It made sense for the Prime Minister to start his Australian visit in Fremantle, the port city where so many Maltese children were unloaded like cargo for a life of 20th-century slavery. He did well to acknowledge the unimaginable misery of those little ones, some of them as young as six, who were removed from their families in Malta under false pretences, or simply dumped by them. The children were shipped out to Australia and a horrible life in institutions that were little more than slave-camps, run by a religious order called the Christian Brothers. They were abused physically, psychologically and some of them even sexually, forced to do hard labour in terrible conditions. All of them suffered permanent psychological scarring, and many of them went under and could not be rescued in adulthood.
Here in Malta, there has been little enough attention given to this tale of horror. News of the half-a-century-old scandal first broke in the London broadsheets a few years ago, and that is how I got to know about it. A Canadian man, who was of British origin but who grew up in Australia, spoke to his daughter about what he had endured, just before he died. He had never spoken about it before. He had been shipped out to a Christian Brothers slave-camp when he was just a few years old, and the shock and trauma of the experience had silenced him for life.
His daughter tried to discover more. She thought it was strange that something so dreadful could have passed by unnoticed and undocumented. She began to publish requests for information, and was inundated with the testimonies of those who had endured a similar or worse fate to her father’s. They poured in, from all over Britain, Australia and Canada. Why had these people not spoken before? Some of them had tried, but no one had listened. Others, like her father, had preferred a life of silence, to move on and forget – except that they couldn’t.
The story grew bigger and bigger, covering whole spreads of the broadsheet newspapers. It was huge. Journalists began to dig up other aspects of the scandal, and revealed truly shocking details, like the fact that many of the children were “exported” from Britain without their parents’ consent or knowledge. They had been among the children evacuated without their parents from the major cities, mainly London, as bombing raids intensified in the Second World War. They had been sent to live in the country, or in children’s homes in rural towns. By the time the war ended, they had been separated from their families for up to five years.
Most of them were reunited with their parents and siblings, but some of them met a sinister fate. They were told that their parents had died; their parents in turn were told that their children had died – and the children ended up as cargo for the Christian Brothers on the other side of the world. Many hundreds of children were shipped out – perhaps even thousands – the vast majority of them genuine orphans who had nobody left in the world to protect them. The fates having decreed that they hadn’t suffered enough already by being deprived of a family and by having lived in the cold and harsh environment of a 1940s British orphanage, they were packed off to a life of cruelty in Australia.
The story entered the British imagination. Fans of the popular BBC detective series Dalziel and Pascoe may not know that Dalziel’s older half-brother, whom he never knew, was one of these children – silently shipped out to Australia while his mother was told that he had died during the war. An entire two episodes of Dalziel and Pascoe were based on this hideous chapter of British history. The detectives investigate murders that are linked to the covert export of children to the Christian Brothers in Australia, from a children’s home run by a religious order in England.
As the story grew bigger and its implications wider, I read that shipping little children out to Australia without their parents was so widespread and went on for so long that it could almost be considered official policy. It served the dual purpose of providing young labour for the new country, and of relieving the “exporting” countries of the burden of unwanted children at a time when orphanages were packed to capacity and there was no welfare system to support impoverished families. Almost all the little slaves of the Christian Brothers were from the British Isles or Canada, and from nowhere else in the British Empire, because there was another policy at the time: to keep Australia white. They didn’t want any brown children, still less black ones.
And then I chanced on a short paragraph in one of those big articles, and I thought, “Why has this never been spoken about?” It described how the only other children to be exported in this way, apart from those of the British Isles and Canada, were from Malta. After some debate, it was finally decided that Maltese children did not necessarily qualify as “coloured” – some of them were the children of British sailors and had fair hair and blue eyes, after all – and so the child-export system was extended to the Maltese islands. It is a tragic irony that the efforts of the Maltese to be classified as white rather than coloured in those days resulted in the virtual martyrdom of so many small children.
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As sometimes happens by odd coincidence, while I was still wondering about it all back then, and about how a veil of shame and silence had been drawn over the whole thing for 50 years, I got talking to the man who usually washed my car on my rare trips to Valletta. Out of the blue, he began to tell me about his childhood. “The parish priest knocked on our door one day,” he said, “and told my mother that she could send me to Australia to live with some priests. He told her that it would cost her nothing to send me. I was quite a handful, and so she sent me to Australia.” He ended up with the Christian Brothers. He seemed surprised that I knew about the story; he was taken aback when I told him that it was then the biggest news in Britain, a really huge scandal. “I never told my mother what I went through,” he said. “She thought I had gone there for a better life, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.”
These legions of children started to be shipped out in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with consignments continuing right through the 1950s and early 1960s. Think how many children that might be, how many lives of misery. It was only possible because children have no voice, and when they try to speak, they are ignored, brushed off, or thought to be exaggerating. Picture the vastness of Australia, the huge ranches that can be reached only after hours of driving in the wilderness: the camps to which the children were sent were fearsome places in the middle of nowhere. Even if they had succeeded in escaping their prisons, they had no way of reaching the nearest inhabited area and seeking help. Think of the absolute powerlessness of an eight-year-old boy locked up with other frightened children, all held captive by men who beat and abused them, and made them work for up to 16 hours a day, in the fields and workshops. They must have spent years dreaming of rescue, hoping that somebody might come along and save them. The horror-stories we read about Chinese and Indian child labour in sweat-shops, furnaces and brick-kilns are what these British children – for the children of Malta were also British then – went through in the Christian Brothers slave-camps of Australia.
The excuse that the authorities in Britain and in Malta did not know what was going on in those camps cannot be taken seriously. It was a serious dereliction of their duty towards the most vulnerable members of society – children without parents to protect them, with parents who wanted to get rid of them, and with parents who had been deceived. There was no “follow-up” system for those who had been sent away, no monitoring of their progress, no checking that they were all right. Occasionally, a visiting official would turn up at one of the camps, and be told that everything was fine, and then he would leave. Nobody ever spoke to the children alone. There was no discussion.
One boy from Malta, when a member of the 1960s Nationalist government visited Australia and took a detour to the Christian Brothers home, gathered all his courage and tried to explain to him how bad things were. He said that the minister promised him he would “see about it” – but of course, he went back to Malta and never did so. The boys had been abandoned to their terrible fate. It must have been very difficult starting an investigation into the practices of the Christian Brothers in Australia, in the hyper-Catholic Malta of the early 1960s, and with more important things on the government’s mind, like negotiating for independence from Britain. But would it have been more difficult than living with the guilt of having known or suspected what was going on, and yet done nothing about it? Or perhaps these people feel no guilt, or believe that they are in no way responsible and have nothing to feel ashamed about.
After the scandal broke, agreements were reached in Britain on financial compensation – but as with the people who were sent to concentration camps by the German Nazis, no compensation is possible for lives destroyed. In Malta, there has never been any discussion about the moral aspects of this story – a country shipping its own children out to slavery – still less about compensation. We do our best to ignore the people who suffered like this. Some of the children, now grandparents, are being good and positive about it.
Two of them were quoted in the newspapers only yesterday, when they met the Prime Minister in Fremantle. One of them became a professor; another, whose family sent him out at the age of eight, all alone, because they couldn’t feed him, said that he was OK in the end, though others had their lives completely destroyed. Yet the fact that a few turned out all right does not in any way make what they endured forgivable, justifiable, or any the less evil. They lived a hell on earth, when they were only little.
All that the former “children from Malta” are asking for now is a monument to their suffering and to the suffering of all who endured the same cruelty. The monument, the Prime Minister has promised, will stand in Grand Harbour, at the point from which they departed, before the year is out. Yet there are problems with the location, so this may turn out to be postponed again just as it has been postponed for the past three years. As for the design of the monument itself, I have strong reservations about it because it is an exercise in distancing ourselves from the truth, and in clouding the issue.
The monument will depict a ship, which says nothing. What it should feature is a solitary and frightened six-year-old child, standing desolate with a tiny battered satchel containing all his worldly goods, torn away from his home and his parents and facing years of beatings and hard labour. That’s the truth, so let’s face it.
