Ex-child migrant sent to Australia tells hearing ‘nearly every day was rape day’

A former child migrant shipped by British authorities to an Australian farm rife with sexual violence has told how “nearly every day was a rape day”.

The survivor, who cannot be identified, was taken overseas in a Government-approved scheme which allegedly exposed vulnerable youngsters to rape, torture and slavery.

The controversial programme relocated thousands of children across the British Empire and is being probed by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

Earlier, the hearing was told how the foster mother of one girl who suffered “sadistic” abuse in the same Australian town wrote to the Queen appealing for the child’s return.

Despite the letter being acknowledged on behalf of the royal family, former migrant Marcelle O’Brien said she felt her plight was ignored.

“They didn’t take any notice, the royal family just didn’t want to know anything,” she said.

The anonymous witness said he was caned by the “evil” woman charged with his care for “lying” after he confided being routinely raped by staff and older boys.

Now aged 70, as a child he was taken from his mother, put into care in various homes across Cornwall and sent to Fairbridge Farm in Pinjarra in 1958.

Breaking down, he told the hearing: “I have had to live with this for about 62 years now. I live with it seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

“But you can’t get that out of your mind because it is imprinted on your mind. There is no way you can get away from it.”

He told the hearing he felt survivors of Fairbridge Farm should receive at least £1 million for each year they were forced to live there.

He said: “I want justice first. The compensation is not just for me. It is for my mother and it is for all the child migrants.

“We lost the love of our parents.”

Many of the children forced to move abroad under the scheme were in state care or had been entrusted to volunteer organisations such as Barnardo’s.

The witness said he had no memory prior to boarding the ship to Australia aged seven, while Ms O’Brien, who turned five as she travelled to her new colonial home, thought she was simply going “on a tea party”.

A case study of the “shameful history” – focusing on the post-war period until the scheme’s end in the 1970s – is being examined as part of the inquiry’s protection of children outside the United Kingdom investigation.

During this time, more than 4,000 children were sent abroad, chiefly to Australia.

Of his experiences at the farm, the anonymous survivor told the hearing: “We had a lot of older children – children aged from five to when they left at about 16 – and there was usually the older boys who started, I’m not going to say sexual abuse, I’m going to say rape.

“None of them had permission. We were just a lump of meat to them really.”

He was raped several times a week by a Church of England priest who preyed on children as they got changed into their choir robes, it was heard.

Similar attacks were experienced at the hands of a pig and poultry farmer whose estate they were sent to work on, he said.

His written evidence, read to the court, said: “Nearly every day was a rape day.”

Ms O’Brien, born in Worthing, Sussex and fostered aged two, said: “I was in a loving and caring home. I didn’t know my real mother, I was so young.

Fighting back tears, she added: “And you all took me away from that.”

The inquiry continues.

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