APPENDIX 29
Letter from Frances Swaine, Leigh, Day
& Co Solicitors, to the Clerk of the Committee
Child Migrants (CM 143)As
promised, I am enclosing with this letter the following:
(a) my legal submission to the Inquiry into the
Welfare of Former Child Migrants together with Appendices;
(b) documentation forwarded to me by former child
migrants to be forwarded to the Committee on their behalf.I am
a partner at Leigh, Day & Co who has been trying for some
time to mount a claim for compensation on behalf of the child
migrants to Australia. There have been many legal difficulties
trying to get the cases off the ground and I have not yet been
able to advise any client to proceed.My submission covers a background
of those areas identified by me as the responsibility of the British
Government explicit by law and implicit by practice and also touches,
for the sake of completeness, upon the legal responsibility of
the Australian Government. I have not been informed of the details
with which the Health Committee may be supplied by other sources.
I have appended material which is perhaps not so easily available
to the Committee but not some of the longer documents or Acts.
I also have further material to that which I touch upon in the
submission, should it be requested. My title is taken from government
documentation contemporaneous with the 1947-55 period.I am sure
that by now the Committee will have identified that the issues
surrounding child migration, and the difficulties that still face
the former migrants are both very complex and still very much
alive.In the context of a professional who has been involved with
the issue of child migration for approximately five years, I would
also like this covering letter to be considered by the Committee,
in a personal context rather than simply as the submission of
a legal adviser.I shall attempt to provide an unbiased but personal
account of some of my experiences which I hope might help the
Committee with the conduct of their enquiry (in particular with
taking formal oral evidence) and might give focus to the child
migrants' needs now.It is, in my submission, impossible to divorce
the past history from the future needs, in that the one has created
the other. Careful, formal interviews with child migrants concerning
past experiences will give credibility to their loss. Wider, less
formal meetings arranged to elicit views on future needs might
meet with a better reception if some credence has been given to
the very private nature of the abuse suffered in private. The
Committee should not underestimate the great emotions stored up
by the child migrants, and it is my view that these will be best
met by a very respectful approach.I flew to Australia in July
1992 to interview some of the child migrants who were already
known to the Child Migrants' Trust and others who made themselves
known during the course of a 10 day visit to Melbourne and Perth.
My stay purposefully coincided with the first time that "The
Leaving of Liverpool" had been screened. The response to
the broadcast was immediate. I was inundated with enquiries.I
was very ill-prepared for the clients that I was to see. Although
in my 30s and trained in, amongst other things, bereavement counselling
(I am primarily a medical negligence lawyer) I found that the
issues I had to deal with were quite unlike any I had met before
and the effect they had, and still have, on me was profound.In
Melbourne I interviewed in a small room in the house rented by
the Child Migrant Trust although I did not interview clients of
the Trust. The first person I saw was 52 year old Margaret Gibson
who had found out a few days earlier that her brother, Pat McFadden,
from whom she had been separated when she was migrated to Australia
when she was seven years old, had died in February that year without
her having found him. From the day of embarkation for Australia
she had been told by those looking after her that she had no such
brother and she had spent her entire lifetime trying to find him.
His existence had been denied to her by those in whose care she
was and by subsequent agencies handling enquiries about him.When
I met her, she asked if we could keep the curtains drawn in the
room. I began (gently, I hope) to ask her the questions I needed
to have answers to for any potential legal case. She started to
talk and she started crying. I sat with her for about forty minutes.
She cried most of the time but she also explained that the loss
of her brother to her at the age of seven had created such a void
in her life that she had never been able to recover from it. To
know that he had died only months before the Child Migrant Trust
were to find his whereabouts for her was overwhelmingly cruel.
Her affect was flat and her voice monotonal.She was the first
of many that I saw (men and women) who cried with a stranger (me).
Many had never told their story to anyone else before. At those
first interviews I remember all engulfing sorrow, bewilderment,
terrible guilt (concern as to what dreadful sin had been committed
to get them migrated at the age of 4/5/6/7/8) and some anger.
But not the anger of these later years once the issue had received
wide publicity and attracted the attention of both Governments
and it still seemed that little was being done.I am not a trained
psychiatrist and do not propose to engage in any lay person's
psychology but it did seem clear to me that what was being wept
over was a loss of family life and a realisation of that loss,
which perhaps could only be expressed after an experience of adulthood—many
failed marriages and great shame at being unable to talk about
any origins at all throughout a lifetime. It seemed to me that
the conclusion of the group that I interviewed was that without
some sense of place—some sense of origins—life was
difficult as a child but impossible as an adult. This was more
than the understood dislocation of the emigrant (for whom there
are at least the support networks of shared memories within a
community). There was an aching space, an intangible hole. This
was often described to me and the pain was palpable.After Melbourne,
I moved on to Perth where I interviewed alone in my hotel room—seeing
a new client every hour, ten hours a day, for three days. When
I arrived home after 10 days away I was asked, quite innocently,
by a colleague how I had enjoyed my "holiday". My reaction
was to be short with him. What I really wanted to do was to knock
him to the ground.I had to examine my reaction very carefully.
It was not caused by tiredness or jet lag. It was the weight and
responsibility of the lives that had been imparted to me. Inexplicably
I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt—as if I was in some
way responsible for the enforced separation of children from their
families and, in particular, from the identity of their mothers.
This was not just the response of a sympathetic Plaintiff lawyer.
It was the response of a human being concerned for the future
of a group of people. I believe that any involvement with the
child migrants by independent observers, on any but the most cursory
level, will evoke these feelings and provoke the response that
it did in me—that the child migrants deserve a full apology
for what has happened to them and some form of recognition for
the distress that has been caused.This apology will sit best with
the child migrants coming from the British Government, whom they
hold responsible for the act of migration itself. Of course, the
abuses suffered by the children whilst in Australia and the deceit
preventing them from knowing about their family backgrounds, was
not in any sense government directed or controlled. However, many
of the child migrants have retained British citizenship. They
think of the United Kingdom as home.To them, it was their Government
that sanctioned their transportation and then, having got rid
of them, failed to ensure their safety and security. The average
age of the transportee was about eight or nine years old, but
many were as young as three or four.The moral guilt of what has
happened to this group of people will remain for a long time.
When I first interviewed them, their thoughts were not on financial
compensation, but rather on their being relieved of the burden
they had carried all those years—that they were in some
sense responsible for the horrors that had happened to them as
children and to the deceit that had continued in adulthood.Over
the past five years I have seen a steady stream of child migrants
at my office and have received correspondence from several hundred.
The stories are, of course, all individual but they set out the
same pattern: total divorce from all family contact by force of
migration; deceit by those acting in loco parentis and others
as to the existence of family; mental, physical and sexual abuse
during childhood.Now the issue has been aired and quite rightly
the child migrants have formed groups of "survivors"
(there have been many suicides or mental breakdowns). I believe
that the question of compensation has become more important as
their loss has received greater public recognition. This is not
the place to rehearse the full legal arguments for any form of
compensation package. Suffice to say the former child migrants
need sufficient recompense to enable them unite with any remaining
family members that they might have; to receive independent counselling
from a service unrelated to the organisation of their migration;
to receive any information about themselves held by the Government
or voluntary organisation free of charge; to relocate to this
country if that is what is wanted and to receive the benefits
available without query as to residence requirements. Above all,
an apology is required to right the moral wrongs. The wording
of such apology needs careful consultation and consideration,
and needs to come from the Prime Minister.I would be happy to
help the Committee in any further way that could be useful, either
in relation to the legal issues or to my personal experience with
the group of child migrants.
20 May 1998
|
