‘The Risk Involved is Inappreciable… and the Gain Exceptional’: Child Migration to Australia and Empire Settlement Policy, 1913–1939

This chapter examines the development of UK child migration to Australia in the inter-war period. Following the opening of Kingsley Fairbridge’s experimental farm school for child migrants at Pinjarra in 1913, the 1920s and 1930s saw a gradual increase in the number of voluntary societies involved in this work and of residential institutions in Australia receiving child migrants. The growth of these programmes in the wider context of the UK Government’s assisted migration policies is discussed. During the 1930s, the global financial depression weakened governmental support for assisted migration, and greater caution emerged within the UK Government about the value of some planned migration schemes. Nevertheless, by 1939, child migration to Australia was seen by UK policy-makers as a small but important part of the attempt to strengthen ties with Britain’s Dominions and to make more efficient use of their collective human and material resources.

‘Avoiding Fruitless Controversy’: UK Child Migration and the Anatomy of Policy Failure

This concluding chapter explores why it was that post-war child migration to Australia was allowed to resume and continue by the UK Government despite known failings in these schemes. It is argued that one factor was the sheer administrative complexity of a multi-agency programme operating over different national jurisdictions and large distances which made control and oversight of conditions for British child migrants harder to achieve. Despite concerns that the post-war welfare state would be a powerful, centralised mechanism, the history of these programmes demonstrates British policy-makers’ sense of the limits of their powers—limits arising from lack of resource, the perceived need to avoid unproductive conflict with powerful stakeholders, the wish to respect boundaries of departmental policy remits and assumptions about the value of following policy precedents. The chapter concludes by considering how fine-grained analyses of such policy failures can contribute to public debates about suitable redress.

‘Providing for Children… Deprived of a Normal Home Life’: The Curtis Report and the Post-war Policy Landscape of Children’s Out-of-Home Care

This chapter examines how child-care policy in Britain in the early post-war period was shaped by the publication of the 1946 Curtis report, whose recommendations were substantially implemented in the 1948 Children Act. The chapter considers both the report’s position on the administrative restructuring of children’s care and its importance in articulating standards of good practice in child-care based on broad concepts from child psychology. The report’s recommendations specifically for child migration are discussed as well as the different ways in which voluntary societies involved in this work engaged with the Curtis Committee on this issue. Whilst strengthening controls over child migration to a limited extent, the subsequent 1948 Children Act introduced separate obligations for the emigration of children from the care of local authorities compared to voluntary societies, thus creating a two-tier administrative system that was to have significant consequences for many child migrants.

‘A Serious Injustice to the Individual’: British Child Migration to Australia as Policy Failure

The Introduction sets this book in the wider context of recent studies and public interest in historic child abuse. Noting other international cases of child abuse in the context of public programmes and other institutional contexts, it is argued that children’s suffering usually arose not from an absence of policy and legal protections but a failure to implement these effectively. The assisted migration of unaccompanied children from the United Kingdom to Australia is presented, particularly in the post-war period, as another such example of systemic failures to maintain known standards of child welfare. The focus of the book on policy decisions and administrative systems within the UK Government is explained and the relevance of this study to the historiography of child migration and post-war child welfare is also set out.

‘Australia as the Coming Greatest Foster-Father of Children the World Has Ever Known’: The Post-war Resumption of Child Migration to Australia, 1945–1947

This chapter examines the policy context and administrative systems associated with the resumption of assisted child migration from the United Kingdom to Australia in 1947. During the Second World War, the Australian Commonwealth Government came to see child migration as an increasingly important element in its wider plans for post-war population growth. Whilst initially developing a plan to receive up to 50,000 ‘war orphans’ shortly after the war in new government-run cottage homes, the Commonwealth Government subsequently abandoned this, partly for financial reasons. A more cost-effective strategy of working with voluntary societies, and their residential institutions, was adopted instead. Monitoring systems of these initial migration parties by the UK Government were weak. Whilst the Home Office began to formulate policies about appropriate standards of care for child migrants overseas, this work was hampered by tensions between the Home Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office about the extent to control over organisations in Australia was possible.

Flawed Progress: Criticisms of Residential Institutions for Child Migrants in Australia and Policy Responses, 1939–1945

The positive view of child migration held by UK Government officials in the inter-war period was not based on any regular system of inspections of the institutions in Australia to which children were sent. During the Second World War, UK Government officials became more of reported problems at several of these institutions, relating to standards of accommodation, management, care, training and after-care. This chapter traces the growing awareness of these problems and the UK Government’s response to them. Whilst policy-makers’ positive assumptions about child migration were challenged, and specific issues and institutions were known to require significant improvement, overall confidence in the value of child migration remained. Despite evidence of organisational failings in Australia, Australian welfare professionals were trusted to address these problems, and suggestions about the need for greater control from the United Kingdom were seen as a backward-looking attempt to limit the autonomy of Britain’s Dominions.

‘If We Were Untrammelled by Precedent…’: Pursuing Gradual Reform in Child Migration, 1954–1961

This chapter examines how British child migration policy became caught up in the political sensitivities of post-war assisted migration. By 1950, officials in the Commonwealth Relations Office were becoming increasingly doubtful about the strategic and economic value of assisted migration, but also concerned about adverse political reaction in Australia to any scaling back of this work. An agreement was reached between the Commonwealth Relations and Home Office in 1954 to continue child migration on the basis of encouraging gradual reform of standards in Australia. In 1956, a UK Government Fact-Finding Mission in 1956 recommended more urgent controls over child migration, but this was rejected by an inter-departmental review in view of these wider political sensitivities. Despite introducing more limited monitoring, British policy-makers struggled to reconcile their knowledge of failings in some Australian institutions with the political challenge of trying to address these in the absence of co-operation from the Australian Government.

From Regulation to Moral Persuasion: Child Migration Policy and the Home Office Children’s Department, 1948–1954

This chapter examines the wider policy context and administrative systems for child migration to Australia in the period 1948-1954. With stronger concerns about child migration being expressed by some professional and voluntary organisations in Britain, in 1949 the Home Office began a process of drafting regulations for the emigration of children from the care of voluntary societies. The chapter examines how the process of developing these regulations was delayed through a complex bureaucratic process, with a final draft of the regulations not completed until 1954. Concerns about the legal limitations of these regulations and their effective power in safeguarding child migrants once overseas contributed to a subsequent decision in the Home Office not to introduce them. This decision was also informed by an independent review of child migration to Australia by John Moss, published in 1953, which offered a broadly positive view of this work. The chapter considers why Moss—a former member of the Curtis Committee—took this view, and how broad policy standards such as the Curtis report were, in practice, interpreted and implemented in different ways.