I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Orange on the Central Tablelands of NSW, thankfully as part of a close and loving family. Weekend activities often included a Sunday afternoon picnic or drive. My father would pack us into the car and we’d head off into the surrounding countryside. I have fond memories of those outings as tangible experiences of the togetherness and nurturing of family life.
About 20 km west of Orange, on the road to Molong, we’d often pass the Fairbridge Farm School. In those days it was explained to us that this institution gave British orphans, rescued from poverty in damp cold postwar England, the promise of a better life in sunny rural Australia. But as the video featured here shows, for most of the child migrants housed in its neatly painted wooden buildings, it failed dismally in delivering on those promises.
The Long Journey Home screened on Tuesday evening on ABC1, the day after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Forgotten Australians at Parliament House in Canberra (it is available on ABC iView until 1 December). It’s a poignant case study fleshing out who some of these forgotten children are, and why there was a desperate need for an apology.
The documentary is not a stylistic masterpiece, but there is something gripping in its plain and straightforward story telling, and its honest portrayal of raw emotion. Former residents explain how they were separated at a tender age from their families, some as young as four or five years old, and sent to far-off Australia. This is shocking enough, but worse was to come as they were forced to do long hours of backbreaking farmwork, and many suffered physical and sexual abuse.
It is based on a book written by the best known alumnus of Fairbridge Farm, David Hill. This former head of NSW Railways, Managing Director of the ABC, and sports bureaucrat is living proof that some children seemed to do well under the austere Fairbridge regime, emerging as leaders in society. This is another strength of the documentary that there is a mix of voices and views, and an acknowledgement of ambiguity. Some interviewees praised Fairbridge Farm and those who ran it.
Hill acknowledges that a small minority did do well – of the thousand or so who grew up there during its forty years of operation, a meagre