His staff called him “God” and, as managing director and chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, David Hill’s brilliant career was all the more astonishing given his poor start in life. He was a “migrant child” – one of thousands of impoverished English children whose parents sent them to Australia in the hope of giving them a better start in life. Born in 1947 into a one-parent family on the Langney council estate near Eastbourne, East Sussex, Hill and his three brothers were raised by their mother; their father had deserted them. One day, in the depths of despair, Hill’s mother received a visit from “the ladies from Fairbridge”, who persuaded her to send her three youngest sons to an Australian farm school under the child-migration scheme run by the Fairbridge Society, an English charity.

It was an inauspicious start, but Hill flourished: after leaving the school, in New South Wales, in 1961, Hill studied economics, became adviser to an Australian state prime minister, a Labour candidate for federal parliament, a board member of several public utilities, MD of the ABC (1986-94) – the Australian equivalent of director-general of the BBC – then head of Soccer Australia and Sydney Water. He also set up Create, a charity for disadvantaged children.In his retirement, a quirk of fate plunged Hill back to his childhood: in 2005, he completed a diploma in archeology at Sydney University and decided to test his new skills on a trial dig at his old alma mater, the Fairbridge Farm School near Molong, four hours’ drive west of Sydney. With the help of the Fairbridge Foundation, Hill and other “showcase” Old Fairbridgians set up the Fairbridge Heritage Association to preserve a memory of the school through which over 1,000 English children passed between 1913 and 69. The association proposed a historical documentary and, in March 2006, Hill began recording the oral histories of about 40 former pupils of the Molong school.

So began a personal odyssey into the dark side of the charity founded by the philanthropist Kingsley Fairbridge in 1908. Its mission was to ease poverty in English slums by giving children of poor families a new start in life, to learn how to be farmers and farmers’ wives in the service of the Empire. To this end, almost 100,000 British children were sent to the Fairbridge Farm Schools in Australia, Canada and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), between 1912 and 74.

Hill’s research at Molong revealed a very different picture of this worthy institution. He heard a recurring story of cruelty, sexual abuse and workhouse labour conditions at the Molong school. He was staggered to discover just how much had been known and effectively hidden, in Britain and Australia, during the school’s existence.

Hill has not investigated other Fairbridge schools, at Pinjarra in Western Australia and Launceston in Tasmania. All Fairbridge schools had been seen as models of a stiff-upper-lip British education, a little harsh but no worse than a standard English public school. In his 1997 book, Orphans of the Empire, for example, Alan Gill wrote that many Old Fairbridgians remembered the farm schools with deep affection. Geoffrey Sherington, dean of the faculty of education at Sydney University and co-author of the 1998 book Fairbridge: Empire and Child Migration, defended Fairbridge as“an imperial philanthropic form of child rescue”. And in 2001, the Fairbridge Foundation – the surviving charity, which does excellent work for deprived Australian children – told an Australian Senate inquiry into child migration that it was unaware of any “unsafe, improper or unlawful treatment” at Fairbridge Farm School in Molong. In 1998 the London Fairbridge organisation had testified before a British House of Commons select committee that it had received no reports of abuse or neglect.The testimony of the Old Fairbridgians Hill interviewed utterly confounded this impression: a consistent account emerged of an institution that for decades had subjected children aged between 4 and 15 to sexual abuse, virtual slave- labour conditions and daily beatings, with straps, canes, electrical cords and on occasions a hockey stick, the wielder of which – the school principal – broke the back of one boy. Two-thirds of the women and most of the men Hill interviewed told him they were sexually abused at Fairbridge. “The revelations shocked me because the story that emerged was so consistent,” Hill said. “The scales first fell from my eyes when I listened to Vivian Bingham. On the second day of filming, I saw this grey-haired woman sitting in a director’s chair. She’d disappeared from sight for years, but was insistent about giving us an interview.”

Bingham was sent to Australia in the care of Fairbridge at the age of four. She told Hill she believed she was first sexually abused when she was five, repeatedly ran away from Molong, was severely beaten and had her head thrust down a toilet. Her testimony and others’ transformed Hill’s perception of the farm school in which he grew up: true enough, he and his brothers, Dudley and Richard, remember the beatings and exhausting farm work – but Hill considered these the harsh reality of any tough educational institution for poor kids. And he stressed that his experience of Fairbridge was not typical: he spent a shorter time there, under the single-parent scheme, in which he and his brothers were reunited with their mother after two years. Most Fairbridge children were denied contact with their parents – if they had parents – for decades.

Hill found himself at the centre of a storm of allegations that suggested Fairbridge had covered up abuses of children for years. So where did the truth lie? Were the horrific memories documented by Hill the norm? In July last year he set out to find the truth. He first went to Fairbridge’s offices in Sydney and was given access to “an assortment of old files, but no access to the board meetings’ minutes”. But during his visit he came across boxes of some minutes, and furtively riffled through them. His eye fell upon a minute that described the children as “generally educationally retarded” – even though most Fairbridge kids had been carefully selected and had above-average IQs. Another item referred to the hockey stick with which the notorious principal Frederick Woods used to beat the children. “I became angry,” said Hill. Woods had been formally instructed to stop belting the children with the hockey stick in 1948, Hill read. Yet the old Fairbridgians whom he’d interviewed said he had used the hockey stick well after that date. Hill dug deeper. He flew to England in July 2006 and examined the archives at Liverpool University, where the British records of Fairbridge are kept. What he found seemed to confirm the worst allegations he’d heard in Australia. He spent the entire plane trip back to Australia writing the preface to a book – The Forgotten Children – which was published last month in Australia.

The thing that most angered Hill was that the British government and the Fairbridge Society, in London and Sydney, had known for years about the alleged cruelty and sexual abuses, but continued sending children out to New South Wales. “In 1945,” Hill reveals, “the British government had secretly condemned the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong as an institution unfit for children.” It was condemned again, and in fact blacklisted by the Home Office in 1956, after a fact-finding mission. But according to Hill’s evidence, pressure from the Fairbridge directors at the time led the government to remove the blacklisting, and hundreds of children continued to be sent to the farm schools in Australia, Canada and Rhodesia.

The Fairbridge Farm Schools were the brainchild of the African colonialist and Rhodes scholar Kingsley Fairbridge, who, scanning the British farms in Rhodesia, lamented the lack of white labour on the agricultural spreads of the Empire. “I saw,” he declared in 1908, “great Colleges of Agriculture springing up in every man-hungry corner of the Empire. I saw children shedding the bondage of bitter circumstances and stretching their legs and minds amid the thousand interests of the Farm.” In essence, English children were to be yoked to the imperial plough through a child-deportation plan. Yet the philanthropists cloaked this reality in worthy intentions: they would rescue gangs of Oliver Twists and train them to a good purpose.

His scheme enjoyed the patronage of the great and the good. In the 1930s the board of Fairbridge Farm Schools in London included the chairman Sir Charles Hambro, of the banking dynasty; the politician and freemason Sir Malcolm Barclay-Harvey; Field Marshal Lord Birdwood; the former governor of Western Australia Sir William Campion; Lady Edith Anderson DBE, wife of a NSW governor; and a smattering of colonels, MPs, reverends and professors. They meant to scour the slums of English cities in search of the more promising children from “the orphan and waif class” – as Kingsley Fairbridge described them. They set about raising funds and drawing sponsors. In 1934, a fundraising drive appeared in The Times as a four-page “lift-out section” believed to be the paper’s first such insertion, launched by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, who made a £1,000 donation with the words: “This is not a charity, this is an imperial investment.”

For the parents, initial impressions seemed to fulfil the promise of the Fairbridge brochures, as neatly articulated by the ubiquitous “Fairbridge ladies”. “The ladies,” Hill recalled, “told Mum however much she loved us, she couldn’t provide us with the opportunities we would be given at the Fairbridge Farm School in Australia.”

True enough, at the time: Hill’s mother had to provide for three boys (the fourth, the eldest, had joined the RAF). The family lived in three rooms, sometimes went without food, and used the sink as a bathtub. The toilet was a shared facility “out the back”. Yet there was love there. Other kids came from far worse, a world of dirt, threat of eviction, hunger and disease unrelieved by the violence of drunken fathers or the nocturnal rounds of prostitute mothers.

The Fairbridge ladies, like so many clean-spun Pied Pipers, sought to break the cycle of poverty and violence. Pictures of John Howard Mitchell House, the society’s lavish estate at Knockholt in Kent, at which the children boarded for a few weeks before they sailed, helped to reassure the parents: “I remember Knockholt well,” said Ian Bayliff, one of eight children from a desperately poor family who arrived there in 1955, aged eight. “Lovely place… the food was beautiful… three meals a day… We were there for two months and really loved it and it was the best Christmas of my life.” The children were also fitted with fine new clothes and leather shoes, a toothbrush, face flannel, sponge bag and Bible. There was no hint of what lay beyond Knockholt, and the lavish treatment continued on the voyage out. The ships were luxurious passenger liners, floating paradises for children, who played on the decks and enjoyed nightly feasts served on silver by perfectly groomed waiters. Hill and his brothers stayed in two former first-class state cabins on the SS Strathaird, whose dinner menu offered cream pompadour, fillets of plaice, rémoulade, medallions of veal jardinière, and roast lamb with mint sauce.

Soon after they disembarked at Sydney, a Fairbridge school employee escorted the children on the six-hour train trip over the Blue Mountains west of Sydney to Molong, a small, dusty township near Orange. For most children their first encounter with the reality was the sight waiting on the platform of a man mountain, all 20 stone, 6ft 4in of the school principal, Frederick Kinnersley Smithers Woods, a former South African wrestling champion turned public educator who presided over Fairbridge from 1942 to 66. One former pupil remembered him as “a large, humourless Afrikaner looking after a bunch of little kaffirs”. That morning, in 1955, as he had done many times since 1942, Woods ushered the little lines of emigrants onto his old truck, and drove them out to the farm.

As the new arrivals entered the cottages, the existing inmates, like Fagin’s gang, appeared out of the gloom barefoot, gaunt, in dirty old cotton shorts – so runs Hill’s description – sporting crazy, jagged haircuts that, Hill soon learnt, were cut by the children. Their fine London threads were confiscated, and within hours Hill and the new arrivals also lost their new clothes and were allocated grey cotton shorts and shirts.

On the first morning, Hill recalled, screams pierced the darkness as Woods moved about the dormitories belting the beds with a cane to wake those who had slept through the bell: “The children scurried out to the locker room in ill-fitting and unmatching pyjamas, rubbing their eyes and the places where Woods had hit them,” Hill wrote. They ate off metal plates and mugs at long benches, in Nuffield Hall, the school’s central assembly room. The usual food was mutton swimming in fat, in which maggots were commonly seen. Hill records how the sheep were slaughtered by older children, who used kitchen knives to slit the animals’ throats.One child recalls Woods forcing another to eat porridge full of weevils; at other times, the children were fed scraps straight from the pig bins. When one boy brought the “maggots” to Woods’s attention, he recalled the principal saying: “They’re not maggots. This is the larvae of the weevils. Good protein. Eat it.”

A day at Molong began with the “bell” (a piece of railway steel line suspended on a chain that a child beat with an iron bar) at 7am, inspection, then an endless round of jobs that proved very difficult for children as young as eight: bringing in the cattle, chopping wood, clearing land, fixing fences and sewerage systems, and painting the rocks that marked the roadsides. The littlest children, aged four or five, were sent out barefoot in the freezing mornings to collect firewood.

Among the children’s most feared tormentors were the “cottage mothers”, the women who lived with the children, of whom 300 passed through Molong over the years. Many, of course, were decent women who treated the children well; others were ruthless harridans with no teaching experience, who dealt brutally with the migrants. One notorious case involved Kathleen Johnstone, a British Indian Army officer’s wife, known as “Fag” for her incessant smoking. A tiny, hunched woman, barely 5ft tall, Johnstone used to terrorise those who wet their beds by whipping them with a riding crop. Vivian Bingham, who arrived at Molong aged four, in 1959, was described as “a lovable little girl” in her early reports; after two years she had become “dull” and “nervous”. The reason lay in Johnstone’s singling out of Bingham for regular punishment: whenever she wet her bed, Vivian was whipped and forced to take a freezing shower. On one occasion, Johnstone “put my head down the toilet and flushed the chain”, Bingham told the ABC. A report by the New South Wales child-welfare department in 1964, the details of which were sent to the Fairbridge Society in the UK, reveals that Johnstone admitted to punishing the children by flushing their heads in the toilet because previous cottage mothers had favoured the method. “The ends justified the means,” Johnstone stated. She also admitted to whipping the children with a riding crop (former schoolchildren recall her using a steel poker).

Johnstone, despite the report, remained in her job at Fairbridge for several years. Nor was she exceptional: several cottage mothers dealt similarly with the children in their care, and several were accused of sexually abusing them. Lennie Magee recalls being whipped with an ironing cord by another cottage mother, the hated Margaret Hodgkinson, another “widow of Empire”, who had been Lady Routledge in India.

Behind the cottage mothers, of course, lurked the real power in the school, Woods, well known for publicly belting miscreants with his cane, hockey stick or other implement. Hill recalls being caned in front of the school, in contravention of the law at the time that decreed corporal punishment should be administered in private. But secret assaults on the children were also common, often by adult farm labourers: Ted Begley, a dairyman loathed by the children, who worked at the farm for 20 years, would casually beat them up for no reason other than a sadistic impulse, according to many accounts.

The worst effects of the children’s treatment were exacerbated by the lack of any emotional comfort or reassurance or adult figure to turn to, a shoulder to cry on, an affectionate embrace. Many children grew morose and plunged into depression; many ran away, only to be returned and severely punished. A few committed suicide: two boys, Peter Johnson, in the late 1940s, and later Joey Smith, shot themselves. And about 20 Fairbridge children committed suicide after leaving the school, including Paul Harris and Ray Wells: both were sent to Australia at a very young age and were treated as “runts”, little kids who bore the sharp end of the adult regime and the bullying of older or bigger kids. “Ray Wells was still wetting his bed at 11 or 12 – he was terribly ashamed,” Hill was told.

Some Fairbridge kids wrote home pleading to be returned to their parents. But, by law, the parents had handed over legal guardianship of their children to the British and Australian governments, and the parents had no recourse to reclaim their sons and daughters. Woods would read the incoming and outgoing mail between parents and children, and on several occasions blocked any attempt to reunite them.

Indeed, the parents knew little of what was happening to their offspring on the other side of the world. The first allegations of sexual abuse were lodged in 1940, against the first principal, Richard “Dickie” Beauchamp, a retired Royal Naval officer and dapper little English gent, who fled to New Zealand with indecent haste after claims that he had fondled some of the senior girls and failed to prevent “immoral and perverted practices” indulged in by the children and cottage mothers on “a serious scale”, according to the Sydney Fairbridge Council. At the time, Sir Charles Hambro, chairman of the London Fairbridge Society, regretted Beauchamp’s loss, and searched for ways to bring him back into the fold – to no avail. “We have lost an irreplaceable principal,” Hambro told Beauchamp, in a letter dated September 25, 1940. Woods, Beauchamp’s deputy, was promoted to the top job – despite the fact that he, too, was under investigation at the time by NSW child-welfare authorities for allegedly sexually abusing a Fairbridge girl in 1945.

As principal, Woods was determined to impose a far stricter regime than Beauchamp’s, and he succeeded, but it got off to a bad start. Six months into the job, Sir Claude Reading, the chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, wrote to Hambro in London: “One of the Fairbridge girls has made very serious allegations against Woods, of sexual misbehaviour towards her…” The girl had complained to the local parson, who informed the NSW child-welfare department, which dismissed her allegations as “the sexual stirrings of an hysterical adolescent mind”. Then in February 1948, Commander P O L Owen, who had survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, undertook a detailed investigation of Fairbridge Farm in Molong. His explosive findings alleged: “that [Woods] is a sexual pervert”; that the children were “not properly fed”; that the children were “dull and downtrodden”; that Woods employed a cook “in the tertiary stage of syphilis – a danger to the children”; that Woods knocked down and kicked a boy “until [the boy’s] eyes bled”; that Woods “beat and injured boys with a hockey stick”; and “other matters too dreadful to mention”.

The allegations were downplayed. Woods explained away his beatings as proportionate to the mischief; his sexual activities were dismissed as gossip; and the matters “too dreadful to mention” were unsubstantiated, notwithstanding evidence of pornography in Woods’s possession, rumours of sexual misconduct by cottage mothers and an assistant cook, who mysteriously kept a jar of boys’ urine in the kitchen. Fairbridge dismissed Cdr Owen as traumatised by his wartime experiences at the hands of the Japanese.

Another side of the story must be weighed against Hill’s sources. Not all Fairbridgians recall a merciless grind of abuse, pain and deprivation. Some attribute positive outcomes to the farm scheme. Certain activities were undoubtedly character-building, and many children remember pleasant moments at Fairbridge: the Sunday sporting events and the annual camps at Gerroa, on the coast, for example. Some Old Fairbridgians even claim that Hill carefully selected his sources and interviewed only 40 of the 1,053 who were sent to Molong Farm. One he overlooked was Dennis Silver, now a councillor with the Fairbridge Foundation in Sydney and president of the Old Fairbridgians’ Association for 40 years. Contrary to Hill’s claim that few who left the school got proper jobs, Silver refers to a survey in 1985 that showed that 37% went into professions. Indeed, Fairbridge paid for Silver’s three-year engineering course after he left the farm school.

He added: “I never heard any of the children complaining about sexual abuse. I had my share of beltings from the boss, but I probably wasn’t belted as much as I deserved. In those days it was accepted to be belted with a strap or a stick.”Beyond the personal anecdotes, Hill draws on a succession of inquiries into the goings-on at Fairbridge. The most damaging was the 1956 fact-finding mission, sent by the British government and chaired by Mr J Ross, under-secretary of state at the Home Office, which travelled around Australia and visited all the Fairbridge schools as well as other child migrant centres. The mission arrived in Orange on February 15. The day before, the Fairbridge Council in Sydney warned Woods to ensure that all the children wore shoes: “I have a feeling that barefooted children would have a very adverse effect on the visitors,” wrote W B Hudson, the council chairman. This measure did little to appease the visitors, who delivered a damning verdict on Molong, in particular: Fairbridge’s spartan conditions were unacceptable. The school had failed to realise that “it was precisely such children, already rejected and insecure, who [were] ill-equipped to cope with the strains of migration”. It condemned the conditions, the lack of privacy, the absence of any warmth, and the quality of the cottage mothers. In sum, Molong had dismally failed to fall in line with modern childcare practices. The report did not delve into the claims of sexual abuse, but its negative tone threatened the very existence of the farm schools. Indeed, the Fairbridge schools at Molong and Pinjarra in Western Australia were secretly blacklisted. This meant they had to put things right before any children were sent to their care.

But the worst allegations were kept secret from the British Overseas Migration Board and the Australian government. Sir Charles Hambro dismissed the report as “extreme”. Under such powerful intervention, the report was set aside and children continued to be sent to Fairbridge schools in Australia for over a decade. Yet their numbers dwindled: parents in Britain were changing their minds about Fairbridge amid requests from child-welfare agencies in Britain and Australia to investigate the growing number of allegations of the maltreatment of children.

HRH the Duke of Gloucester was president of Fairbridge at the time of the 1956 fact-finding mission and was very influential in Fairbridge’s affairs. He and other powerful members of the charity joined forces with Hambro to overturn the effects of the “blacklisting”.

Woods was eventually sacked in 1965; the reasons were never made public. Hill has unearthed the facts: Woods had been conducting an affair with a new cottage mother, a Mrs Wunch. On the death of his wife, Ruth, Woods decided to marry Wunch, a divorcée. Lord Slim, chairman of the London Fairbridge Society, decided that Woods’s behaviour with Wunch had “created a scandal and besmirched the good name of Fairbridge”, according to the minutes of a meeting of the society in London, on July 2, 1965. Woods was fired for a social indiscretion 20 years after being severally accused of perversion and brutality, excesses for which nobody had acted to terminate his employment. Hard on the heels of his demise, Molong closed in early 1974. It briefly served as a chicken farm, and is now largely derelict.

Today, Hill and a few dozen Old Fairbridgians are considering a class action against Fairbridge in London and Australia. Their legal action is in the very early stages and may not succeed, Hill concedes. Fairbridge today is a very different organisation, a donor charity that simply funds organisations which help disadvantaged children. And it is unclear who was ultimately responsible for the children’s welfare: Fairbridge, the Australian federal or state governments, or the British government. Bill Madden, a partner at the Sydney law firm Slater & Gordon, who is representing the Fairbridge action, said that if the case proceeds, the most likely target will be the Fairbridge charity in Australia. There may also be a case for suing the British government.

Even today the odour has never quite lifted from the Fairbridge name. An Australian Senate inquiry into child migration – Lost Innocents: Righting the Record – as recently as 2001 exposed this “very sorry chapter in Australia’s history and… the role of both the British and Australian Governments in bringing child migrants to this country…” It concluded: “While some child migrants have made positive comments about their time in institutional care, others can only recall childhoods of loneliness great hardship and privations.” In response, in May 2002 the Australian government recommended that former child migrants under the Fairbridge and other schemes be offered travel grants to re-establish contact with their families in Britain and funds to pay for the cost of counselling services and family-tracing. Public memorials, to recognise former child migrants to Australia, were also proposed.

For many Old Fairbridgians, whose parents died long ago, the recommendations are way too little, way too late. Yet David Hill consoles himself in the knowledge that his little son will grow up in the loving care of a family that so many children of England’s “waif and orphan classes” never enjoyed.

RON’S STORY

Ron Simpson was born into a poor family in Annisford, Newcastle upon Tyne; his father was a miner and a heavy drinker. “I was the whipping post,” Simpson recalls. “My father would grab the razor straps, and I’d cop it.” In 1937 an advertisement in the paper caught his father’s eye: a farm in the colonies was offering to educate the children of poor families.“My parents talked to me and my sister; I was nine and my sister not quite seven. I was pleased to go: I thought yes, I’d get away from my father’s beatings.”

Simpson and his sister sailed in April 1938 and arrived at Fairbridge Farm School in Molong on June 1. The next day, the children’s fine clothes issued in London were confiscated.

Simpson recalls his first horrific encounter at Molong: “I was working in the kitchen when the chef pushed me into the toilet, bolted the door, ripped off my clothes and sodomised me.” Simpson told the cottage mother, who “refused to believe me and caned me for saying that”.

Later, after he slept through the bell one morning, Simpson got a taste of the principal Woods’s regime. “Woods said he wanted to see me in his office. I knocked on his door; he appeared with his arm behind his back and whacked me with a stick — it was a hockey stick. He hit me above the spine and I fell. Then he whacked me in the back again and I fell straight down the steps.”

After a few weeks, Simpson collapsed: “I couldn’t feel anything from my waist down.” Woods’s beating had damaged the vertebrae in his spine. From then on, Simpson couldn’t sit on his backside: “The pain was horrendous. The doctors said I’d never walk again.” Simpson spent almost two years in hospital. He tried to tell the doctors the cause of his back injury, “but they took no notice”. Simpson was sent back to Molong and put to work in a steel brace. Now 78 and happily married, he still suffers from acute lower back pain. His lawyer is investigating the case for compensation.

MARY’S STORY

Mary O’Brien cannot forget being driven through London’s East End, where she had lived, towards Tilbury docks, one dreary, wet and miserable April afternoon. She was 13.

That year, 1959, she left England for the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong, New South Wales, with her brother Paddy and sister Myrtle, aboard the SS Strathaird, a grand old P&O liner. When she boarded the ship, in her linen hat and gingham frock, she stepped into a sumptuous world of wealth and luxury.

“It was a child’s dream,” she said. Within six weeks the children sat in a rattling old train heading towards the Fairbridge Farm School in rural Australia. Mary recalls arriving at the station: “We were herded into a truck and driven out to the farm. And the honeymoon was over…”

Within a year at Molong, Mary was moved out of her cottage into Gloucester House, where visitors to the farm stayed. It was also the home of the aftercare officer, Mr William Phillips, and his family. Mary served as the “domestic” and shared a bedroom with Phillips’s daughter.

“I was expected to clean up for them, serve them and their visitors. It was the most degrading part of my life. They treated me — he [Mr Phillips] treated me — like shit, sexually abused me. I’d then be expected to serve him breakfast next morning. I didn’t mention it because I thought it was just happening to me. I had no idea whether other children were having problems.”

Her grades at Orange High School, which Fairbridge allowed her to attend because she showed talent, slipped; her self-esteem fell; and she played truant. But within two years she was allowed to rejoin her mother, who emigrated to Australia to be reunited with her three children, and lived in a flat in an outer suburb of Sydney.

“I felt sorry for those who never had that,” Mary recalls, “to walk out of Fairbridge and have their mums to go to. My mum was poor and she was sick. But she was my mum. And she took me away from there. And that was everything.”

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