From Forgotten Children to a Reckoning for Fairbridge kids

Much has changed since Fairbridge Farm School campaigner, David Hill was forced to launch his first book on abuse of children at the facility from the back of a car at Molong Railway Station.

The latest book by the former student and one-time head of the ABC titled, Reckoning catalogues how Australian attitudes have changed over the past 15 years to revelations about the wide-ranging exploitation of children in institutions like Fairbridge.

The launch of his latest work will be held at Orange City Library on Thursday, March 31 where the author will discuss how the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has changed the way we all deal with what was a shameful episode in our history and the legal cases that followed.

Fairbridge was one of dozens of children’s immigrant schools throughout Australia for British children supposedly offering the chance of a new life in a new land after the devastation Britain suffered from the World Wars.

Hill and his brother were two such children at Fairbridge near Molong where industrial-scale sexual and physical abuse of children was commonplace at these so-called enlightened institutions.

Cataloguing the history of this at Fairbridge in his first book, The Forgotten Children, he was forced to launch the work at Molong Station after his booking at a local venue was cancelled at the last minute.

“It was the story of Fairbridge, and it was written from children’s experiences,” he said of his first work on the facility.

“As it turned out, it was only the beginning of the big story that unfolded afterwards, with the Royal Commission exposing the extent of abuse in many of these institutions,” he said.

While The Forgotten Children exposed the crime, his new work, Reckoning, exposes the cover-up and its ultimate revelation in court by dozens of those who had been abused.

“It was the Royal Commission established by Julia Gillard that found a whole series of institutions were found to have covered-up these abuses... from Fairbridge alone, 60 former students sued and won compensation,” Mr Hill said.

Child abuse was the hidden shame that many sufferers simply kept hidden from the world, due to low self-esteem and a dread, often encouraged by the abuser, that they would not be believed.

“For many, it took decades for people who were abused to talk about it. All the Fairbridge kids who I interviewed; I was the first person who they talked to.

“I have a photo of a couple of women who were in their mid-seventies, who said they’d never told anyone about it.”

Part of the motivation for the book is to highlight the number of powerful and respected institutions who did nothing about the issue until it came to the light of day.

“This book is about the great institutions and the powerful organisations who were all players in this. All of these institutions have since admitted their guilt and apologised to the children, all of them,” he said.

This included the British and Australian governments, the NSW Government, and Fairbridge itself.

He argues that ignorance of itself, did not explain the failure to protect these vulnerable children – mostly from poor homes, separated from their parents, and sent to largely-unregulated institutions in rural areas on the far side of the world.

Mr Hill pointed to a British Government report that recommended the suspension of further child migration to Fairbridge Farm School at Molong or its sister school in Western Australia due to its treatment of children.

Patronage from the British Royal family and key members of the British aristocracy at the time, however, meant that Fairbridge was able to have the report shelved.

“In one my chapters, called ‘The Cover-Ups’, I detail how political pressure was brought to embarrass the British Government into not releasing the report. So, they knew then, what was going on, and yet they let it continue.”

He said that the acceptance of the widespread nature of this physical and sexual abuse of vulnerable children is one of the positive results of the Royal Commission.

“This is one of the good signs, community awareness is now so much greater... when we launched the Forgotten Children in 2007, people simply didn’t believe it.

“The café that we had booked for the event, said they had people ring up and complain... so we had the launch out the back of my car,” Mr Hill said wryly.