Word: australia
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...Laurie Humphreys had already spent the majority of his short life in a Southampton orphanage in England. He was 13, and clearly remembers the BBC Home Service for schools announcing that Australia needed more migrants. "When the sisters asked who wanted to go to Australia, my hand was one of the first to go up," he recalls...
...time, Humphreys believed Australia was the antidote to his dark, damp days in southern England. "We were told that there would be 14 hours of sunshine a day, and that we could ride a horse to school," he says. When he was one of the three chosen from his orphanage to go abroad, he was delighted. (See pictures of Australia...
...Reality differed from Humphreys' expectations. His arrival in Bindoon, a small town in Western Australia, marked the end of his formal education. By 14, he was driving a truck to collect rocks and sand for a construction site where he and other child-migrant laborers were working. They were under the control of the Christian Brothers, an international Catholic congregation who are today notorious for their record of physically and sexually abusing orphans. "[The Brothers] were not afraid to use a belt. They wore these black robes that had a pocket on the inside - like a holster," remembers Humphreys...
...Humphreys' was one of 7,000 British orphans shipped to Australia from 1930 to 1970 under the Child's Migrant Programme - a scheme designed to bring "good white stock" to populate Australia. Today, the people affected by the catastrophic policy are sometimes referred to in Australia as the "lost innocents." Though Humphrey's mother had died when he was 4, many child migrants who came to Australia during those years were children with single mothers who were forcibly removed from their homes. Some of their relatives had no knowledge that they had even left the country...
...beaten and abused, physically, sexually, mentally - treated like objects not people - leaving you to feel of even less worth," said Turnbull. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is due to make his own apology to the 130,000 British children sent from Britain to Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia sometime next year...