DIALOGUES-Third Critical Studies -Colonialism and Migration

Abstract

On the 9th of July 1987, The Observer published a full page and a half article entitled “Lost Children of the Empire”, which was to be the first of three long articles signed by reporter Annabel Ferriman on, as she put it “a little known episode in British colonial history: the despatch to Australia of thousands of abandoned or orphaned children in the hope of giving them a new start”. This part of British colonial history, at the time unknown to the general public, had been unearthed accidentally by a British social worker from Nottingham, Margaret Humphreys, who had founded a small project called Triangle in 1984. Its aim was to explore the area of adoption and put in contact, whenever possible, the 3 adults concerned: the adopted “ child” and her/his natural parents. In 1986, she received a letter from an Australian woman who had heard about the project. She had been emigrated to Australia as a child because her parents “were dead” and had spent her childhood in a children’s home. Apart from that, she did not know anything about her past. She wasn’t even sure of her date of birth and wanted Margaret Humphreys to find out about it. She thought she had been in a children’s home in Nottingham before being shipped to Australia. Margaret Humphreys did not believe a child could be sent to Australia on its own until she met another client who told her a similar story. The latter had been adopted in England when one day she remembered she had a brother. She contacted the Salvation army and, a few months later received a letter from her brother who had also been shipped to Australia as a child and, with a number of other British children in similar circumstances, had spent his childhood in a home. As she could not find any files of children having emigrated to Australia in England, she had approached Annabel Ferriman, the correspondant for Health working for the Observer and, after she was advised by the latter to put an ad in an Australian newspaper to find more of these child migrants, they both flew to Australia. The advertisement which had been published in the Melbourne Daily of the 10th January 1987 ran: “would anyone who was sent as a child without parents to Australia from Britain in the 1940’s and 1950’s and who was put into a children’s home, please contact Margaret Humphreys, a British social worker, who would be interested in researching their past”. Margaret Humphreys got about a dozen replies from people who she then interviewed in Australia. After the articles appeared in The Observer, however, she got thousands. What she discovered was so shocking to a social worker of the 1980’s that she dedicated the research she published under the title Empty Craddles: “To all the child migrants and their families, particularly those who have suffered in silence for so long, with respect and admiration”. Her book was launched at a function at the Houses of Commons in 1994 in London, many years after she had met her first “case”.
Three years later, the (Australian) Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) published a report entitled Briging them Home. This report was, according to Naomi Parry (2007), the result of “concerted lobbying by Aboriginal groups”. It had been commissionned by the Labour Government who had been urged by Aboriginal groups to inquire into what they call “the stolen generation”, i.e. this generation of Aboriginal people who had been removed, as children, from their families and put into homes “for their own good”, in order to forget Aboriginal origins and become “good Australian citizens”. According to the report, it is difficult to evaluate the number of children removed but their estimation is that “between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were: forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970. In certain regions and in certain periods the figure was undoubtedly much greater than one in ten. In that time not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal (confirmed by representatives of the Queensland and WA Governments in evidence to the Inquiry). Most families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children”. The report is dedicated “ with thanks and admiration to those who found the strength to tell their stories to the Inquiry and to the generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people separated from their families and communities”.
It is difficult not to see a connection between the two stories. At the individual level, as most of these children spent their remaining chilhood in Australian homes and suffered what other children had suffered in such institutions at an earlier – or even at the same – period in the “British” Isles (see the “scandals” of institutionalisation which are now being uncovered in Ireland). At the “Imperial” level, I will argue that the removal of these children was part of the “biopolitics” of Empire, even after the latter had ceased to exist. It was part of the re-distribution of populations throughout the world in which the British Empire has played the leading part; it was also part of the “anglicisation” and the whitening of the world. Indeed, one of the reasons the British children, the majority of whom, it seems, were not orphans but “unwanted”, the illegitimate children of single mothers, i. e. “filius nulius” – nobody’s child – had been removed from the mother country, was to rid the latter from potential future problems and provide the receiving country – which, according to the doxa was, until 1994, considered Terra Nulius (empty land) – with “good British stock”. Those Indigenous children who were removed from THEIR families were also often “filius nulius”; they were generally those with the lightest skin colour, either because they were of “mixed” parentage, or because they just happened to be lighter than the others. The idea was that, a generation later, they would be absorbed into the white population.
What was shocking to the public of the 1980’s and 1990’s was not that this had happened at all. It was that it had happened only a few years earlier (the last group of emigrated children left Britain in 1967; in 1970 the last group of Indigenous children were removed from their family). This was after the Curtis report in England had unveiled the incredible distress of institutionalised children, after the evacuation of children, during the war, had motivated numerous researchs and launched the careers of British future world famous child specialists like Bowby and Winnicott whose theories were popularised by the media.
Using both official sources and sources emanating from some of the main private institutions which organised the Emigration of British children at that time, I will try to show how this paradox of intensely institutionaling children could be presented as legitimate in an era where the feelings against the institutionalisation of children was so strong. Whenever required, I will also use the Bring them Home Report in order to make a few points of comparison.

Bionote

Martine Spensky – Professor of British and Gender Studies – Universite Blaise Pascal – Clermont-Ferrand – France.