Sex and spices in a Jaipur hotel

TheWest Australian believed that if you loved Tea With Mussolini, Venus, Ladies in Lavender and Late Bloomers, you will love The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Love them? They were my favourite films ever! Then add Howard's End, Room with a View, The Shooting Party and My House In Umbria, and you will have my favourite cinema-going life in a nutshell.

I read a very mixed review of the film called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, suggesting that the acting and photography were beautiful, but that the story was quite limited. The lack of originality would, it was suggested, be particularly acute for the film goer who had never been to India and who had not read books about Indian society. The fact that the film was based on Deborah Moggach‘s super 2004 novel, These Foolish Things, was not seen to rescue the story line.

None of this bothered me in the slightest because of three factors. Firstly I love Moggach’s novels. Secondly spouse Joe and I travelled widely in central India. Thirdly I know a great deal about the academic history of this huge British colony, at least before independence.

Arriving by tuk tuk; first glimpse of their new hotel in Jaipur

Even more importantly, the fact that the film’s target audience was likely to be people aged 50 or more made us ideal candidates for loving every frame of the film directed by John Madden. Older people should know more about real life. Since spouse’s sister became a widow 18 months ago, we have also dealt with every aspect of poor mental health, loneliness, unemployment and physical frailty associated with mature age.

All the characters had their own story. Judi Dench had become widowed and couldn’t cope with modernity and its endless requirements. Bill Nighy and Jean Wilton were a married couple whose financial security was precarious and their serenity in retirement was looking even more precarious. Ronald Pickup planned to resurrect his sex life, thousands of ks from home. Maggie Smith, a very fine actress, was a rather nasty lady who needed surgery she couldn’t afford. The character we can probably identify with most easily was a High Court judge played by Tom Wilkinson. He had been very happy in India as a young man and hoped he could recapture his youth. Celia Imre was looking for something new, not her lost youth revisited.

Is there anyone in the universe who hasn't been bored witless in airports?

The Jaipur hotel might have been once a very elegant place, but that was decades ago. By the time the group arrived, the hotel was somewhat crumbly. But Sonny the hotel owner, played by Dev Patel, was young and keen, and tried his best to make the dilapidated hotel into a home. Sonny was fighting his own battles. His mother (Lillette Dubey) thought the hotel would fail and, worse still, she disapproved of his beautiful girlfriend (Tina Desae) who worked at a call centre.

Joe and I loved Jaipur’s architecture and history when we were touring India a few years ago, but I did find the city messy, noisy and a tad chaotic. And since the film’s cinematography in Jaipur was so accurate and so colourful, I thought I could smell the spices coming out of the cinema screen. So it should not surprise the cinema-goer that older Europeans escaping to India might find that their lives had become messy, noisy and a tad chaotic.

Hotel owner Sonny and his girlfriend taste freedom from mum

I am with Ed Gibbs in the Sydney Morning Herald. For  cinema goers able to relate, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel will come as a welcome surprise. A sunny but shrewd musing, it offers an oft-ignored section of the cinema-going audience a delightful hit all their own. And I would add that it offers oft-ignored issues that mature people worry about – financial stability, quality health care, lost youth, rekindled sex lives and graceful retirement.

Dean Spanley: a tale about reincarnation

Taken from what is rapidly becoming one of my favourite periods of history, the late Victorian-Edwardian era, I read a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle book and reviewed it in my post Victorian Spiritualism: Arthur & George. Soon after, and quite coincidentally, I saw the film Dean Spanley. I didn’t know of the Irish writer Lord Dunsany before and I had never heard of this slim novel written just before WW2.

Set in 1904, Dean Stanley was a rather bizarre story of a father-son relation­ship (Peter O'Toole & Jeremy Northam respectively) and some key people who touched their lives. Out of desperation at his father’s tetchy, critical behaviour, Fisk took his father to hear a lect­ure on spiritualism by Indian Swami Prash (Art Malik). There they met the peculiar Dean Spanley (Sam Neill) and a rough Aust­ralian call­ed Wrather (Bryan Brown). Wrather could procure anything a soul might crave, if the money was right. Since what Dean Spanley craved was rare Hungarian golden dessert wine Tokay, that is what Fisk paid for.

Fisk Snr and Jnr at the lecture on spiritualism

The film's most important scene was a formal dinner for the 4 men, well lubricated by Tokay. In the semi-gloom around the din­ner table, a drunken Dean “revealed amazing and cathartic connections from the past” that eventually intrigued the group. As a result of the group’s relationship, the father-son’s own emotional relationship was changed forever. The NZHerald thought Dean Spanley was a sweet, if somewhat sticky, tale of redemption and friendships renewed – somewhat like the Tokay. But more importantly for me, The NZHerald also thought the script made the absurd vaguely coherent.

But dream-like perceptions and drunken memories of some imagined past are not much to hang a film on. I was very interested in these educated men, living quite formal and prescriptive lives, becoming involved in spiritualism. broadcastellan blog wrote in Best in Show: Dean Spanley as Out-of-Homebody Experience that film was actually inspired by My Talks with Dean Spanley, a casual, witty discourse on reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Even with the excruciating pain of having lost a son in the Boer War, why didn’t Fisk Snr simply refuse to go along with the irrationality of it all?

A Persistent Vision blog in Dean Spanley (2008) (SIFF 2009) put it down to a strange, wonderful clash of the absurd and coherent. I presume that meant that proper Victorian-Edwardian gentlemen could deal with rationality and spiritualism concurrently, and not see anything strange about the two themes. There seems to be no other explanation that I can see.

Gender politics in "Albert Nobbs", the film

Late in the C19th in Ireland, a woman could not yet be truly financially independent. The main character Albert Nobbs (played by Glenn Close) was a woman who had to dress and live as a man, in order to escape a life of poverty and dependence on a husband. Apparently she had long ago decided to work as a waiter in a hotel, in male clothes with a male name. 30 years later, Nobbs was still a hard working waiter in the same hotel, silent and socially inept.

The film was set in a small, rather elegant Dublin hotel in 1898; there were sexual liaisons, a typhoid fever epidemic and class differences that were excruciatingly emphasised. Morrison's Hotel apparently had regular clients, people who were familiar with the tasteless food, but loved the atmosphere anyhow. It ran very smoothly, thanks to the hard work of the staff, the simpering hospitality of the owner (Mrs Baker, played by Pauline Collins) and a lot of blind eyes being turned. Dr Holloran (played by Brendan Gleeson) didn’t seem to have a regular medical practice, probably because he was a fall-down drunk, but he had a warm heart and some middle aged sex appeal.

Glenn Close as the waiter Albert Nobbs, Janet McTeer as the painter Hubert Page.

Only at night, when Nobbs escaped into his private bedroom and locked the door, did he have the time to count and record his tips down to the last halfpenny, then hide them under a floorboard.

Life might have gone on forever thus, had the wall-painter Hubert Page (played by Janet McTeer) not been hired by the hotel, and had the painter not been allocated Nobbs’ room overnight. Nobbs' secret was exposed for the first time ever, allowing Hubert Page to expose an even bigger secret – that he too was born a woman and was married to a real woman. Mrs Page (played by Bronagh Gallagher) turned out to be a very hospitable and friendly woman, who Mr Page really did love.

So what was the difference between Nobbs and Page? Where Nobbs became a “man” out of fear, Page loved his new life choices. Faced with the same societal restrictions, Hubert Page had a relatively happy life and Nobbs did not.

Nobbs decided that if the Pages could have a normal life, so could he. But he didn’t have a clue about courting a young woman. So he very ineptly went after the working-class maid Helen Dawes (played by Mia Wasikowska), who DID know what courting men were supposed to do. Helen’s choices were limited to two: the inept but decent Nobbs or the sexy but nasty boiler mechanic, Joe (Aaron Johnson).

With all of Nobbs’ silent moments and isolation, the film still managed to bring the late Victorian era (1898) to bustling life. The downstairs staff ate breakfast together before the hotel guests woke up, then spent the rest of the long day rushing around without a break. Outside the hotel, the streets were throbbing with crowds of people, working and shopping.

BETSY SHARKEY of the Los Angeles Times said “perhaps it is the very nature of its central character that is the film's problem. Nobbs is such a spectral presence that infusing any measure of life into this person is an insurmountable challenge”. I disagree. I think Glen Close, or the director Rodrigo Garcia, handled the challenge brilliantly. Gestures were so constrained that if you licked your icecream at that nano second, you may well have missed them. Nobbs’ face was nearly devoid of expression, his voice was almost pathetic and his eyes were blank. Glen Close delivered a heart-rending performance, very difficult to watch. Between fear of intimacy and fear of unemployment, Nobbs was so emotionally retarded that he was almost comatose.

Guests at the hotel partying, while the staff worked and served

The film did suggest some hope for the working classes, especially when Nobbs began to reconsider his own future. I won’t give away the dénouement except to say that it was full of tragedy and optimism, in almost equal proportions. Whether the modern viewer enjoys the film or not depends largely on how much relentless, working class pain the viewer is prepared to tolerate. The viewer can see this film as a localised drama, or can focus on the broader issues about class, gender and sexuality in Dublin.

**

The film was based on a novella, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, which was first published back in 1927 by the politically aware Irish writer George Moore (1852–1933). And he wrote another collection in 1927 called Celibate Lives, also controversial.  For a much maligned author at home, Moore mixed in rather impressive literary and artistic circles abroad i.e London and Paris.  Émile Zola, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein are often mentioned. 

Now literary critics acknowledge that Moore helped modernise Irish literature, by encouraging a serious  exploration of gender and social class roles. The blog Skip The Makeup is even more specific. She says that Moore, who supported early forms of feminism and likely wrote the story as a parable of a woman escaping a hardscrabble existence, might have made conclusions from meeting a real life Albert Nobbs that were not informed with our more recent insights. Nonetheless Moore understood what he wanted this Albert to represent.

Desperate Refugees: 1940 and 2001

Phillip Adams is a columnist in one of Australia’s most prestigious newspaper and a film producer of note. He wrote the most amazing column just recently (The Australian, 18th Feb 2012) that I would like to reproduce and then comment on.

The newspaper article started here. "The remarkable Australian writer-director Ben Lewin being carried shoulder-high through cheering crowds at the Sundance Festival. Lewin's latest film, The Surrogate, should now enter Oscar contention. At the same time, Australia’s wealthiest woman, Lang Hancock's daughter Gina, was upping her strategic media holdings with a tilt at Fairfax. The two stories strangely connected – mining magnate Lang Hancock was a secretive player in the Australian film industry. And, having backed Australia's most famous film Mad Max in 1979, he agreed to back Ben Lewin.

Adams had long loathed Hancock’s bank-rolling of right wing Queensland premier Joh BjeIke-Petersen; his enthusiasm for business partner and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu; his contempt for Aboriginal land rights; his insane attempts to have the Treasurer of Australia ban the writings of Ralph Nader and John Kenneth Galbraith; and his lunatic plan to create new deep-water ports in Western Australia with nuclear bombs. But Lewin and Adams were finding it hard to finance a feature called The Dunera Boys - and suddenly Hancock came knocking. Waving a cheque for the entire budget.

The Dunera Boys, National Library of Australia

The film would have told why Australia used a prison camp for Jews at Hay. They'd been among a few thousand refugees from Germany and Austria that Churchill had interned during the UK's darkest hours - and then shipped them here on HMT Dunera. He bizarrely believed that the Jews, many of them men of great distinction, might be Nazis. The camp was as surreal as Churchill's notion. On good terms with the guards, the Jews re-created Viennese cafe society in southwest NSW. After the war, many Dunera boys stayed on to make immense contributions to Australia.

All but forgotten, the Dunera story is one of the oddest episodes in our history. Ben Lewin's script was masterful and Phillip Adams was the producer.

The initial approach came from a go-between who'd neither confirm nor deny that Hancock was his client. But he was well known as the magnate's man. Were there any projects that would qualify for the 10BA tax concessions? Yes but, suspecting that Hancock's right-wing views probably included anti-Semitism, Adams warned that his nameless client might not like the story. "He won't be concerned. It's all about tax planning, not the content of the movies. Nor will the size of your budget be the slightest concern."

So in the early 1980s they signed heads of agreement, booked a marvellous cast including Bob Hoskins and Warren Mitchell - and started building a replica of the Hay camp. But before the first take of the first scene there was a phone call. "My client has instructed me to tear up the cheque." No reason was proffered; no discussion would be entered into. "He's found out that our film is about a boatful of Yids, hasn't he?" Once again the lawyer would neither confirm nor deny. Infuriated, Adams warned that the film director and producer would call an immediate press conference to denounce his client as an anti-Semite. The measured response was to say this would lead to an immediate libel action.

They scrambled to save the film, trying to raise the funds within the Jewish community. But time beat them. They had to release the cast and crew, and dismantle the sets. A few years later in 1985, Ben Lewin rejigged The Dunera Boys as a mini-series under a different producer. It remains one of the finest achievements in the history of Australian television. But the backstage story of the Hancock investment scandal appears here, for the first time.

Ben Lewin's success at Sundance was wonderful but his brilliant career has not come easy. He greatly deserves his latest triumph - and to be recognised as one of our best, up there with Weir, Beresford and Schepisi." End of the newspaper article.

**

To my mind, Lang Hancock was perfectly entitled to back any film project he fancied and could have stayed well away from any project he did not like. So why did he seem to at first accept the Dunera Story, a tragic episode in Australian history that is still fresh in the minds of people old enough to remember World War Two, Nazism and terrified refugees?

I have of course seen the final mini-series that Ben Lewin directed, The Dunera Boys, and thought that Bob Hoskins and Warren Mitchell were indeed amazing.

Let me leap forward a few years to 2001 at the Maritime Museum in Sydney, when the 61st reunion of the Dunera Boys their families and friends was being held. Its not far from the place they first landed in Australia on the transport ship Dunera in 1940.

As already noted, they had been 2000 of the Jewish refugees who fled to England from Germany and Austria. England was afraid they might be a security risk so put them into internment camps and later shipped them to camps in Australia; a miserable cargo - unwanted and uncertain of their future. Many of the Dunera Boys went on to become prominent lawyers, doctors, businessmen, professors and artists.

At the Dunera reunion there was plenty of talk about the past, but also about current world headlines regarding the asylum seekers on board the tragic ship, Tampa. Think of events that rocked Australia at that moment and consider the coincidence of place (Sydney wharf), time (2001) and theme (desperate refugees)!

The Norwegian freighter, The Tampa, rescued and protected the refugees, 2001

In August 2001, the Howard Government of Australia refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued but unauthorised Afghans from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters, to enter Australian waters. The Prime Minister ordered the ship be boarded by Australian special forces and the refugees taken out of Australian waters. Later that same August, the Prime Minister introduced an emergency bill entitled the Border Protection Bill 2001. The government subsequently acted to excise Christmas Island and a large number of other coastal islands from Australia's migration zone. It was arguably Australia’s most immoral legislation since becoming a nation in January 1901.

The timing of the Tampa disgrace was exquisitely painful. The surviving Dunera boys, now men in their 80s, wanted to shake the Prime Minister, John Howard, saying “we were tragic refugees. Don’t you forget it. You must never turn a boat away with refugees”.

Learning history; preparing for life

The History Boys was a film directed by Nicholas Hytner that I first saw in 2006.

Set in 1980s Britain, Cutlers' Grammar School in Sheffield was trying to get its students into the university and college of their choice. It was a process that everybody I have ever met in my entire life has gone through, so members of the audience were all nodding their heads in recognition. Even better, the two senior teachers, played splendidly by Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths, were characters I knew very well from my own Matriculation experience in 1965. Clive Merrison, the principal, was less successful, but I suppose that was the very point the director was trying to make.

The language used by the boys and by the staff was brilliantly written, and remained a key part of the film, regardless of the scenes. I presume that was because the film had been adapted by Alan Bennett from his play of the same name; the script had not originally been written for a book or for the screen. In plays, there can be sets, costumes and actions, but the language remains central. Perhaps the language was, if anything, too sophisticated. As with anyone who has raised or taught boys at that stage of their development, I know they grunt a lot. And hit each other, instead of using words. And they talk about sex a lot, often in poorly constructed English.

The history students and their three teachers, Sheffield, 1980s

Still... these were clever boys, and motivated to do well academically. The conflict only appeared when a very young man named Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) was invited into the school to assist the more traditional teachers in preparing the boys for the university entrance exams. I am not sure what Irwin's exact duty statement contained, but the boys were asked to prepare slick and polished historical presentations, regardless of content. The search for documented facts and historical truths became secondary.

Since I am a lecturer in history and art history, there was something compelling and personal about this film. I now realise why first year history students at university these days are more assertive in their historical perspectives than I had been in the 1960s, but less well equipped for seeking solid evidence.

I would have liked to end the film after these talented young lads went to Oxford or Cambridge for their interviews, filled with awe at the endless grounds, the stunning buildings and the serious college staff. It was wonderful seeing the day when the universities’ letters arrived, received by excited and anxious families in their kitchens.

In real life, there is normally no way of knowing what will happen to boys in their future lives; the last day of school is normally the end of one (perhaps beloved) era and the start of a totally unknown new era. But the director decided to let the viewer know who became successful in their careers, who became ordinary workers and who died tragically in the army. Although this annoyed me, I suppose from a teacher’s perspective it would be very satisfying to find out what happened to their once-young charges.

Of Gods and Men - monks and Islamists

The film “Of Gods and Men” (2010) is a true story set in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria.

The Algerian Civil War was an ongoing and tragic conflict that continued throughout the 1990s, fought out between the Algerian government and various Islamic military groups. The conflict began in December 1991 when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) party was gaining popularity. The National Liberation Front (FLN) party, fearing a FIS victory, cancelled elections after the first round. As a result, the country's military took control of the government in a 1992 coup. The guerrillas had initially targeted the nation’s army and police, but by the time of this story, 1996, some groups had started shooting civilians as well. A truce of sorts was eventually declared in 1999, but by then some 200,000 citizens had been murdered.

I wish the director Xavier Beauvois had written something about the year and geographic location at the beginning of the film, to set the scene. Before seeing Of Gods and Men, I thought that the film was set in the 1950s and that it described the conflict between France and the Algerian independence movements. And since there were constant references to French colonial power in the power, it seemed to this viewer that Algeria was still trying to gain its independence from France. [Trappists live an ahistorical life, so it wasn't until I noticed a flat screen tv and attack helicopters in the film that I realised the 1950s War of Independence was not the setting]. Needless to say the setting looked totally authentic - the film was created in the very old, long-deserted Benedictine monastery of Tioumliline Morocco.

Eight Roman Catholic French Trappist monks lived quietly in their monastery in mountainous country, serving God and the people who lived in the impoverished villages beyond the monastery walls. Life was quiet, predictable and religious. They spent endless hours praying, reading spiritually uplifting stories, cooking, gardening, washing dishes, chopping wood and singing. The film opens with Psalm 82 being read: "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes."

The monks being faced by soldiers, inside their monastery

The monks were ordinary human beings, of course. They missed their families back in France and they were fearful of the future; they may even have been keen to taste fine food, wine and classical music again. But led by the abbot Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson), they were committed to poverty, simplicity and living the life of Christ. David Stratton called their approach to life almost mystical.

The monks were not out of contact with the real world. They looked after the sick from the local villages, gave out clothing to needy families, sold their food products in open markets and helped with agricultural tasks in the villages. In return the Muslim locals seemed to have a true love for these elderly gents in their funny Christian uniforms, especially the doctor Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) who was superb.

Peace continued in its normal way until the monks and villagers heard about the murder of Croatian labourers on a nearby construction site. Why were the Croatian men murdered? Who would be next? The Algerian government certainly made it clear to the Trappists that their own lives could not be protected and that they should rush back to France on the first ship. Yet even when rebel soldiers invaded the monastery itself, armed to the teeth, the monks were reluctant to leave.

The most telling part of the film came, quietly, towards the end. The monks sat at their normal refectory table, enjoying a last bottle of wine and a last session of Tchaikovsky music. Despite the inevitable catastrophe about to befall them, the viewer could see their outer joy and could start to understand their inner peace. If it were me, I wouldn’t have been smiling. But then I wouldn't have stayed in Algeria during the Civil War, had there been an opportunity to escape back to France.

Monks voting whether to stay or leave

Richard Brody believed that at the end, the monks didn’t just salute the worldly in the abstract sense; they affirmed that their faith was that of secular European ideals of individual liberty and self-expression. As the monks were marched off to their death, they presented their readiness for sacrifice with not a thought of vengeance. Perhaps their monastic meekness might even be seen as a symbolic purging of the sins of colonialism. I disagree. I thought at the very end, we learn that bad men with guns will destroy good people who are pacifists.

But what is the take-home message to historically minded viewers? Not whether the tension between the monks is well shown, nor the relationships between the monks and the outsiders - the film is indeed filled with faith, austerity and the responsibility of the men to God and to other humans. My interest would be how accurately the film  engages itself in this modern tragedy, the Algerian civil war.

Would it have made any difference if Beames On Film is correct. At the time, 1996, the killings were claimed by The Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. But Beames wrote French secret service documents now suggest it was the Algerian army who had really killed the monks, as a result of some ghastly error. Would film reviewers have been talking about the nightmare of religious fundamentalism if they had known the national army did the murders?

Child migrants/deportees from Britain to the Empire

“On Their Own - Britain’s Child Migrants” is a collaborative exhibition that came out of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and the National Museums Liverpool in the UK.

An organisation known as the Church of England Central Home for Waifs and Strays opened for business in 1881. By 1905 the Society had 93 homes throughout England and Wales, accounting for 3410 children in care. Two thirds of these lived in Society's homes, a few hundred in affiliated homes, and the rest were fostered. Because there weren't enough beds for all the children needing assistance, many of these young British citizens were sent to Canada.  The National Children's Homes, a Methodist organisation established in 1869, also emigrated over 3,000 of the children they took into care.

Under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and 1937, the British Government formally assisted private organisations to help people who wanted to settle in His Majesty’s Overseas Dominions. Most were adults. But some 130,000 children were also sent from Britain to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries through child migration schemes.

The child migrants were largely lied to; they were told their parents were dead so that they were being sent on holiday to a place where the sun always shines and fruit can be picked off the trees. But few of the children were true orphans; many had originally been placed in the British orphanages because their parents had been unable to care for them, temporarily or for the long term.

Child migrants from Fairbridge, setting out for Australia, 1938.
Photo from Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool

Child migrants were sent abroad without passports, social histories or full birth certificates. Thus it was easy to tell the children that their parents had died and that there was no member of the family who could ever care for them or adopt them. And as the majority of the transportees were only between seven and ten years of age, they were in no position to have argued with the authorities.

The British government thought that they would offload their needy families and save the British economy a fortune. But the charitable and religious organisations in Britain often had a more moral and less financial motive. The Fairbridge Plan for caring for British child migrants originated with Kingsley Fairbridge’s “vision splendid”. He was truly appalled at the conditions of the thousands of under-privileged children with no future other than poverty. He wanted to transplant such children to the wide-open spaces in the colonies; the orphanages agreed and were very happy to send their charges overseas.

For their part, the Australian and other British Empire governments hoped these schemes would supply them with much needed population and labour. They could have imported cheap labour from any country, but they wanted sound, British stock. “Stock” was always the word that was used. In 1913 the first children arrived in Western Australia to take up residence on The Fairbridge Farm near Pinjarra, south-east of Perth. In 1937, The Fairbridge Farm Schools were opened in New South Wales.

"This is not a charity", declared the Prince of Wales in 1934 of the work of the Fairbridge farm schools... "it is an Imperial investment".

The Britain’s Child Migrants Exhibition’s own documentation notes that the lives of these children changed dramatically and fortunes varied. Some succeeded in creating new futures for themselves. Others suffered lonely childhoods, brutalised and exploited by the church organisations that were supposed to protect them. All experienced disruption and separation from their families and from the British towns they grew up in.

Exploitation and misery were not exclusively the fate of those children sent to Australia. The Child Migrants Trust said that while children in New Zealand were often placed with foster parents, those in Canada could be entrusted to the care of farmers, often without sufficient supervision. Some Canadian farmers were charged with manslaughter, such was the extent of their cruelty. Very few children were legally adopted in Canada and the vast majority spent their entire childhoods in farm schools or large, impersonal institutions which accommodated up to 350 children.

These child migration schemes received poor publicity from the outset, yet they continued until the 1960s. So why didn’t the schemes attract the critical attention of historians and welfare workers until the 1980s? And even then it was accidental. Margaret Humphreys was a social worker in Nottingham, specialising in child protection. One day an Australian woman contacted her, saying she had been taken from a children’s home in Nottingham and sent as a toddler to Australia by boat after WW2. Could Humphreys help her find her mother?

Humphrey’s pursuit of the scheme took her all over the British Commonwealth. To her very great credit, Humphreys also founded the Child Migrants Trust, to help those who suffered under the policy. What seems improbable to me was that Margaret Humphreys was the first concerned professional to raise the issues of involuntary child migration. Perhaps she was just the bravest. Or perhaps the others had been turned away by obdurate government officials.

Fairbridge Farm children on the SS Ormonde, 1950
Photo from the State Library of WA

Even so, it took until 1999 for the British government to set up and endow a travel fund to be spent on onetime visits for family reunions. Unfortunately there were so many restrictions that only 300 of the 10,000 post-WW2 migrants to Australia were able to go back home. The travel fund expired in 2002, but in any case, how many mothers and fathers who placed their children in care in 1938-46 would still have been alive in 2002? Formal apologies from the Australian Government in 2009 and British Government in 2010 were late, but were welcomed by the transportees.

The Australian National Maritime Museum has suggested the following reading list:

1.Bean, Philip & Melville, Joy Lost children of the Empire. London; Sydney Unwin Hyman, 1989.
2.Coldrey, Barry M Good British stock: child and youth migration to Australia.  National Archives of Australia, 1999
3.Gill, Alan Orphans of the Empire: the shocking story of child migration to Australia. Milsons Point Vintage, 1998.
4.Humphreys, Margaret Empty Cradles. London Corgi Books, 1995.
5.Sherington, Geoffrey & Jeffery, Chris Fairbridge: Empire and child migration. University of Western Australia Press, 1998
6.Wagner, Gillian Children of the Empire. London Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
7. Wheeler, Charles Carried away, in BBC History, October 2003. Great article!
Months after writing this particular post, I saw the film Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson as the Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys and directed by Jim Loach. The film, which opened in Britain in April 2011 and in Australia in June 2011, focuses on the individuals' experiences of Britain's semi-secret child migrant programme to Australia. I say semi-secret because, although the relevant government ministers and church authorities thought they were doing the best thing for the unfortunate children, they destroyed the children's paperwork on purpose and lost the children's true identities. The film skilfully depicts the impact of this loss of identity, 50 years or more after the children had been deported from their homeland.

Young migrant children put out to labour in the fields,
Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney