In 1998 Sixty Minutes first told this story and on the third of this month Sixty Minutes II aired a follow-up...
Following World War II, Great Britain was flush from victory but short on cash for social programs. They had a surplus of kids—overflowing children's homes with kids put there by parents too poor (at the time) to care for them. Couple that with Australia's (and other country's) shortage of people and continuing fear of being overrun by the Japanese and an ugly Scheme was hatched: ship the kids overseas.
For twenty years beginning in 1947, the British government, with the collaboration of primarily the Catholic Church and various charities, shipped tens of thousands of its children overseas, never to see their families again. The children ranged in age from 2 to 15.
All over Great Britain, priests and bureaucrats rounded up kids, telling them that they were going to a new life, a new land, and a new family. The kids were also told that their parents were either dead or didn't care about them.
Six weeks and 12,000 miles later, there was no sign of loving families waiting on the docks when the ships landed on the western shores of Australia. A "man in black," the Archbishop of Perth, was. He told them they were needed to populate Australia. Children were soon separated by sex, sisters from brothers, brothers from sisters, amidst screams of terror that they would never see each other again.
No loving parents were waiting for them at their final destinations, either – only picks and shovels. The boys set about building places like Bindoon, sixty miles from civilization in the sweltering bush country of western Australia. An Order of Catholic monks, The Christian Brothers, ran Bindoon. Supposedly it was to be a home and school for boys, but the new arrivals soon found out that little of their time would be spent in class.
The boys, many not even in their teens, were used as forced laborers to build the substantial complex of buildings. From sun to sun they built the fifty-foot high, cathedral sized structures out of blue stone and concrete blocks—a marvelous series of red-topped structures that still stand as a real school today. Constantly malnourished, floggings and beatings were part of the daily routine. The nightly routine included systematic rapes of the young boys by the priests—nine-year-olds being a favorite target.
Tony Shanahan, current head of the Christian Brothers, admitted that there were pedophiles on the staff that "did serious damage." A British government inquiry went further, stating that "a quite exceptional depravity" had gone on at Bindoon and other facilities throughout the country.
A head of the British investigative team said, "there was widespread and systematic physical and sexual abuse of the boys at Bindoon and at other Christian Brothers establishments." Shanahan took exception to the charge. While not saying outright that some of the stories were made up, he did say that some had "grown" over time.
Neither the Australian nor British governments have breathed a word of even the mildest of apologies. The question of why an official apology has never been offered was asked of the current Australian minister of Immigration.
"Well... um... I don't know what, um... we would be necessarily apologizing for... um... what we sought to do in Australia... uh... was to provide an environment in which young people who were brought here were given opportunity for a new life." A "new life" indeed!
Across the Big Pond in Britain, no official word of apology is forthcoming. A current member of Parliament, David Henslett(?) who is part of a new inquiry into The Scheme, theorized that at the time many high level government officials including the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary (Interior Minister), archbishops, and perhaps even the Queen herself all knew and never said a word then or since. The most the Brits would say is that the "policy was misguided."
(Note: In response to a lawsuit, in 1993 the Christian Brothers organization officially apologized to children who had been abused at their institutions as well as set aside $2 and a half million as reparations for 250 of them.)
For fifty years the governments of Great Britain and Australia, and the Catholic Church and the Church of England had not only exploited and abused thousands of kids, they had also conned parents and kids alike. When their financial lives improved many parents returned to the orphanages to retrieve their children but were told that their children had been adopted. The authorities also lied to the children. Many of the thousands of kids, now 50 years old and older, are finding out that their parents are still alive.
Since no funds have been set aside to help reunite disjointed families, Sixty Minutes II paid Mary Malloy's way to Dublin where her mother is still alive and in reasonably good health (for a woman her age). Earlier in the program while the cameras rolled, Mary laid eyes on her mother for the first time when producers of the show gave her a recent picture of her 81 yr old mother.
Mary learned that her mother had tried to stop the adoption fifty years ago but the priests told her that Mary had already been adopted and it was too late to stop the adoption. What they *didn't* tell the mother – even though they knew it – was that Mary had been shipped off to Australia.
"Not a day passed that I did not think of her," Mary's mother said. Again while the cameras rolled, Mary and her aged mother embraced for the first time while the mother begged for forgiveness.
Mary is one of the "lucky" ones since she has been able to reconnect with at least one of her living parents. Many thousands of other children, now past middle age, have not faired so well. One man found his mother and brother and made arrangements to go see her after fifty years. Just days before his departure a phone call broke the news that she had passed away. He saw her... after fifty years... as she lay in her coffin.
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It was hard to watch the story, hard to keep from getting choked up and misty eyed while this story played out. I don't mind saying that I didn't try to keep from doing either. It was an enormously sordid, tragic story, knowing that institutions that should have been the very protectors of thousands of children – governments and churches – were the actual perpetrators. I couldn't help thinking that the Dateline segment about the WTS is going to be a devastating, hard hitting exposé.
For more information on the Lost Children of the UK, see http://www.childmigrants.com/A%20Brief%20History.htm