The British and Australian governments are to apologise formally for the transportation and treatment of thousands of children who were separated from their families and ended up being abused in care homes on the other side of the world.

Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, said sorry this morning for abuse suffered in Australian orphanages by children shipped there from Britain as part of a white emigration policy that lasted more than 40 years. “We come together today to offer our nation’s apology,” Mr Rudd told a meeting of victims.

Gordon Brown is also planning to apologise for Britain’s Child Migrants Programme, which ended in the late 1960s after sending thousands of children to countries including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

British government records show that at least 150,000 children were sent to Commonwealth countries until the programme ended in 1967. About 7,000 were sent to Australia.

In a speech in Canberra, Mr Rudd will recognise the mistreatment and suffering of 500,000 minors dubbed “forgotten Australians” who were held in orphanages or children’s homes in Australia between the 1920s and early 1970s.

Thousands of British children 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”.

The children were sometimes removed from their families with the support and encouragement of organisations such as the Salvation Army and Barnardo’s, and were often told that their parents had died and that they were being sent to a better life in Australia.

For many, it turned out to be a childhood of abuse through starvation, slave labour and sexual abuse, described by Jenny Macklin, the Minister for Families, as “beyond most people’s imagination”. “Many were put to terrible menial work and not allowed to get a decent education, as well as suffering terrible abuse,” she said.

“We do hope that it will heal, that it will help people who have been treated so badly. I think it is important, too, for us to acknowledge what did happen in the past and that we bring it out into the open.”

John Hennessy, who was taken from an orphanage in Bristol at the age of 10, said: “It wasn’t Charles Dickens’s time, it was our lifetime, and England was the only country in history to export her children to the other side of the world and then abandon them.”

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