Australian Leader Apologizes for Child Migrants

[Story]

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to children who were abused in government institutions between the 1930s and 1970s.

The children were gathered up by the tens of thousands, some of them as young as 3, taken from single mothers and impoverished families in Britain, then sent abroad for what was supposed to be a better start in life. What they found was isolation, physical and sexual abuse, and what the prime minister of Australia said Monday was “the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost.”

In an emotional address in Canberra, with many in the audience weeping, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a national apology for Australia’s role in child migrant programs that forcibly brought an estimated 150,000 British youngsters — known in Australia as the Lost Innocents — to Australia, Canada and other parts of the Commonwealth. The programs ended about 40 years ago.

Video and complete article at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/world/asia/17migrants.html

Ten-year-old twins Brian Thomas, left, and Kevin James Sullivan carry their luggage as they leave London bound for Auckland, New Zealand, in October 1950.

 

[Cricket]

Reading the accounts of the two grown migrants in the article made my heart fall to the floor. I think what got to me more was the photo that shows a couple of innocent boys...with smiles. Thanks for sharing on an apology well overdue.

 

[Cigarband]

The only meaningful apology is one from the perpetrator of the transgression. All else is Politically motivated Political Correctness. Today's Governments spend too much time on nonsense like this. Make sure the world knows what happened, and promise that IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!
Then keep the promise! Far more important than an empty apology.

 

[cecil]

The only meaningful apology is one from the perpetrator of the transgression. All else is Politically motivated Political Correctness. Today's Governments spend too much time on nonsense like this. Make sure the world knows what happened, and promise that IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!
Then keep the promise! Far more important than an empty apology.

Uh, well for starters these people were apologsied to by the Prime Minister on behalf of the government of Australia, and the government of Australia was indeed the perpetrator.

Secondly, the address included the line "And, as a nation, to resolve that such systematic abuse should never happen again.". The fact that it has made international news would suggest that the world knows what has happened.

Here is the speech, should you care to read it:
http://www.pm.gov.au/node/6321

- Cecil

 

[andy richards]

This item was on Dutch national news as well. I was amazed and shocked this happened just a couple of decades ago. May this be a lesson to the hole world and especially to politicians of our generation.
Andy

 

[Roquentin]

I remember a passage in Bill Bryson's book on his travels Australia where this program is mentioned. Evidently some of the children taken didn't even realize that they were going to another country halfway across the world- they asked their handlers if they would be home in time for tea.

 

[tuppence]

No Cigarband, this is not nonsense. These apologies have nothing to do with political correctness.The Government don't just decide to apologise to a bunch of people. It takes a lot of hard work and years of pressure from people affected by the circumstances, to gain government recognition, that what happened to them was unacceptable.

 

[Story]

Apology Opens Wounds of British Migrant Program

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/world/23children.html?hpw

LONDON — Laurie Humphreys, at least, had the advantage of being a teenager — if anything about being uprooted from family and homeland in 1940s Britain and sent 12,000 miles to brutal and often sexually abusive orphanages in western Australia could be called advantageous. Mr. Humphreys was 14, old enough to understand at least some of what was happening to him.

Others among the boys and girls known in Australia as the “lost innocents” were as young as 3, children abandoned by single mothers or impoverished families, placed into institutional care in Britain, then transported across the world, often without parental consent, with certificates bearing wrong names and birth dates, and falsely noting that they had no living parents or siblings.

Mr. Humphreys arrived in Fremantle on Sept. 22, 1947, one of 100 boys and 40 girls who were part of the first wave of child migrants to leave Britain for Australia after World War II, resuming a program that was started in the 1920s but that had origins in the early 17th century, when child migrants were shipped across the Atlantic to the Virginia colony. The scheme broadened in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a total of perhaps 150,000 children sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Rhodesia.