Reconciling British Child Deportation to Australia, 1913-1970: Apologies, Memorials, and Family Reunions

Between September 2019 and December 2023, I was one of three scholars within the Wilberforce Institute’s Falling Through the Net Research Cluster, a group whose research concerned institutional failures to care for child migrants in an array of historical contexts.

Our research was generously funded by a series of full scholarships provided by the University of Hull. In this article, I outline the findings of my doctoral research and explore some of the ongoing issues faced by former child migrants, as well as their descendants.

In the year 1986, Dr Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham-based social worker who specialised in the fields of family tracing and personal identity, received an unexpected letter from an Australian nurse called Mary. In this letter, Mary explained that she had been born in the UK and had been put on a ship destined for Australia when she was six years old, and pleaded with Dr Humphreys to help her find her birth family. Little did they know at the time, this interaction would lead to thousands of other former wards of the Australian state requesting help from Humphreys in locating their biological families in the following decades, the establishment of the Child Migrants Trust, as well as the public unveiling of one of the largest childcare scandals of the twentieth century, namely the deportation of some 7,000 British, Irish, and Maltese-born institutionalised children to Australia.

Beyond being deported from their country of birth, many of these former child migrants endured cruel and repugnant maltreatment. This ranged from institutional abuse and labour exploitation to the alteration of their names, places, and dates of birth, in addition to being told that their parents had died or no longer wished to look after them, leading to a loss of personal identity. To this day, Illiteracy, psychiatric disorders, and addictions are sadly all too common among former child migrants. Despite the fact that the child migrant scandal came to public attention in the mid-to-late 1980s, governmental reconciliation for this shameful historic episode would not begin in earnest until the year 1998.

This year marked the publication of the UK Health Select Committee’s Third Report, which addressed the consequences of historic child migrant programmes. Three years later, the Australian Senate would publish their own inquiry into the subject entitled Lost Innocents: Righting the Record: A Report on Child Migration. Although both reports advocated for national apologies, the Australian Federal Government did not apologise until eight years after the publication of Lost Innocents, with the UK Government waiting until twelve years after the publication of the Health Select Committee’s Third Report to do the same.

On 16 November, 2009, Kevin Rudd, then the Australian Prime Minister, offered a joint apology to both former child migrants and the Forgotten Australians, the latter being the roughly 500,000 Australian-born children raised within the institutional care system, for the neglect and maltreatment that many suffered during their childhoods. Rudd’s speech addressed the pain these former state wards had suffered throughout their lives, the feelings of isolation that many endured during their time in institutional care, as well as the failures of successive governments to adequately safeguard these children. Although some former child migrants including Oliver Cosgrove and Patricia Carlson have praised the apology for its sincerity, others including Hugh McGowan have argued that former child migrants were treated as an afterthought within the ceremony, calling for the issuing of a separate apology.

On 24 February, 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued his own apology on behalf of the UK Government, this time addressed solely to former child migrants. The ceremony further included an invitation to both Prime Minister’s Questions and a formal reception after the speech had been issued. While the apology was forthright in accepting liability for the maltreatment of former child migrants after they had been deported, it had a rather celebratory tone, highlighting the adversities that these former wards of the Australian state had overcome in adulthood while also praising the work of the Child Migrants Trust. Although former child migrants including Harold Haig and Michael Harvey have acknowledged the success of the apology in recognising the pain they suffered as children, in the year 2017 Gordon Brown himself admitted that his speech overlooked the maltreatment of former child migrants in British institutions prior to their deportation.

Although both national inquiries recognised the importance of creating public history installations dedicated to former child migrants, Lost Innocents was much more forthright in doing so and this has meant that Australia is home to a far wider array of permanent memorials than the UK. Between 2001 and 2007, the Australian Federal Government spent AUS$100,000 installing permanent markers in honour of former child migrants in each of the nation’s six devolved states. Although the unveiling of these memorials was accompanied by an apology or statement of regret issued on behalf of the state in question, these monuments outlined the contributions that former state wards had made to Australia and the difficulties they had overcome, while neglecting to mention what exactly these adversities were. Only one permanent marker dedicated to former child migrants in the UK was created during this same period, in Nottinghamshire. This memorial marked the 60th anniversary of the commencement of postwar child migrant schemes and praised the role of Nottinghamshire County Council in helping to reunite lost families.

This divergence in memorialisation policy is emblematic of a wider phenomenon. Australian memorials relating to childhood have typically recognised injustices suffered by children, including the plight of First Nation Australians forcibly removed from their families as children. Additional measures offered to the Stolen Generations, including a national apology and family tracing projects, have further proved influential in paving the way for indirect reparations offered to former child migrants. Meanwhile, British memorials of childhood have tended to celebrate successes in caring for children, with notable examples including the Kindertransport and the Basque refugees. While it is of course vital that we acknowledge humanitarian efforts in looking after child refugees, this should not come at the expense of understanding how many children have been let down by the British welfare state, including former child migrants.

This stark contrast in the volume of public histories dedicated to children in these respective nations is underlined by the memorialisation processes that took place in the wake of national apologies, with Australia creating three new memorials, a museum exhibition, and an oral history project, all of which were jointly dedicated to the Forgotten Australians and former child migrants. Although the bilateral museum project On Their Own: Britain’s Child Migrants commenced in 2010, it would not arrive in the UK until 2014, and a small display devoted to child migrant programmes appeared in the Departures exhibition hosted by the Migration Museum in London between 2020 and 2022.

In addition to the significant emotional distress involved in attempting to locate one’s birth family, reuniting former child migrants with their lost relatives has been challenging for four main reasons. The first of these is the fact that many former state wards were given false names and dates of birth upon arrival to Australia, were separated from their siblings, and had their birth certificates either altered or confiscated, leading to a widespread loss of personal identity. This has in turn made the process of obtaining original birth certificates significantly more challenging, further impeding the ability of former child migrants to obtain citizenship and passports in order to leave the country to which they were deported. Even once these issues have been rectified, one final factor, namely the cost of this process, has proved prohibitive for many wishing to engage in family reunions. The Child Migrants Trust, who have engaged in vital family tracing and counselling efforts since their inception, have also been chronically underfunded in proportion to the work they have undertaken.

Early governmental efforts to facilitate family reunions concentrated on travel bursaries which, though welcomed by former child migrants and their advocates, could only help with the process of meeting lost relatives as opposed to engaging in family tracing, the principal work undertaken by the Child Migrants Trust. The UK Government’s £1 million Child Migrants Support Fund, for example, spanned from 1999 to 2002 and covered travel costs and counselling for first time family reunions, but was means tested and only open to UK-born applicants with living parents, aunts, uncles, or siblings. Meanwhile, the Australian Travel Fund, which was open from 2002 to 2005, provided AUS$5,500,000 of funding for repeat family reunions, visits to gravesites, and/or citizenship costs to applicants born in either the UK, Ireland, or Malta. Although a combined total of nearly 1,000 successful applications were made to these funds, the Child Migrants Trust were unable to expand their operations beyond their offices in Nottingham, Perth, and Melbourne to meet this new and unprecedented demand for their services.

Although both national governments have continued to offer some funding for the Child Migrants Trust, there would be no further bursaries available for overseas travel until the year 2010. Shortly after the apology issued to the Forgotten Australians and former child migrants, the Australian Federal Government launched their Find and Connect service, a primarily digital platform designed to be a starting point for all non-indigenous care leavers wishing to trace their families. The UK Government’s apology, on the other hand, marked the launching of a new £6,000,000 Family Restoration Fund. Unlike their previous Child Migrants Support Fund, this more recent bursary is open-ended, having been renewed twice in both 2014 and 2017, can be spent on family tracing work, and is not restricted to first-time family reunions, with many applicants having been able to attend significant family events including weddings and funerals. However, no formal guarantees have been made about the long-term duration of either the Find and Connect or the Family Restoration Fund, and as recently as March 2023, roughly 1,400 former child migrants have still not had the chance to reunite with their birth families.

Having analysed apology, memorialisation, and family reunion efforts offered to former child migrants by both the UK and Australian Federal Governments, my doctoral research has unearthed three overarching findings. These are as follows:

1. Due to the current lack of an independent inquiry into child migrant programmes and the fact that the governments in question have set the terms for reconciliation, the aim of truth-telling has been marginalised.
2. Reconciliation has almost entirely occurred on national levels, with little cooperation between the UK Government and the Australian Federal Government being evident within this process.
3. The families of former child migrants, alongside themes of social class and empire, have been all but overlooked within the process of reconciliation.

Therefore, in a similar vein to the inquiries conducted by the UK Health Select Committee and the Australian Senate in the years 1998 and 2001 respectively, the conclusion of my thesis contains a series of recommendations designed to enhance reconciliation for former child migrants and their descendants. These are for:

• The commencement of an independent inquiry into historic child migrant schemes,
• A separate apology issued by the Australian Federal Government targeted specifically at former child migrants,
• An amended apology issued by the UK Government recognising the institutional maltreatment of former child migrants in British sheltering homes,
• The installation of national memorials dedicated to former child migrants in both Australia and the UK,
• The installation of permanent museum exhibits dedicated to former child migrants in both Australia and the UK,
• The commencement of a British oral history project designed to document the lives of repatriated former child migrants, as well as their descendants,
• The indefinite continuation of both the Family Restoration Fund and the Find and Connect programme,
• Sustained governmental funding of the Child Migrants Trust in order for the charity to continue their family tracing and counselling work, as well as to expand their operations beyond their three existing bases, and,
• The removal of barriers obstructing former child migrants and their descendants from obtaining citizenship of either the UK or Australia.

I leave you with a quotation from the end of the UK Government’s apology, which acutely highlights the ongoing need to offer help to all those affected by the deportation of British, Irish, and Maltese children to Australia throughout the twentieth century: