PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD UK Child Migration to Australia, – A Study in Policy Failure Gordon Lynch Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood Series Editors George Rousseau University of Oxford Oxford, UK Laurence Brockliss University of Oxford Oxford, UK Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the frst of its kind to his- toricise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no historical series on children/ childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the identity and attraction of the new discipline. Editorial Board Matthew Grenby (Newcastle) Colin Heywood (Nottingham) Heather Montgomery (Open) Hugh Morrison (Otago) Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany) Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford) Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) Lucy Underwood (Warwick) Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14586 Gordon Lynch UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945–1970 A Study in Policy Failure Gordon Lynch University of Kent Canterbury, UK ISSN 2634-6532 ISSN 2634-6540 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ISBN 978-3-030-69727-3 ISBN 978-3-030-69728-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69728-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To OC and all the many former child migrants who have fought hard to understand the truth of their early lives… ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been made possible through the kind support of a number of people. Archival holdings on the history of child migration programmes to Australia are substantial, and I was only able to manage this work through the wonderfully diligent work of Steph Berns, Alice White, Lorraine Clarke, Catherine Sloan and Oliver Gibson in accessing and copying material from across the United Kingdom and Australia. I am also indebted to staff at the UK National Archives at Kew, the National Archives of Australia at Canberra and Perth, the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the Battye Library in Perth, the Church of England Record Centre and Lambeth Palace Library in London, the Modern Records Centre at Warwick, the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, the State Records Offce of Western Australia in Perth and the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. Material from the Fairbridge collection at the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives has been used in this book by kind permission of the Prince’s Trust. I have also been greatly helped by a project advisory team—Stephen Constantine, Lucy Delap, Michael Lambert, Joanna Sassoon and Mathew Thomson—who discussed key ideas with me, read drafts of chapters and suggested other relevant resources. I have been fortunate also to receive feedback on this work having presented papers based on it at conferences and seminars at Boston College, King’s College, London, and the Universities of Durham, Exeter and Oxford. Signifcant elements of this vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS research were also undertaken whilst I was under instruction as an expert witness to both the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, and I am very grateful to the thoughtful and dedicated work of both Inquiry teams through that pro- cess, including Henrietta Hill, Alix Rejman, Colin MacAuley, Julie-Anne Jamieson and Andressa Gadda. Colleagues at the University of Kent have also been consistently supportive of this work, including Shane Weller, Kerry Barber and Jeremy Carrette, and I remain indebted for the institu- tional support that I’ve received for this project over the past few years, including funding from the University which has made it possible to pub- lish this book in an open access format and an additional period of leave to undertake my work for IICSA. Dr Phillipa White kindly publicised this project through Tuart Place in Western Australia, and I’m very grateful to all of the former child migrants who contacted me following this to talk about their experiences, all of whom enriched my understanding of this history. Oliver Cosgrove and Maureen Lewin also sent me, and made me aware, of valuable source material. It goes without saying that whilst I have beneftted enormously from the support and interest of all of these people, the responsibility for the fnal content of this book is mine alone. The research for this book has also been made possible by a Leadership Fellows Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/ R001766/1) and from the Michael Ramsey Research Fund. It’s often the case, in acknowledgements such as these, that (usually male) researchers express thanks for the forbearance of their families whilst undertaking their work. I was very fortunate that the fexibility provided by my AHRC grant made it easier to manage this work around the school run and post-­ school play and reading sessions. Undertaking research on a history woven around fractures in family relationships, and children’s sense of geographi- cal and emotional displacement, often made me appreciate my time with my family even more, and as always, my love and thanks go to Duna, Hani and Sami. When writing this book, I have been very conscious of those who were caught up in these migration schemes as children, and who may still in some respects be trying to make sense of that experience. This is also true of the children and grandchildren of those former child migrants who may ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix also wonder about their experiences and how it shaped the lives of their own families. My hope is that this book might be able to make at least some small contribution to their process of making sense of the past, and it is to them that this book is dedicated. Canterbury Gordon Lynch September 2020 CONTENTS 1 ‘A Serious Injustice to the Individual’: British Child Migration to Australia as Policy Failure 1 2 ‘The Risk Involved is Inappreciable… and the Gain Exceptional’: Child Migration to Australia and Empire Settlement Policy, 1913–1939 23 The Inter-war Expansion of Child Migration to Australia 30 Policy Consolidation and the Implications of Institutional Diversity 46 3 Flawed Progress: Criticisms of Residential Institutions for Child Migrants in Australia and Policy Responses, 1939–1945 55 Child Migration, the Onset of War and Failing Institutions 59 The ‘Pinjarra dossier’ and the Garnett Report 70 ‘The original idea of the scheme… is sound’: Interpretative Frames and Policy-Making 86 4 ‘Providing for Children… Deprived of a Normal Home Life’: The Curtis Report and the Post-war Policy Landscape of Children’s Out-of-Home Care 91 The Curtis Report and the Administrative Restructuring of Children’s Out-of-Home Care 94 xi xii CONTENTS Criticisms of Existing Standards of Care 99 ‘Child Psychology’ and the Ethos of Child-Care 106 A Future Beyond Residential Institutions 117 The Care of Children Committee and Post-war Child Migration 121 5 ‘Australia as the Coming Greatest Foster-Father of Children the World Has Ever Known’: The Post-war Resumption of Child Migration to Australia, 1945–1947 131 The Resumption of Assisted Child Migration in 1947 145 The Catholic Child Migration Parties of Autumn 1947 152 Complex Organisational Systems: Failure, Social Imaginaries and Trust 173 The Home Offce and Child Migration After Curtis 179 6 From Regulation to Moral Persuasion: Child Migration Policy and the Home Office Children’s Department, 1948–1954 191 Bureaucratic Drag and the Slow Process of Drafting the s.33 Regulations 195 Stalled Regulation: Policy Decisions and the Perceptions of State Power 210 Limited Oversight