National Library Home > News & Events
Gateways

Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project

As the Prime Minister announced in his Apology on 16 November 2009, the National Library of Australia is conducting an oral history project to record the lives and experiences of Forgotten Australians and former Child Migrants. Interviews will be conducted across Australia, will be preserved in the Library and made publicly available, subject to any access conditions imposed by interviewees.

This project will run for three years and aims to document a rounded history of the experiences of children in institutional and out of home care and the lifelong impact of these experiences on their lives and their families. The project will also interview a selection of advocates and allied professionals, including welfare officers, employees of institutions and administrators. Ten interviews were undertaken as a pilot, with three former Child Migrants (two English and one Maltese), five Forgotten Australians and two employees of institutions. One of those interviewed was Vera Fooks, aged 98, who was in care in the 1920s. Before her recent passing, Fooks was a constituent of the Prime Minister’s and he described meeting her in his Apology speech.

With an average length of approximately four hours, these pilot interviews show the diversity of experiences and life outcomes of children in care. In some of the interviews, people were asked about the meaning to them of the term ‘Forgotten Australians’. One employee of an institution for unmarried mothers said about this term: ‘from their mothers’ point of view they would have never been forgotten … Did society forget them? … I think the mothers were forgotten’. When asked whether he ever got the feeling he wasn’t wanted anymore, one interviewee, Charlie Walker, responded: ‘I never got that feeling ‘cos I already knew that nobody wanted me ‘cos I was abandoned, that’s all I can say’.

What child migrants knew about Australia, and whether they had any choice in leaving, is discussed in interviews. In reflecting on his feelings of leaving the poverty of post-war Malta and his mother behind, one interviewee, David Plowman, said: ‘We knew it was a big trip. We knew it was the unknown, but if you understood Malta at the time, the unknown was preferable to the known’. However, in showing the lack of choice for British Child Migrants in being sent to Australia, another interviewee, Mick Snell, said: ‘Well, we weren’t told. I was at school one day and on the boat the next day … They’d picked out who they wanted to send over because they reckoned that they had no future in England and that they had no families to go to’.

The project will be scaled up over the next few months with nationwide recruitment of interviewers and interviewees. Since the Apology, there has been widespread interest in being interviewed for the project, and the Library will be maintaining a careful selection process to build a collection which will contain stories telling the diversity and complexity of the experiences.

Along with undertaking interviews, the Library is seeking to collect associated materials, including ephemera, self-published autobiographies, websites and manuscripts. The Library has already received significant donations, including a rare shipboard diary written by a 14-year-old British Child Migrant, ephemera such as membership badges produced by the advocacy organisation Care Leavers Australia Network (CLAN), and self-published volumes of autobiography by Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants.

The Library is working closely with the National Museum of Australia, which is developing an exhibition about the history of institutionalised care of children, and there is a joint website for these two national history projects. The Library is also working with the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM), which is developing the travelling exhibition On their Own—British Child Migrants. This exhibition is a collaboration between ANMM and National Musemus Liverpool.

A selection of interviews from the Library’s collection are available online.

For further information, please visit the project website.

Joanna Sassoon, Project Manager,
Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project