Book Review (Non-Fiction): The Forgotten Children

The Forgotten Children

Fairbridge Farm School And It’s Betrayal Of Britain’s Child Migrants

David Hill

Allen & Unwin 2017                                                                                  338 Pages

“You can never really entrust your children to anyone else” - Anon

Author David Hill’s single mother did, but realizing her error, was luckily on hand to rescue him and two siblings from a very Dickensian institution in - of all places - 20^th century Australia. 

Mr Bumble the Beadle, Wackford Squeers and other such fictional 19^th century child-abusing Victorian ogres would have felt right at home at the Fairbridge Farm School, Molong, established in 1938. This now happily defunct Gulag of child slaves was no less a hellhole than the chilly soot-encrusted workhouse of Oliver Twist in the London slums.

The road to hell is paved with good(?) intentions...

The Fairbridge scheme was borne out of the seemingly laudable desire of Kingsley Fairbridge (1886-1924), a member of the Edwardian upper middle class and scion of Empire, to reinforce far-flung British possessions with white settler stock drawn from destitute children of the UK. Despite the stated “philanthropic” aim of resettling pauper juveniles into productive new lives in Canada, Rhodesia and Australia;  this was really a way for the ruling classes of Imperial Britain to get rid of a problem underclass, while extending exploitation of the colonies. In the author’s view, the Fairbridge scheme only succeeded in reinforcing the appalling class inequity of Imperial Britain in Australia.

In his now notoriously panned poem “The White Man’s Burden” that smugly sententious bard of empire, Rudyard Kipling enjoined Britain to send out the best of her sons overseas in the service of Empire. The crew sent out to run the Fairbridge Farm School certainly didn’t meet that description; these included a retired Royal Navy officer, Commander R R “Dickie” Beauchamp forced to resign due to the prevalence of nocturnal immoral practices and F K S Woods, a brutal South African-born giant given to beating the boys in his charge with a hockey stick, even breaking the back of one of them, Ron Simpson.

Enforcing a harsh regime of hard labour, inedible food, appalling education, frequent sadistic punishments, poor and shoddy facilities were the “cottage mothers” who supervised the children in the cottage dormitories. These “widows of empire” were often extremely venomous former memsahibs like chain-smoking Kathleen "Fag" Johnstone and Margaret Hodgkinson, both addicted to flogging the hapless children in their charge – it’s just as well the British Raj is long gone now and India doesn’t have to suffer the attentions of such awful Englishwomen any more.

Using his skills as a researcher, author Hill has collated the horrifying stories of many of the child victims of the Fairbridge Farm School in stark detail.  The Forgotten Children paints an unsparing portrait of institutional apathy and cover-ups. Despite decades of well-documented physical and sexual abuse of its charges and their exploitation as child labour, the Fairbridge Foundation got away with it, as an institution associated with such influential stalwarts of the imperial establishment as Sir Charles Hambro and Field-Marshal Lord Slim.

As an institution, Fairbridge Farm was already obsolete well before changes in social welfare administration and childcare practices in the late 1940s made it increasingly irrelevant. The post-war decline of the British Empire it was supposed to serve only accelerated this process. The concerned authorities, foiled in their initial attempts to shut down an embarrassingly iniquitous and inefficient institution by politics, found other ways to starve the beast by covertly blacklisting it and closing the inflow of child migrants.

The Farm was finally shut down for good in 1974. But by then it was too late for several lost generations of children who had been robbed of childhood, education, social skills – and left with a troubling legacy of psychological and other health problems from being so cruelly ill-used.

Despite having assets of several million dollars, the Fairbridge Foundation persistently refused to disburse funds to help rehabilitate the innocents whose lives it had so callously wrecked. It took a class action lasting over 7 years before the Australian Supreme Court awarded nearly 200 former Fairbridge children 24 million Australian dollars in damages in 2015.