Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

Product Information

In fact for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. I can't believe I had no idea any of this had ever happened - thousands of children sent across the world thinking they were orphans, growing up neglected, abused and without identity. At great cost to herself, both financial and emotional, Margaret Humphries made it her mission to try and reunite some of these child migrants with their families. There are brief moments where Humphries alludes to the personal toll of her work, but these are included with such spontaneity and brevity that they are difficult to follow and feel jarring. The author (a social worker by profession) finds herself involved in reuniting families and before long, the trickle of cases becomes a flood.

Whilst we all think that such terrible things must come to light, we often give little thought to what it may have cost the ‘whistleblower’ to pursue this path. Margaret Humphreys soon discovered that as many as 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britian and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the Empire—the last as recently as 1967. As I read these pages, with the snippets and details of many individual stories, I was reminded of so many people I have met over my years of working in various institutions in Australia where untold stories were ever lurking just below the surface.

to face life in dire conditions, slave labor, subservient positions, all under the guise of Charity and furthering the United Kingdom in it's colonies! My father, still traumatised after having survived four years in a concentration camp, worked nights in the local colliery. Almost all of the children, from orphanages or children’s homes, had parents who did not realise what was happening. Throughout she never judges or apportions blame, instead she focuses on what really counts, reuniting families.

Margaret's book Empty Cradles was written to raise funds for CMT and to increase public awareness of this dark episode in recent history. It was shocking to realise that Child migration was still happening when I migrated to Australia in the early 1960s and even more so when she described how some of the child migrants travelled to Australia on the same ship that I travelled on with my family albeit several years apart. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. For me the stories have always been diverse, the needs of the people involved varied, and the journeys seemingly individual and private despite their occasional similarities.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I was absolutely shocked to read that this could have taken place, that the UK could have been involved in something so appalling. Margaret Humpreys, a social worker in England is also a very brave woman who took on the bureaucracy to help English child migrants also now known as the Lost Children, who were taken to all parts of the then British Empire, but mostly to Australia never to see parents or relatives again. She gradually discovered, to her horror, and the horror of the British and Australian public in general, that as many as 150,000 children had been sent (without parent or guardian) from British children’s homes, starting in the 1920s, to a “new life” in Canada, Australia, Rhodesia or New Zealand. Such a shameful act of how both the English and Australian governments organized it, how religious organisations managed to get away with hiding monsters who held positions of power and abused it in the worst possible way and only came to light when one of these children approached Margaret in the 1980’s and she started to investigate the allegation.

Their organisation (in this case the Christian Brothers but elsewhere other religious groups) closed up like a giant clam full of vile secrets.

She got a secondment from her social work position and created the Child Migrants Trust and it took over her whole life.

Margaret Humpreys stumbled on the cover up by accident, unable to believe that children were sent thousands of miles away without parental permission. There is bitter-sweetness too in recounting the slight relief child migrants find when they can finally share their experiences and burdens. When you think of that raped child being eight years old, and then ten and fifteen and then being a young man and going to work for the first time, and finding a girlfriend and going to work for the first time; and finding a girlfriend, becoming a husband and a father – all those phases of life that we go through – and this is his baggage; this is what he takes with him through all those changes. In their new countries, their ‘new life,’ as the children were told they were going to, they encountered various things.For many of them that is the reason they became priest, to hide behind doors and abuse the weak and the vulnerable. Margaret's work lead to the exposure of this little known scheme and helped many people reunite with the families they left behind years earlier. we never did follow him because my mother always warned us about priests, nuns, and policemen and to never ever go to a public washroom by ourselves, and to always hold hands no matter where we go.