"We Will Support You All Your Lives" Making Amends for British Child Deportation to Australia, 1913-1970

Between 1913 and 1970, approximately 7,000 British children were sent to sheltering homes in Australia. Child migrant schemes were co-orchestrated by governments, religious orders, and charities in both Britain and Australia. They promised that these children would receive professional training and a higher level of education, as well as being removed from urban poverty. However, it was later discovered that these children suffered substantial maltreatment. This included abuse, forced labour, and a loss of personal identity. In adulthood, many experienced addictions and psychiatric disorders.

Campaigns supporting redress for child migrants have been ongoing for the past three decades and substantial progress has been made in this regard. Official inquiries conducted on behalf of the UK and Australian Federal Governments around the turn of the millennium advocated for the implementation of apologies, public histories, and measures to reunite lost families. All of these reparations have been implemented in some capacity, but questions remain about why both governments were as slow as they were in coming to terms with their involvement in this shameful historic episode.

This paper is grounded in the campaigns of the Child Migrants Trust, a bilateral organisation who have campaigned tirelessly on behalf of former child migrants. Their work centres around three core values; reparation, recognition, and rights. This presentation will utilise these notions as a means of understanding whether the reconciliation process has succeeded in offering a voice to British child migrants, whose testimonies have been largely overlooked throughout their lives.

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About the speaker

Between September 2019 and July 2024, Dr James Baker was a PhD candidate at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, passing his viva in December 2023. James previously studied for both a BA in History & Philosophy and an MA in Modern History at the University of York, presenting his MA research about the arrival of Spanish Civil War refugees in Britain at History Fringe, part of the BBC History Weekend, in October 2018.

During his doctoral studies at the Wilberforce Institute, James was affiliated with the Falling Through the Net cluster, a research group concerned with governmental and institutional failures to protect child migrants and refugees in an array of historical contexts.