Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (32 page)

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.

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.’

Of course, the Catholic Church wasn’t the only organization to see the benefits of child migration – particularly when the children were ‘sponsored’ by governments and a subsidy was paid for each of them.

The first government-assisted migration of children to Australia started in 1912, when the Fairbridge Farm School was established at Pinjarra. In 1929, Barnardo’s established a farm school near Picton, NSW, and a children’s home in Sydney. In the 1930s, the Fairbridge Society opened its farm at Molong and a similar ‘school’ was founded by the Lady Northcote Emigration Fund at Bacchus Marsh, outside Melbourne.

The list grew longer every year.

The logic behind the schemes was becoming clear. Britain paid money to remove a social welfare problem; Australia increased its population. It fitted perfectly into the rationale of the charities, many of which believed that urbanization and industrialization were the roots of all evil. What better way to reverse this trend than to take children from the slums and turn them into farmers?

A week after the
Strathaird
departed, another thirty-one child migrants left England on the
Otranto
, and, in May 1939, a third group of forty-two boys arrived in Fremantle on the
Strathnaver
. Those who were too young to become apprentice farmers were sent to Castle-dare, the remainder to Clontarf or Tardun – all Christian Brothers’ homes.

More were expected, but the Second World War intervened. Brother Conlan wanted to encourage wartime shipments but couldn’t find the necessary transport, or a way past the German U-boats blockading Britain.

However, on 28 November 1945,
The Record
newspaper reported:

Readers may remember that just before the war, the Christian Brothers in Western Australia had all the machinery working for receiving orphans and other poor boys from England and Ireland, and one considerable batch of boys is all the happier for it today in this State …