Between the 1910s and 1970, 7,000 children aged between three and 14 were transported to Australia as part of Britain's child migrant program. Promised a better life and loving families waiting to adopt, most were instead delivered into institutions where large numbers suffered abuse.
Home Children was the child migration scheme founded by Annie MacPherson in 1869, under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The programme was largely discontinued in the 1930s, but not entirely terminated until the 1970s.
The emigration programme was set up to ease the burden on UK orphanages and to boost the populations of the colonies but it was later revealed that some migrants in Australia, who had been told they were orphans, may have relatives living in the UK.
The last child was migrated to Australia in 1970. Most if not all of those children who had been migrated remained within their receiving institution, despite the concerns that had been raised about the appalling conditions in which many of them were accommodated.
From the 1860s, more than 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries through child migration schemes. Few were orphans; many came from families who were unable to care for them.
Oranges and Sunshine is directed by Jim Loach and adapted to screenplay by Rona Munro from the book "Empty Cradles", written by Margaret Humphreys. It stars Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham and Richard Dillane.
Between 1938 and 1956, an estimated 1,147 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, unaccompanied by parents, through child migration initiatives operated through Catholic organisations.
Between 1788 and 1868 more than 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Of these, about 7,000 arrived in 1833 alone. The convicts were transported as punishment for crimes committed in Britain and Ireland.
The victims of this misguided scheme have sometimes been described as 'orphans of the empire' but few were actually orphans. They were more often just trapped in poverty or been stranded by broken homes. About 10,000 British children were sent to 26 child migrant centres in six Australian states.
Defining 'child migration'
2.9 In the context of this inquiry, the Committee uses the term 'child migrant' to refer to unaccompanied children generally under the age of 16 years who were brought to Australia from the United Kingdom or Malta under approved schemes during the 20th century.
Why were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children taken from their families? The forcible removal of First Nations children from their families was based on assimilation policies, which claimed that the lives of First Nations people would be improved if they became part of white society.
During the time of the Stolen Generations tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were forcefully taken from their families. They were sent to missions all across Australia. Some, however, went with their adopted families as far as England or the United States of America, sometimes never to return.
Many children were denied benign parental care – but there were those who fared much worse. They were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, often affecting their long-term mental health. Reports of the abuse were ignored by the charities ostensibly “caring” for these children.
The removal of Indigenous children was a deliberate effort by the Australian Government as part of its assimilation policy. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report found that government officials took children away from caring and able parents. These parents often had no way to stop this.
By the 1950s, concerns about the level of care children were receiving in institutions led to the closing down of some larger orphanages and children's homes and a move towards group care in smaller cottage and foster homes.
About 4,000 children were sent to Australia and other countries after 1945. Many of them were poor or orphaned and were promised a new life where "sheep outnumbered people". They were sent by charities and the Catholic Church. Clifford Walsh was sent to Western Australia.
The disappearance of Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont on Australia Day in 1966 became one of the country's enduring mysteries and remains unsolved. The children — aged 9, 7 and 4 — left their Somerton Park home for a day at Glenelg beach, but never came home.
Estimates of numbers have been widely disputed. The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.
By 1969, all states had repealed the legislation allowing for the removal of Aboriginal children under the policy of 'protection'.
Seeking to pre-empt the French colonial empire from expanding into the region, Britain chose Australia as the site of a penal colony, and in 1787, the First Fleet of eleven convict ships set sail for Botany Bay, arriving on 20 January 1788 to found Sydney, New South Wales, the first European settlement on the continent ...
Hundreds of thousands of convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Today, it's estimated that 20% of the Australian population are descended from people originally transported as convicts, while around 2 million Britons have transported convict ancestry.
The first Irish orphans arrived in Sydney on Earl Grey in October 1848. Many more followed, entering into domestic service and eventually marrying, raising families and settling into colonial society.
The British Home Children were boys and girls from the United Kingdom who were relocated to British dominions and colonies in other parts of the world. They were sent to places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the belief that these children would have more opportunities there.
In 2011, Australian census data reported almost five and-a-half million Catholics, 25.3 per cent of the total population. By 2021, that number had gone down to just 20 per cent.