Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

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The deceit and cruelty ring out from the pages not only for what Britain did, but also for how Australia treated the "lost innocents", many of whom suffered appalling abuse. Margaret Humphreys is the Director and founder of the Child Migrants Trust, supported by Nottinghamshire County Council.

If there is anything to be learnt it is that orphanages have to be very carefully monitored and a child under 10 years of age should never be allowed to be alone with either a Nun or a Priest of the Catholic faith. Their parents, too, were often deceived; many believed that their children had been adopted in Britain. Rather like watching Schindler's List or Hotel Rwanda, it's dark and brutal, touching and emotional, and I loved it for that, but it's a heavy, difficult story to get through.

Some of these stories end in further disappointment as Humphries and her team reassemble the pieces of a child migrant’s past only to find reunion is no longer a possibility. This is an important book and the story should be made known, but put simply I was so irritated by Humphrey's writing and her vendetta that it lost a lot of impact for me. It was shocking to realise that Child migration was still happening when I migrated to Australia in the early 1960s and even more so when she described how some of the child migrants travelled to Australia on the same ship that I travelled on with my family albeit several years apart. In their new countries, their ‘new life,’ as the children were told they were going to, they encountered various things.

The secrets of the lost children of Britain may never have been revealed if it had not been for [the actions of] Margaret Humphreys. In uncovering these events, Margaret Humphreys set up The Child Migrants Trust, in 1987, to attempt to reunite these ‘lost’ migrant children with any family members who were still living. She founded the Child Migrants Trust (CMT) in 1987 and has worked tirelessly to promote public awareness of the needs of former child migrants- to reclaim their identity and reunite with their families. She got a secondment from her social work position and created the Child Migrants Trust and it took over her whole life.Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the British empire, right up until 1970.