|
This is an uplifting and inspiring memoir...a great Australian story! The Bush Orphanage does however, reveal an outstanding social issue that has never been resolved.
The Australian Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee report, Lost Innocence Righting The Record Report on Child Migration of August 2001, failed to investigate crucial government archival material involving serious government wrong-doing.
This material reveals a conspiracy between two governments, Britain and Australia, to defraud British children of their legal and human rights. Also revealed is the deliberate government policy to institutionalise these children at a time when more humane care and welfare opportunities were available in Australia. The author has included in the book, photographic evidence of a falsified immigration document, which has the signature of a seven-year old child consenting to his deportation.
The book explains how the protection devices written into the Children Act UK 1948 were deliberately sabotaged by British and Australian authorities who ignored their responsibilities under British law.
In addition, the book provides documentary proof showing travel bans imposed by the Department of Immigration, and other restrictive devices being placed on British mothers, to prevent them from ever regaining custody of their children. This attack on British mothers led directly to children arriving with wrong names and birthdays, in an attempt to make their tracing impossible.
In short, crimes against humanity were committed by British and Australian government authorities in the quest to get British children to fill Australian institutions. The author's own story is an example of these crimes.
In 1933 Canada banned child migration after years of allegations of cruelty and abuse. Ever mindful of not repeating the Canadian scandal, the British Home Office laid out specific guidelines about how these children should be raised, educated and assimilated into Australian society. However, the more child-friendly and humane model for care of children proposed by the Home Office did not exist at the time in Australia. This could have been a sticking point for the child migration scheme.
Part 1 of this book is the life story of a child traveller cast adrift on an ocean of uncertainties. It is the author's story.
Part 11 is a brief overview of the child migration scheme to Australia. It is a story about the complicity of governments who shirked their legal and moral responsibility for the lives of child migrants, and in doing so, negated the common misconception that the genuine but misguided authorities in Britain and Australia, were driven by benevolence and goodwill to give children a 'fresh start in life'. It is also a story of the churches and secular organisations that took part in child migration, and ultimately have taken the blame for the tragedy.
...many children had little access to positive and caring family environments and were often restricted in their opportunities to join in community life. Yet there is lttle evidence of the psychological trauma inflicted on these children - only their word.
The lessons of history have taught us that children, above all else, need consistent nurturing and love in their lives. The authorities involved in the child migration scheme mistakenly believed that the Church and the State would be a suitable substitute for loving and well-adjusted parents and role models. They also assumed that children could be uprooted and transplanted into a foreign culture without ill-effects.
If Dame Enid Lyons and John Curtin had won their argument to have young British children fostered or adopted into Australian society, then the scheme might have been more successful. It is no surprise that the orphanage system caused great social, educational and psychological disadvantage for the child migrants, yet to their credit, they have overcome these disadvantages and have taken their place, along with their children, in Australia, making a large and valuable contribution to the richness of Australian life.
buy this book...
|
