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.