Laurie Humphreys was just 13 when a nun at his orphanage in Southampton gathered the young boys around and asked: “Who wants to go to Australia?”

“We didn’t even know where Australia was,” Mr Humphreys, 76, told The Times today. “But shortly afterwards a Christian brother came and spoke to us about this land on the other side of the world. He said there was sunshine 14 hours a day and that we would be able to ride horses to school, which, for a 13-year-old like me seemed like a fantastic adventure. We were promised it was the land of milk and honey.”

For a boy in bleak, post-Second World War Britain, who had lived at the orphanage since four, it was an enticing thought. A short while later he was one of three boys picked to sail to a new life in Australia. But Mr Humphreys soon found it was far from the idyllic paradise they had been promised.

Mr Humphreys is one of around 7,000 British children sent to Australia as part of the Child Migrants Programme, a white emigration policy that lasted more than 40 years until 1967. They were taken from unmarried mothers, poor families and orphanages and shipped thousands of miles to boost Australia’s population and labour force with “good white stock”. They were placed in institutions where many were emotionally, physically or sexually abused by those who had been charged with their care.

Today Mr Humphreys was among around 40 Britons to sit in Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the child migrants and thousands of Australian orphans for the “ugly chapter” in the country’s history.

Mr Rudd said: "Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care.

"Sorry for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy, of childhoods lost. Childhoods spent instead in austere and authoritarian places where names were replaced by numbers, spontaneous play by regimented routine, the joy of learning by the repetitive drudgery of menial work."

Mr Humphreys was driven to tears at words which he had flown over 1,900 miles from his home in Perth, Western Australia, to hear. "The sorry part didn’t affect me that much, it was the acknowledgement that these things actually did happen which meant a lot," he said.

An apology from Gordon Brown would help the healing process for the abused Britons, he added. "I've heard British people say: 'The British Government would not do that [to the children]'," he said. "But to have the leader of the country saying that they did would be another acknowledgement for us, that it did happen."

Sitting among the emotional crowd, many weeping as horrific tales were recounted from the stage, Mr Humphreys was reminded of the day his childhood turned a harsh corner on September 22, 1947. “I’ll always remember that date,” he said. “That was when we landed in Fremantle on the boat, ready for our new life.”

Mr Humphreys had left England five weeks earlier for the 12,000 mile journey on the SS Asturias. There were 140 children on the ship – 100 boys and 40 girls – from around the British Isles.

Once in Western Australia, the children were separated and Mr Humphreys was sent to the Boys Town at Bindoon, an orphanage run by the Christian Brothers in a remote part of the state.

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