On 16 Sep 2011 at 7:03, Kevin and Lynette wrote: > This is a great blight on the Australian Government and churches between 1945 > and the early 1970's. The Catholic and Anglican churches had the orphanages > and were the biggest offenders. I do not know about children in Australia > being fostered in private homes. A film has recently been released 'Oranges > and Sunshine' the story of a Social worker who reunited thousands of children > with there parents who were told they were orphans and sent to Australia for > presumably 'Oranges and Sunshine' but instead they got cruelty. In Australia > there are many people suing the different church groups for the mal treatment > of them as children. It appears this happened all over the Commonwealth > countries. Lynette from OZ I have a book called "Kingsley Fairbridge, by himself" Kingsley Fairbridge was born in the Eastern Cape in the 19th century, and trekked with his family to Mashonaland (now eastern Zimbabwe) where he grew up. He had a fairly tough life on the farm, doing a lot of farm work, but he also enjoyed his childhood, the outdoor life, and thought it was healthy. He went to study in England, and was shocked by the conditions in which the children of the urban poor lived, and so he proposed, developed and promoted "child emigration" schemes, with a vision for establishing farms throughout the British Empire where children could have a healthy outdoor childhood such as he had had. His ideas were marked by idealism, altruism, imperialism and, to some extent, racism. He wanted to increase the white English-speaking population of the "Empire". I believe he actually established one or more farms in Western Australia. His idea was that children should grow up in a clean environment, and especially with clean air and sunshine, that they should work on the farms and grow their own food, as he had done as a boy. So the scheme would be self- financing, and the children would learn useful skills and become farmers. What he didn't foresee was the difficulty of finding people who shared his vision to actually run the farms. Many of the people who did that were anything but suitable, saw it as just a job, and the children in their care as just cheap labour to be exploited. So the vision and the reality rarely matched. But the movement he was instrumental in starting lasted about 70-80 years. It ended partly because people realised that it wasn't working, but also because in the 1960s Britain had largely recovered from the urban poverty of two world wars, and, with the independence of many former colonies, imperialism as an idea and ideology was fading, and came to be regarded as quaint and old-fashioned. But it was a farm boy from the Eastern Cape who started the whole thing. -- Steve Hayes E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk Web: http://hayesstw.tumblr.com/ (follow me on Tumblr) Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com Phone: 083-342-3563 or 012-333-6727 Fax: 086-548-2525