond said.

No institution can replace a family. It can provide clothes, food, knowledge and good manners, but it can never give a child love. Desmond eventually got attention, but not the sort he craved.

‘I never saw their faces. Hands would come into the bed, playing with me at night. I was too frightened to open my eyes. They would roll me over on my face, pulling my trousers down and playing with the cheeks of my backside.’

When Desmond was eight, a priest came to his school and gave the boys a talk about Australia. That night he dreamed about a white sandy beach and a group of aborigines carrying a coffin into the waves.

‘I’d never seen an aborigine before. No-one had told me about indigenous people, so I don’t know how I could possibly have conjured up this dream.’

The following day, Desmond was measured for a new set of clothes – the first he’d ever owned.

‘No-one told me I was going to Australia. No-one asked me. We were made to line up and taken to the railway station. I was crying my eyes out. We crossed the Irish Sea by ferry, sleeping on bare wooden bunks with one blanket between two of us. Then we boarded another train for a long journey, through lots of tunnels. I guess we must have gone to London.’

Another train took Desmond to Southampton where thirty-two children, half from Ireland and the rest from England, were marched up a gangplank. They were allowed to stay on deck as the ship pulled away, waving from the railings at imaginary friends and family. In truth, there was no-one to see them off.

‘The boat trip was nice,’ recalled Desmond. ‘I remember people having birthday parties, with special treats to eat. There was a social worker, Theresa, looking after us and she used to give me a hug before I went to bed. I had a big crush on her.

‘You know, I remember the name of every kid on that voyage. I remember telling them, “I’m never going to forget you.” And I didn’t. Every name. There was this one kid I remember best. On the day we arrived in Fremantle, they put him on the back of a truck and he disappeared. His name was Jimmy Quigley and I never saw him again. I always remember thinking, Whatever happened to Jimmy Quigley? He was just thrown on this truck and taken away.’

Desmond talked of how the children were split up and put on buses when the boat docked. Some went to Clontarf, others to Tardun and the older boys to Bindoon. Desmond was taken to Clontarf.

‘I remember going down the plank, then getting on a bus. I put my face against the window waving to Theresa to say goodbye. I didn’t get any sort of immediate impression of Australia – I was too busy crying, crying from deep inside. It took days before the contrast sunk in. Ireland was green, cold and wet, Australia was brown, hot and dry.

‘Smell is very powerful for me, and Australia smelt different. I remember smells from Ireland, they’re very strong in my mind now.

‘We got to Clontarf and I was crying so loudly that I didn’t hear the others crying. I drowned out the sound. We were taken to the refectory and given a plate of thick cold stew. The flies were horrendous and you couldn’t help eating them every time you took a mouthful of food.

‘But we quickly learned never to push our plates away. We had a joke about the porridge served on Fridays. We weren’t supposed to eat meat because we were Catholics, but there were so many weevils in the porridge, it was impossible. It’s a Boys’ Town joke.’

Desmond was nearly nine years old when he started his new life. He remembers the heat and alien landscape; waking up to the sound of magpies and sometimes a kookaburra.

‘The day after we arrived, they took us to the zoo and we had a ride on an elephant. It made good pictures for the newspapers. And the following Saturday I was set to work, barefoot, in the baking heat, cleaning up an army rubbish tip.

‘Within a week my back was like one big blister, a water blister, burned by the sun. We slept on a veranda and rain would slant in when the wind blew, making the beds sodden.

‘I can’t remember any brother telling us why we were there, or what the rules were, or welcoming us. I was lost in every sense.

‘There was no-one we could go to when we were hurt, scared or sad; no adult we could turn to for comfort, consolation or information. We just had to rely on each other. The only stabilizing factor in our lives was that we were all together.

‘A part of me died at Clontarf in those first few weeks. I was nothing. I was sitting on a small wall at the front of the main building, beneath one of the arches and I suddenly realized that I was no longer a human being. I became a nonentity. Life was never going to be what I wanted. I was going to be nothing.

‘From the age of eight to thirteen the brutality compounded that hopelessness. The core of me had died and I had this shell; the shell of God’s brave little soldier. A mechanical toy.’

There were no women at Clontarf, except for a group of Hungarian nuns who spoke little English. They worked in the laundry.

Desmond’s teacher was a lay person and former Boys’ Town boy. He didn’t belt the children, which made him popular.

‘We had our own way of judging people,’ said Desmond. ‘The difference between a good person and a bad person was that a good person didn’t belt you. That was how we measured good and bad.

‘The brothers never gave opinions on people unless it was with the strap. Troublemakers were punished, the rest were ignored. I kept my mouth shut. We were taught to keep our mouths shut.

‘In that first year, when I was nine, I was accused of doing naughty things with another boy. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to have done, but it was something to do with having played with his penis. This brother accused me and I couldn’t answer. I didn’t understand what he was asking.

‘When you were hit at Clontarf it was called a dong. Six dongs meant you were hit six times. This particular brother used a bamboo cane that he would buy long and get cut to length. He kept hitting me until I confessed. I got belted into submission because I knew he wouldn’t stop unless I admitted it.

‘Another time I was hit until I cried. But I couldn’t. I had to make myself cry; to squeeze out the tears so that he’d stop beating me. I forced this noise out – a noise that sounded like submission.