England to Australia, for some, Heaven to Hell…

Sections of the following article have been taken directly from the British Parliamentary Hearings into “THE WELFARE OF FORMER BRITISH CHILD MIGRANTS“.

We now take a trip into the past.  Back to the late 1940′s when a bill was debated in the British Parliament that enabled legislation allowing the transportation of children from England to Australia.

The House of Lords was told by the Lord Chancellor that “the Home Office intends to secure that children shall not be emigrated unless there is absolute satisfaction that proper arrangements have been made for the care and upbringing of each child”.  It is hard at this distance in time to know exactly what he considered ‘absolute satisfaction’ or  ‘assurances’, but they were definitely not what we would demand these days.

Some of the children may have been orphans, but some definitely were not.  They were told ‘stories’ to get them to volunteer.

Things like:

“fanciful tales of travel to the ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ where children ride to school on horseback and pick up fruit on the side of the road”

No parental consent:

“I was very sad and angry knowing that I was one of the boys who was leaving, I was scared. My mother was never told what was going on.”

One child was told his parents were dead, only to find out years later his mother had died in 1974.  Some parents were led to believe their children were being cared for in Britain by other families whereas the truth was that they had been shipped overseas.

Who was doing this?  The Catholic Church and it’s agencies: Barnardo’s, the Catholic Child Welfare Council and the Children’s Society.

Canon Fisher of the Catholic Child Welfare Council said to the hearing:

“I think the bottom line of the professional decisions that were made at the time is still the bottom line that we use today, whether it is in the child’s best interests, and I rest my case there.”

If that is the best they can come up with, they should never be allowed access to children of any age or in any form whatsoever, ever again.  That is the most inane argument I have ever heard.  How could any of what happened in the lead-up to their departure or after their arrival  on our shores be for the children’s welfare?

There are allegations that documents such as birth records were falsified.  One of the children themselves has stated that 87% of the children taken from the Catholic Agencies came without parental consent and 96% of those had at least one parent still living.  It seems the Catholic Church really believes it knows what is best for our children.  This is their mentality.  Single men, never having had offspring of their own think they have a better understanding of what our children need.  Amazing isn’t it.

Their idea was that to make things easier they should provide birth certificates in an abbreviated format, leaving out all parental details.  This would cut all ties I suppose.  They had no idea of the tenaciousness of these children.  Decades later, some of them still managed to find family.  But it was that not knowing about who they were and where they came from that caused much of the psychological damage.

When they arrived in Australia many of them were split up.  Boy went one way and girls the other.  Siblings lost contact with each other almost immediately as they were dragged apart screaming to separate lodgings.  One of these children said, “Where it hit me particularly was when they dragged the brothers and sisters from one another, I can still hear the screams today.”

When you take into account the deliberate falsification of information, withholding of information, separation of siblings, you have to ask what made them think it was the morally right thing to do.  What was the motivation behind the actions?

The report issued in 1998 found an abuse of power and total disregard for the parents and children’s feelings.  Although I can’t disagree with that statement, I do regard it as a complete understatement.  I don’t know how I would word it if I was putting it into a government document, but I certainly would feel the need for stronger language.

Another child migrant stated that, “England deserted us children in the most cruelest fashion in our biggest hour of need”.  Yet another talks of the mental and sexual outrages committed against him and said, “I am reminded of these experiences everyday of my life, however hard I try, I simply cannot forget”.

Once they arrived here in Australia the treatment, far from getting better, only got worse.  Much worse.  They were made wards of the state which meant that the state within which they ended up should have been more vigilant in watching out for their welfare.  Sadly that was not the case.  In written evidence the Christian Brothers Ex-Residents’ Services have admitted:

“We have no explanation, and there is clearly no excuse, for the apparent failure to monitor the child migrants when they were in care. A statement made by the counsellors at CBERS appears uncontestable, ‘there was clearly a breach of guardianship duties in sending the children in the way they were sent and in not monitoring their health and welfare sufficiently’. Furthermore, ‘there was a failure to care for them to contemporary standards’.”

There are two cases that can make my blood boil and bring tears to my eyes at the same time.  I warn you now, not to read any further if you are not of a strong enough nature to handle the worst of mans depravity as the following is of that kind.  I have never heard of anything so bad before in all the cases I have read and hope  never to again.  So please, read no further till you are feeling strong enough and are alone.  You do not need to have children around in case you react in a very negative manner.  I admit that I did.  Our children are all moved out, but my wife did come running to see that was the matter.  So…

The first case is of a blue-eyed boy.  The eyes, together with his looks made him a favourite of the Christian Brothers at Tardun to such an extent that they had bets to see who would be the first to rape this youngster 100 times.  This young fellow tried to hit his eyes so hard and often with the intent of changing their colour in the hope that his tormentors would leave him alone.  Then, as if to prove that they could be even more depraved they had the boy masturbate animals for their pleasure.

I cannot say just how much I hate these people at the moment, but it’s a feeling I hope never to have again.  An eye for an eye is not something I have ever believed in until now and I detest them for making me feel this way.  They deserve it though.  It wasn’t like they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong because they then held the boy upside down over a well and threatened him not to tell what they had done to him.

These children were so poorly fed that they took to raiding the pig bins to survive.  The boys were used as slave labour when buildings were needed.  One boy talks of the timber being stained with their blood.

These children were told that whatever the priests did ‘was the will of god’.  How would you feel under those circumstances?  Lost? Without hope?  With no one to turn to it could not have been worse.  This is the humanity shown to children by the Catholic Church.

It has been said at times when such things happen that it could be exceptional, that it was only in one place at one time, but in this case they don’t even have that defense.  The abuse went on in many different institutions at that time where these children were sent.  Tardun, Bindoon, Clontarf, Castledare in Western Australia, Neerkol in Queensland, Goodwood in South Australia  There is no excuse.

The second case was about a girls who were flogged with “thick leather straps”.  One girl, at 15 years of ages was stripped and flogged in front of 50 other girls.  What is the need for such humiliation?  The Nuns never left them alone during inspections so that the truth couldn’t be told to the inspectors.  There were stories of head shaving and severe punishments for bedwetting.  The Nuns didn’t eat the crusts off their own bread.  They threw them on the floor and watched the girls scramble for the food.  How could grown women treat young girls in this manner?

How does the Church feel now about the abuse they heaped upon the children?  They say they are sorry.  The heads of those organisations say though, that they didn’t know what was happening.  Where have we heard that before?  So, they are sorry are they?  What are they going to do about it?  Nothing.  The Western Australian cases can’t be heard there because of a 6 year limit on cases.  So they were taken to court in other states.  What happened?  The priests tried every legal avenue to have the cases moved to Western Australia knowing that then they’d be thrown out of court.  Well, there’s compassion for you.

The last paragraph of this section of the report states in part:

“one of our eyewitnesses expressing relief that he was now terminally ill.”

There is no god.  Just an organisation riddled with sick, demented, sexually perverted deviates. I suggest that if you have made it this far, that after you finish, you may want to click the link at the top and read the whole section of this report regarding Australia.  There is much more than I have told you here.

Recently in a comment to one of my blogs I was given the following comment by Loren Miller.  I like it so much that I have asked and been given permission to use it myself.  I was saving it for this article.  It will also adorn the bottom of each and every article I write about the Catholic Church in future.  I ask that others do the same, without changing the wording.

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We wait and hope for the day that we hear these words from the Pope:

“These children are the future of our world, and they must not be made to bear the ignominy of the past. We shall set a goal that ANY priest, or nun, of any rank involved in these activities shall be cast out of this church and subject to the law of the land wherein the offenses took place, and a zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual abuse will be in force from this day onward.”