Sent off to hell
SHOCKING and incredibly sad, this one-off special highlights the scandal of thousands of British children shipped out to Australia from the late 1940s.
The idea was to solve problems for two countries – remove kids of struggling UK families who might be a drain, and build Australia’s coveted white workforce.
Davina McCall says: “These are the stories of British children sent from safety here in the UK and banished to the other side of the world.”
The children, some as young as four, were sent on the promise of a better life, but instead found themselves in badly run institutions suffering poor education, neglect and often physical and sexual abuse, whileall ties with their families were severed. Dorian Reece was sent to live in Australia in 1955 when he was just eight years old. Searching for answers about where he came from and who his family were, the LLF team takes up the search.
Dorian recalls being sent from a revolting children’s home, where the mattresses were saturated with urine, to an abusive home run by male religious order The Christian Brothers.
He says: “The beatings, they were the thing. And it wasn’t just physical abuse. Lives were destroyed by what kids went through.”
Bruce Wilton refused to go to Tasmania when he was 14 in 1970, but remembers waving goodbye to his 10-year-old brother Rex and eight-year-old brother Kevin.
He wrote to them for months but the letters were intercepted. “I got nothing back, I assumed they had gone to a happier life,” he says.
But that wasn’t the case.