AUSTRALIAN prime minister Kevin Rudd yesterday gave an emotional apology to the 500,000 “forgotten Australians” who suffered abuse and neglect in foster care and orphanages between the 1920s and 1970s.
Most were born in Australia but up to 11,000 were taken from their families in Britain. About 1,000 people travelled to the capital Canberra from all over Australia to hear Mr Rudd apologise for the abuse. Many wept as Mr Rudd said Australia looked back in shame that so many children were left cold, hungry and alone.
“To you, the forgotten Australians and those who were sent to our shores as children without their consent . . . we are sorry,” he said. “Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where you were so often abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love or tenderness or care.
“Sorry for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost, childhoods spent instead in austere and authoritarian places where names were replaced by numbers.”
Speaking in the Great Hall of Australia’s parliament, Mr Rudd said: “The truth is a great evil has been done. The truth is this is an ugly story and its ugliness must be told without fear or favour if we are to confront fully the demons of our past.”
Despite the apology, the government said it will not pay compensation to the victims, but Mr Rudd said they will receive special care in old age.
The federal minister for families, Jenny Macklin, told parliament governments must ensure this never happens again.
“A nation’s most fundamental obligation, its most solemn and sacred duty, is to keep safe and cherish its children. For half a million children our nation failed to do this — for those who were born here and for those taken from their families and brought here from Britain and Malta,” she said.
From 1618 up until the practise ended in 1967, Britain is estimated to have sent up to 130,000 children to populate its colonies with white people.
Between the late 1920s to 1967 tens of thousands of British children, some as young as three, were sent to countries such as Australia and Canada.
Many were from poverty-stricken areas and some had been abandoned. But many parents gave up their children after being promised they would have a better life. Instead a huge number suffered shocking abuse.
A 2004 Australian senate inquiry into the forgotten children found widespread assault and emotional, physical and sexual abuse, as well as neglect, humiliation and the deprivation of food, education and medical care.
Some children were wrongly told their parents were dead. Siblings were separated when they arrived in Australia. Those sent to Australia from Britain were part of a plan by then immigration minister Arthur Calwell to bring “good white stock” into Australia.
As the children grew into adults they fought for recognition of the abuse they had suffered. The call for an apology from the Australian government grew since it was recommended by the senate inquiry five years ago.
Laurie Humphreys was 13 when he went from an orphanage in Southampton to Bindoon, a small Western Australia town. “We were told that there would be 14 hours of sunshine a day, and that we could ride a horse to school,” he said.
But the reality was that he was soon driving a truck for a construction site where he and other child migrants worked as labourers. They were controlled by the Christian Brothers.
Mr Humphreys said the Brothers “were not afraid to use a belt. They wore these black robes that had a pocket on the inside – like a holster.
“And their belts would crack out like whips from under there.” John Hughes, who had his legs broken, face put over a gas stove, was stabbed and had a foster mother who hit him in the head with a swing, welcomed the apology, but said it should have come from Queen Elizabeth. “She’s the one that sent the immigrants over here and she sent over all the superintendents from Ireland – they’re the ones who abused us,” he said.
The Australian government apologised to the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children, who were taken from their parents and raised in orphanages and with white families, last year.