Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine) Read online

  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.

  Maureen stayed with the nuns at Nazareth House in Geraldton for five years.

  She wrote: ‘At the age of sixteen I was put on a bus and sent to work as a domestic on a farm in Western Australia for two pounds plus keep. What a dreadful experience it was after spending so many years in the care of the nuns and having so many other children around me. Then I woke up one morning early to find that I was completely on my own. I had no idea where I was going, or to whom I was going, and worst of all, not knowing who I was.

  ‘I clearly remember being made to sign a wage book. Upon seeing my name, I asked, “Whose name is that? I don’t know that name.”

  ‘“Don’t you know your own name?” I was asked.

  ‘“I’ve never heard that one.”

  ‘“Goodness, fancy not knowing who you are!”

  ‘I ran to my room and cried and cried. It was at that moment that I decided to find out who I am. I’m forty-five years old, with two children of my own, and still I have no identity.’

  ‘I have a dream that maybe one of these days I will be able to ring my sons and say, “Your mum has found herself. She has an identity after all.”’

  When I finally spoke to Maureen I realized that her letter couldn’t possibly begin to convey her tremendous longing to find her mother. As soon as I began asking questions, she fell to pieces. Sadly, the mother whom she couldn’t picture or remember had never left her; she was always in her thoughts.

  ‘There are others like me,’ she said. ‘There are hundreds of us here.’

  ‘Is it possible for me to meet any of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. I’ll arrange it.’

  Later that day, Maureen called and said she’d spoken to her friends and a group wanted to meet me at one of their homes in the suburbs of Perth.

  David and I got lost twice trying to find the modern brick house. We arrived late, at 7.30 p.m., and found seven or eight women sitting around a large dining-room table.

  They were all about the same age and had spent their childhoods in Nazareth House at Geraldton. From the moment we sat down I was struck by how relaxed these women were with each other. They were like a large family, chiding each other and laughing. The bonds were incredibly strong – sealed in their childhood.

  I noticed, not for the first time, that the word ‘orphan’ was being used over and over. The women would say, ‘I’m an orphan, do you think I have a mother?’ ‘We’re orphans, we were told we had no-one.’

  It was a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, they’d been told they were orphans and their parents were dead. But on the other, they had this dream that one day they would find their parents.

  Their stories were similar to Maureen’s. Each had been sent from England when they were aged between five and eleven. One woman described how she knew she’d never see England again: ‘Because we’d been on the ship for so long, we knew it would take a long time to get back. What chance did we have of going back? None.’

  Another talked of life at Nazareth House. ‘What I missed most was a bit of love. You had no-one, you had the girls you came out with but they were in the same boat as you. Some of the nuns were nice, but still they didn’t give you the love you needed. I think when someone’s sick or going through an emotional time they should be shown a bit of love, but we weren’t. I think to bring up a child you’ve got to give them love so they have the security to go out into the world.’

  Adjusting to life in an outback orphanage was traumatic for all the girls because they were still bewildered by their journey. It was a feeling that stayed with them all their lives because nobody had been able to explain to them why they were sent.

  I didn’t know whether they were truly orphans. I was fearful of raising their expectations. But I made a commitment that evening to each and every one of them that I’d do my utmost to trace their families.

  David, Joanna and I felt humbled and privileged, but at the same time we found it hard to contain our disbelief. Having arrived with only three or four possible contacts in Perth, we were suddenly swamped with people who believed we were their last hope – their only hope.

  As each day passed, David grew more outraged.

  ‘Other people had to know about all this. A conspiracy of silence has existed over many years. Where were the police, the doctors, the welfare officers? Why didn’t they know? Someone had to have known what was happening.’

  David couldn’t hold his anger back. He would tell the child migrants that they shouldn’t have been treated this way.

  It wasn’t just the enormity of it that hit me but also the complexities raised by the allegations of physical and sexual abuse. It was an area I’d worked in for a long time – always with children. But these people were adults – adult survivors of institutional abuse – not by parents or friends, but by a religious organization. This was a totally different kind of abuse and I had little experience of how to deal with it.

  They had stripped these tiny children of their identity by continually telling them they were nobody, that they were worthless. It was desperately difficult for these men to come to me and I admired them for doing it. Throughout their li
ves they had known no mother figure; there was never anyone to offer them maternal care. They grew up in an essentially all-male environment, believing that the one mother they might have known had supposedly abandoned them, or that, as far as they knew, she was dead. Nobody wanted them.

  One night I went into David’s interviewing room when the last migrant had gone and found him sitting with his head in his hands. He was struggling to come to terms with what he’d heard.

  The difference between adults and children had been brought home to us. Adults are articulate; they can tell you everything that happened, down to the last, heartbreaking detail.

  When it came time to leave Perth my feelings were mixed. I knew that these people needed my help but their stories were so overwhelming that I had to step back for a while.

  As David and I sat at the airport waiting to leave on the flight to Adelaide, I became aware of a noisy group coming towards us.

  ‘Who are all those people?’ I asked David.

  ‘I think you probably know them,’ he said.

  The women I’d met from Nazareth House in Geraldton had come to wave us off. It became very emotional when one of them presented me with a beautiful hand-embroidered tablecloth.

  I found it hard to speak. I thought it was terrible that these people should feel grateful. I turned to David and sighed, ‘You must make sure this never happens to me ever again. No-one should be grateful for our services. It should be theirs by right.’ Their friendship and hospitality overwhelmed both of us. But I knew that I would be returning to meet with them again.

  12

  When we left Perth, I wished we were on a plane home. Aside from what we’d been through, David and I were both homesick. Tiredness seemed to be almost constant.

  It was difficult to adjust to such a long period away from home – from Mervyn, Ben and Rachel. Although I’d tried to send them postcards every second day, when I sat down to write I didn’t know what to say. In the end it was always a simple ‘Miss you’ and ‘love you all’.

  On the journey from England, we had stopped over in Hong Kong for a day and David presented me with a Mother’s Day card that Rachel and Ben had asked him to give me. Since then, I’d propped it open beside my bed and it was the first thing I saw when I woke each morning.

  It made me even more homesick, but I was also conscious that I was working with people who must have found every Mother’s Day extremely painful.

  Before leaving Perth, David had contacted the Community Services Department in Adelaide and asked if they could help. They kindly paid for our accommodation and provided us with an office. It wasn’t ideal but we were thankful for any help given. Situated in the suburbs, it was opposite a large hospital, which meant that we could buy coffee and sandwiches from the cafeteria. Again we struggled to cope with the heat.

  Even before we left Perth a television station in Adelaide, Channel Nine, called me and said that about fifty women had come forward following publicity about the Child Migrants Trust. A number of them wanted to welcome me to Adelaide.

  I was given directions to the home of one of the child migrants. When I arrived at the door a bunch of flowers was presented to me and a television camera was about four feet from my face.

  Fifteen or so women were waiting with beaming smiles and warm handshakes. What struck me most was the question: ‘Why were you in Perth?’

  ‘I was interviewing child migrants,’ I said.

  ‘Were there others?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, we thought we were the only ones.’

  Over the next three days, I interviewed each of them. They had been sent to an orphanage called Goodwood in Adelaide, an institution which was also home for many Australian girls.

  There seemed to be an anti-British policy at the orphanage. At every opportunity the girls were told to forget Britain and any thoughts of going ‘home’. They were punished if they sang ‘God Bless England’, instead of ‘God Bless Australia’.

  None had been prepared for their new life in Australia. Being uprooted and separated from their schools, their friends and all that was familiar had traumatized them.

  I noticed when I visited their homes and walked into their sitting-rooms that I could have been anywhere in England. Whether consciously or not, they had decorated their houses and gardens in a particularly English style.

  At Goodwood, the new arrivals slept in dormitories. Many wet their beds and these girls were singled out and made to sleep elsewhere. One woman remembered being terrified of going to sleep in case she wet the bed but each morning the sheet and mattress were soaked.

  ‘And if you wet your bed you were made to stand up in front of the class with the wet sheet over you. It makes me feel sick, remembering it.’

  The children were not allowed pillows and had only two thin blankets for cold winter nights.

  Punishment at Goodwood was swift and sometimes brutal. I was told stories of girls being caned for having a hole in their socks, a stain on their dress or getting prayers wrong. These beatings were often public and girls would have to pull their pants down and lie across their beds.

  ‘The Reverend Mother came up with this huge strap and whacked me one right through the sheet. Then she ripped my nightie off, and there I was in the raw, trying to cover myself up. She kept hitting me until I was covered in welts.’

  It seemed hard to imagine, listening to these articulate, well-dressed, middle-aged mothers and wives, that any of them could have done something to warrant such a beating.

  Their days seemed very regimented and revolved between chores, classes and more chores. They were woken at six every morning and had to dress for mass in the chapel. After mass they changed to do their chores and have breakfast. After school and on weekends there were more chores.

  ‘On Saturdays we did the washing. There was a massive laundry with industrial machines and it took two of us to manage each machine. In England, we would have been outside in the sunshine enjoying ourselves. But not at Goodwood,’ one woman recalled angrily.

  Another complained at having to wear the same underwear for a week regardless of whether it was soiled. ‘When one girl’s first period started, she had no idea what the blood was and hid her pants behind the door.’

  One by one, I interviewed these women and I asked each if there was a single moment which stood out about their childhoods.

  Almost all recounted the same event – a story that troubled them deeply.

  There was a very young child migrant, no more than five years old, who arrived from England. She was very upset and couldn’t stop crying. The little girl had long curly blond hair and was very pretty.

  After being at Goodwood a few days, she packed all her possessions in a bag and ran off down the drive in her nightie. The nuns followed her and dragged her back. The next morning, all the girls were made to line up in the yard and watch her being punished.

  Although each of them gave a slightly different account of what happened next, the details were the same. Two of the nuns held the little girl down, while another started cutting off her hair with garden shears.

  Her struggles and cries went unheard. When they had finished, there was just an inch or two of hair left on her head. ‘God wants her punished more than that,’ one of the nuns said, and she produced a pair of secateurs. She started cutting again and didn’t stop until the young girl’s hair was gone completely and her scalp was bloody with cuts.

  All those I interviewed who witnessed this event remained traumatized by it, even decades later.

  Among them was Pamela Smedley, who arrived at our makeshift office on a Tuesday afternoon, accompanied by a friend. She was very nervous and David had to reassure her.

  All her life, Pamela told me, she’d been searching for the truth: ‘At the back of my mind is the fact that I’m a nobody. I’ve got no roots.’

  Pamela could only ever remember growing up in institutions. She had no memory of a mother or father and had been told that he
r mother abandoned her in hospital as a newborn baby.

  At the children’s home in Middlesborough she and a group of other girls were informed that they were being sent to Australia to be adopted by families.

  When the six-week voyage ended in another institution, the realization was devastating.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it. We sat on the iron steps at the home and cried. We sat there and cried for three days. We just wanted to get on a ship and go home to England.

  ‘I thought, How am I ever going to see England again? How am I going to find anybody all the way out here?’

  When I asked Pamela about conditions at Goodwood, her description wasn’t as harsh or uncaring as others had recounted. Pamela accepted the punishment and regime as part of institutional life. She didn’t blame anybody, least of all the nuns, for what had happened to her.

  Pamela was fifteen when she was sent out to a shearing station some five hours’ drive from Adelaide, in bone-dry countryside where temperatures in the summer rose to well over one hundred degrees. It was an isolated farm, miles from anywhere.

  ‘It could have been Mars! It was so different from England,’ she said. ‘I was being sent away again, you know, even further away. Talk about being punished for something you didn’t do.

  ‘I hated it. I cried myself to sleep every night. I was cut off from all the friends I ever had.’

  ‘What did you do on the farm?’ I asked.

  ‘I cooked for seven shearers. I had to be up before dawn to cook them breakfast and then make them morning tea, then lunch and then dinner. It was a big old place with wood floors and great huge wooden tables. I would have to light the stove early to heat the water.’

  ‘What was the owner like?’

  ‘The woman that I worked for often made out she was having a heart attack, to frighten me. I thought she was going to drop dead on me and I’d get the blame, so I would work twice as hard. I was that used to getting the blame for things that I didn’t do.