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

Abstract

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.

The decision by the UK and Australian Commonwealth Governments to support the post-war resumption of child migration to Australia built on what had already become a growing field of collaboration between government and voluntary organisations before the outbreak of war.

Although child migration work to Australia had taken place on a small scale in the nineteenth century,¹ the practice of sending child migrants to farm schools and other forms of residential institutions began with the opening of the Pinjarra farm school in Western Australia by Kingsley Fairbridge in 1913.² After experiencing a series of financial crises, in 1920 Pinjarra became the first institution of its kind to receive direct financial support from the UK Government as a result of Fairbridge’s prodigious networking and personal contacts, including with the then Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, Leo Amery.³

The slow expansion of child migration work to Australia from this point on took place in the wider context of greater integration of imperial migration policies by the UK Government. This was informed by substantial work undertaken between 1912 and 1917 by the Dominions Royal Commission in assessing how the human and natural resources of the United Kingdom and its five self-governing Dominions could best be developed.⁴ The Royal Commission fully endorsed child and juvenile migration as the most advantageous forms of emigration for supporting the future development of Britain’s overseas Dominions, given the ‘youth and adaptability’ of such migrants. The ‘risk involved’ in such schemes, it claimed, ‘is inappreciable, and the gain exceptional’.⁵ Moreover, the Commission argued in its final report that there was scope for far more active encouragement for the emigration of those children amongst the estimated 35,000 healthy, orphaned and deserted children over five years of age who were now in the care of Poor Law authorities, as well as amongst the 200,000 children receiving some form of Poor Law assistance for whom parental consent to their migration would be needed.⁶ Given this large pool of potential child migrants, the Commission noted with disappointment that the annual total of Poor Law children being emigrated between the years 1909 and 1913 never exceeded more than a few hundred.⁷ Their criticism of the ‘certain want of imagination’ on the part of local Boards of Guardians was to be echoed later in the post-war period in complaints by advocates of child migration about the lack of understanding within many local authorities of the benefits of emigration of children in their care. The Royal Commission concluded that financial and administrative arrangements for child migration should be reviewed to encourage greater emigration of children, whilst the well-established model of child migration to Canada should also be extended to Australia and New Zealand.⁸

The Royal Commission’s calls for greater administrative and strategic co-ordination of emigration led, in 1919, to the creation of the Oversea Settlement Committee which took on both responsibility for the development of emigration policy and the allocation of Government funding to support it. Under the auspices of the Committee, Viscount Milner and Leo Amery convened a discussion with representatives of the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Governments of proposals for the financial support of emigration from the United Kingdom within a wider strategy of both securing the Dominions and encouraging the development of imperial trade.⁹ It was agreed that assisted migration to the Dominions was to be encouraged not to address short-term problems with unemployment in Britain, but as an element of a wider strategy of encouraging primary production (particularly of agricultural goods) in order to sustain greater economic development and trade within the Empire as well as ensuring the most effective use of the imperial labour-force. A provisional agreement was reached that the UK Government would establish a sustained policy of assisted migration supported by spending of up to £2,000,000 in any given year, with these funds to be allocated to encouraging land settlement in the Dominions, more general assisted passages for emigration or any other migration scheme that appeared worthy of support. Supporting agricultural development in the Dominions was seen as particularly valuable as this would be required by any future substantial expansion of the Dominions’ secondary industries. Encouraging settlement in rural areas also had the advantage of avoiding rapid increases in migration to urban areas which would add competition for limited housing and jobs and create friction with the Dominions’ organised labour movements.

Ratified by the 1921 Prime Ministers’ Conference,¹⁰ this arrangement was formalised through the passing of the 1922 Empire Settlement Act. Presented to the House of Commons by Leo Amery, the Act was a short piece of legislation that empowered the Secretary of State, in conjunction with Dominion Governments and other approved organisations, to develop and fund schemes for assisted emigration. With such funding remaining subject to financial agreement from the Treasury, the UK Government’s financial contribution was not allowed by the Act to exceed half of the total expenses of the scheme. The initial funding to be provided for these schemes by the UK Government in 1922 was to not exceed £1,500,000 or £3,000,000 in subsequent years, and the commitment to provide this funding extended only for a period of 15 years from the passing of the Act, subject to further renewal of the legislation. The assumption from the 1921 Prime Minister’s Conference was, however, that such renewals of the Act should occur as empire settlement was to be regarded as a permanent policy in support of the social and economic development of the empire and not simply as a policy tool for managing short-term needs within the United Kingdom. Despite its slow initial effects,¹¹ the numbers of assisted passages funded by the Act had grown to several tens of thousands by the mid-1920s and the Act (and its successor legislation) became the legislative means through which the UK Government continued to give financial support for child migration through to the 1970s.

In the wake of this new funding arrangement, and slow initial progress in increasing rates of imperial emigration through it, the Oversea Settlement Committee sent a delegation to Australia and New Zealand in 1923–1924 to review existing arrangements for the settlement of British emigrants and to consider how the aims of the Empire Settlement Act might best be conducted in the future. Led by Sir William Windham, formerly of the Ministry of Labour, the delegation produced reports for each country in which some attention was paid to issues of child and juvenile migration.¹²

With regard to New Zealand, the delegation noted that whilst there were few current schemes in existence, excellent prospects potentially existed for juvenile migrants and there was clear evidence of interest in organisations and individuals wanting to provide agricultural apprenticeships. No form of government assistance for child migration was currently available, although the delegation did visit a Salvation Army farm school that had recently received 20 children from the United Kingdom. However, recognising the economic difficulties in encouraging land settlement given currently inflated land values, the delegation made no specific recommendations for the extension of these schemes.

By contrast, Australia offered far better prospects for juvenile emigration. Although the delegation recommended that care needed to be taken to ensure that any land settlement initiatives proceeded on an economically sustainable basis, it saw considerable potential for young people eventually being able to set up their own farms if given suitable agricultural training on arrival. Furthermore, well-established schemes to train boys over school-leaving age in farm work such as the Dreadnought Trust were already in existence, well supported in Australia and were judged to be achieving good results in producing future Australian citizens. The delegation also visited Fairbridge’s farm school at Pinjarra, which was by now receiving on-going maintenance grants from the United Kingdom, Australian Commonwealth and Western Australian State Governments. Whilst warmly commending its work, the delegation expressed doubt that the costs and subsidies required for this form of training institution for children would make it a practical model to be developed on any large scale in the future. Alongside its emphasis on the value of juvenile migration schemes for giving young emigrants from Britain the chance to learn new skills and establish themselves in work, the delegation also acknowledged the potential risk that some might be placed with unsatisfactory or exploitative employers. Whilst recognising that some safeguards had been put in place, the delegation nevertheless recommended that further steps should be made to ensure more regular and effective inspections to check their progress and welfare.

In 1924, another Oversea Settlement Committee delegation was sent to Canada by James Thomas, the Secretary of State for the Colonies in the short-lived minority Labour Government, in response to an invitation from the Government of Canada to obtain first-hand information about the system for sending and placing child migrants in Canada.¹³ Led by the Northampton MP, and influential trade unionist, Margaret Bondfield, the delegation sailed to Canada in September 1924 and arrived back in early November, by which time MacDonald’s Government had fallen and Bondfield had lost her seat in the ensuing general election. As with the Windham delegation reports, the Bondfield report supported the view that emigration could offer good prospects overseas for young people, whether or not they ultimately remained in agricultural work, and broadly regarded the current system as satisfactory. However, whilst the Bondfield delegation generally found that child migrants were well-treated in the private homes in which they were placed, it noted some cases where children were being expected to undertake more work for the household than was reasonable. Furthermore, it expressed concern that younger children were, in principle, less able to resist having their labour exploited, and educational opportunities curtailed, because of their greater dependence on the adults entrusted with their care. As a result it recommended that no further support should be given by the UK Government to the emigration of children under school-leaving age—unless for children emigrating for the purposes of adoption in Canada—but that the emigration of children over the school-leaving age of 14 should be actively encouraged.

The Bondfield report was somewhat different in tone to the Windham reports on emigration to New Zealand and Australia. Bondfield did not evaluate the benefits of child migration to Canada in terms of a wider framework of imperial trade and development, but only in terms of the benefits to the child themselves, arguably reflecting her long-standing concern with individual’s experiences of their working conditions. By comparison, the Windham reports, whilst interested in the value and risks of migration to young people as individuals, understood this more explicitly in terms of wider national and imperial needs. When meeting teenage migrants in Australia who complained about the relatively better wages earned by other young people not working in agriculture, the Windham delegation was at pains to remind them that ‘they were not required in Australia for positions of this kind, but only for work on the land, and that they must fulfil the obligation into which they had entered to undertake that work’.¹⁴

Despite these differences, the Bondfield and Windham reports nevertheless shared both a recognition of the value of emigration for young people and of their potential vulnerability. Given that there was no imminent prospect of significant demand for the increased migration of children under school-leaving age to Australia and New Zealand, and juvenile migration was considered a more important priority by the Windham and Bondfield reports, the policy adjustment of no longer supporting the migration of children under school-leaving age to Canada was not considered to be a contentious one by the Oversea Settlement Committee. As the in-coming Conservative Government’s successor to Thomas as Secretary of State for the Colonies, Leo Amery duly accepted this recommendation in 1925.¹⁵ The Canadian Government concurred, conceding to a growing campaign against child migration in Canada itself.¹⁶ Although the figure of 1407 children under 14 that Bondfield reported to have been migrated to Canada in 1923 was not insignificant, the Committee took the view that the majority of child migrants were now being sent around the age of 14 anyway and that any numbers lost through ending support for migration under the age of 14 could be compensated for by increased juvenile migration in the future.¹⁷ Bondfield’s recommendation that no further Government funding be provided to support farm schools, given the lack of evidence for their benefits for young emigrants’ employment prospects, was not however taken up.

The decision to end Government funding for the future migration of children under school-leaving age to Canada, whilst maintaining it for children to be sent to Fairbridge’s Pinjarra farm school, might appear inconsistent. However, Bondfield’s main objection to the migration of younger children related to their vulnerability to being over-worked or being taken out of school to undertake household labour. These concerns were not assumed to apply to the Fairbridge scheme in which agricultural work and training was ostensibly integrated into the farm school’s educational curriculum and to which the Windham Delegation had given its endorsement. Amery’s personal sympathies for Fairbridge’s work may doubtless have also helped. On the basis of the evidence it received from these delegations, there were therefore no strong grounds for arguing that Bondfield’s concerns should lead to the cessation of child migration to Pinjarra—not least because there was little expectation on the Oversea Settlement Committee’s part at that stage that child migration to Australia would grow much beyond Fairbridge’s experimental project in Western Australia.¹⁸ The fact that, prior to the Bondfield delegation visit, agreements had already been made by the United Kingdom Government under the terms of the Empire Settlement Act to contribute to the cost of passages and overseas maintenance for child migrants in Canada and Pinjarra, also created a precedent which made financial support for other Australian schemes possible.¹⁹

The Inter-war Expansion of Child Migration to Australia

The early death of Kingsley Fairbridge in 1924, at the age of 39, could have brought this nascent experiment in child migration to Australia to an end. By this point, however, the Child Emigration Society that he had co-founded whilst a Rhodes scholar at Oxford had well-established committees in both London and Western Australia with strong connections to politicians and other influential figures in public life (including Geoffrey Dawson, who was to serve as the editor of The Times from 1923 to 1941).²⁰ With more secure funding and governance,²¹ and the powerful symbolic narrative of a founder who had given his life to his vision of saving British children for the sake of the Empire,²² the Child Emigration Society (renamed Fairbridge Farm Schools Incorporated in 1935) was to become a substantial charity, soon enjoying the active support of members of the Royal Family. In addition to strong public support from the Prince of Wales, and an enthusiastic visit to Pinjarra from the Duke and Duchess of York, Fairbridge’s work was also endorsed by Prince Henry who, as Duke of Gloucester, subsequently became the charity’s President by 1938.²³

The development of the Pinjarra farm school had, by that point, also been made more secure by the decision in 1923 by Dr Barnardo’s Homes to begin sending child migrants there, following initial difficulties Barnardo’s experienced with placing child migrants with its recently established branch in New South Wales.²⁴ This collaboration was further consolidated by the implementation of Bondfield’s recommendation to end UK Government support for the migration of children under 14 to Canada, a decision against which Dr Barnardo’s Homes had protested. By the mid-1920s, half of the children resident at Pinjarra had been sent there by Dr Barnardo’s Homes, with Barnardo’s continuing to send at least a third of those arriving at the farm school between 1925 and 1930.²⁵ From 1925, two other sending bodies in Britain who had previously been involved in the emigration of children under school-leaving age to Canada began sending children to Pinjarra as well: the Church of England Waifs and Stray Society²⁶ and Middlemore Homes in Birmingham (which later began to operate as a national reception centre for children before their migration to Fairbridge farm schools).²⁷ The Over-Seas League also began to support the Fairbridge Society’s work, initially sponsoring a child to be sent to Pinjarra and later (after its own direct involvement in sending child migrants overseas ended in the mid-1950s) continuing regularly to donate funds to support Fairbridge’s work.²⁸

New organisations that were later to engage in child migration work also began to be created in response to empire settlement policies. In 1923, the Oversea Settlement Committee had recommended that imperial emigration could be increased by greater liaison between overseas organisations, who would propose group nominations for immigrants whom they would support or help to find work, and organisations in the United Kingdom who could publicise and recruit emigrants for these opportunities.²⁹ Whilst some voluntary organisations had overseas affiliates with whom they could collaborate in this way, the trans-national nature of Christian denominations meant that churches were particularly well-placed to undertake this work. In response to a direct appeal from Dominions Governments, the Church Assembly of the Church of England proposed that a new body, the Church of England Council of Empire Settlement, be created to publicise and select people for opportunities for emigration. Established in 1925, initially through voluntary subscriptions, the Council quickly expanded its work and by 1928 a substantial majority of its income came from funding from the UK Government through the Empire Settlement Act, as well as from Dominions Governments.³⁰ Whilst supporting the emigration of families and single, adult workers, the Council also became significantly involved in juvenile emigration as well.³¹

Concerned at the risk to the faith of Catholics who might emigrate through non-Catholic bodies such as the Church of England Council who might take little interest in placing them near Catholic churches or priests, the Archbishop of Westminster, Francis Bourne, initiated the formation of the Catholic Emigration Society in 1927.³² Although lukewarm about the value of the emigration of Catholic adults and families from the United Kingdom, Bourne argued that such a body was necessary to safeguard the Catholic faith of those who would inevitably be drawn to the prospects offered by emigration. Focusing on supporting adult and family emigration, the Catholic Emigration Society was meant to complement the work of the Catholic Emigration Association, originally formed in 1904, to co-ordinate Catholic child and juvenile migration. In the wake of growing tensions between these two bodies, however, discussions began about integrating them into a single Catholic Emigration Council in 1935, with the Catholic Hierarchy in England and Wales finally approving this in October 1938 to form the Catholic Council for British Overseas Settlement.³³ Child migration work undertaken by the Council was to be under the exclusive control of its Children’s Sub-Committee which would be made up of representatives from all of the diocesan child rescue societies in England and Wales, making its membership the same as that of the Catholic Child Welfare Council.

Whilst continuing to send children to Pinjarra, Dr Barnardo’s Homes subsequently opened its own farm school at Mowbray Park, Picton, in New South Wales in 1929.³⁴ The UK Government had previously contributed to the capital development costs of the Pinjarra farm school through a £20,000 grant to the Child Emigration Society in 1920. Following this precedent, between 1930 and 1939, a total of around £7500 was loaned to Dr Barnardo’s Homes by the UK Government under the terms of the Empire Settlement Act to support the initial construction and subsequent development and expansion of the Picton site.³⁵ Empire Settlement Act funding was also provided to cover maintenance costs of child migrants at Picton.³⁶ The capital funding was granted on the condition that the site would only be used to receive child migrants from the United Kingdom, a condition only temporarily suspended between 1944 and 1946 when the Dominions Office allowed Barnardo’s to admit Australian children to the farm school until child migration had resumed.

By 1931, the global economic depression was having significant effects on imperial emigration.³⁷ Rising unemployment and the slump in the market for agricultural products in the Dominions led to their Governments introducing more stringent immigration controls and substantially reducing their support for assisted migration.³⁸ Following a review of Pinjarra farm school by its Development and Migration Commission that questioned its cost-effectiveness as a migration scheme, the Australian Commonwealth Government also considered whether it could continue to contribute to Pinjarra’s on-going costs, not least because other organisations including the Catholic Church and Salvation Army were pressing for comparable funding.³⁹ In 1932 the Commonwealth Government eventually decided to make Pinjarra an exceptional case for continued funding against the background of cutting almost all other expenditure on assisted migration.⁴⁰ The United Kingdom Government followed suit, substantially reducing its own funding for empire settlement. In its seventh annual report in 1932, the Church of England Council of Empire Settlement noted that its core funding through the Empire Settlement Act had now been completely withdrawn. Rather than supporting further emigration, the Council’s work increasingly turned to tracing and supporting those it had already helped to emigrate but who had moved from their original placements in search of work. By 1934, a review commissioned by the Church Assembly recommended that the Council be wound down in its current form and replaced by an advisory council—a body which in the post-war period was to involve itself in child migration.⁴¹

The level of both imperial emigration and assisted passages specifically funded through the Empire Settlement Act was substantially reduced. Whilst the numbers of people emigrating annually to other parts of the Empire had averaged around 180,000 in the decade between 1922 and 1931, by 1933 this had halved.⁴² Assisted passages funded through the Empire Settlement Act, which had ranged from 29,000 to 71,000 per annum between 1923 and 1930, had, by 1933, fallen to 196.⁴³ In the context of this decline, an Inter-Departmental Committee on Migration Policy was established to advise on future policy with regard to assisted migration, chaired by the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Malcolm MacDonald, the former Labour MP and son of Ramsay MacDonald.⁴⁴ Its Report, published in 1934, signalled a significant shift to the policy approach to assisted emigration that had led to the Empire Settlement Act.⁴⁵ Building on previous work done by the Economic Advisory Council’s Committee on Empire Migration which took a pessimistic view of the economic prospects for future emigration to the Dominions,⁴⁶ the report argued the empire settlement policy had previously been premised on the flawed economic view that imperial migration was a stimulus for, rather than a symptom of, economic growth. It was not feasible, the report stated, simply to treat imperial migration as a transfer of human resource from a surplus of the white population of the United Kingdom to under-developed parts of the Dominions without recognising that economic conditions in the Dominions needed to be sufficiently strong to support immigrants’ livelihoods. The Report therefore recommended a movement away from structured planning for imperial emigration—including ostentatious and expensive schemes for group settlements—and for future assisted migration to provide some support for individuals and families who had realistic prospects overseas.⁴⁷

One of the main exceptions to the report’s aversion to more organised assisted migration initiatives was child migration.⁴⁸ Children who emigrated at a young age did not, it noted, place the same immediate social and economic demands for work and private accommodation as adult migrants. Although the costs of their maintenance overseas could be substantial, these costs were in many cases likely to be placed anyway on charitable or public funds were these children to remain in the United Kingdom. Whilst noting the Bondfield Report’s recommendation about the cessation of the migration of children to Canada under school-leaving age, the report proposed that this policy would be reviewed and that younger children should be sent to be boarded out again in Canadian households on the understanding that they were not placed primarily for their labour and would receive more regular inspections and better local support. In addition to recommending that such boarding out be entirely conducted on the basis of fees being paid to private households—which might reduce their expectations on the amount of work to be done by a child—the report introduced the policy idea that such child migration work should only be allowed to be undertaken by voluntary organisations approved by both the United Kingdom and Dominions Governments. The farm school system, used at Pinjarra and Picton, was praised by the report as being ‘beyond question the most satisfactory and successful method of establishing young children overseas’. Financial support by the UK Government should continue for the overseas maintenance costs of child migrants, it recommended, with the creation of new farm schools also being supported by capital funding from the UK Government up to half of the total costs.

Whilst economic depression had a stultifying effect on most forms of imperial migration, for supporters of child migration it reinforced their belief in the value of taking children from impoverished homes and future unemployment in the United Kingdom to better opportunities in the Dominions.⁴⁹ Alongside the policy encouragement provided by the Inter-Departmental Committee’s report, new child migration initiatives began to develop. There was no resumption of the boarding out of child migrants to Canada. However, a substantial public appeal for donations was made in 1934 for the development of three new Fairbridge farm schools, endorsed and contributed to by the Prince of Wales. Through funding raised through this, and a £10,000 capital grant from the UK Government, Fairbridge opened its new Prince of Wales farm school in British Columbia the following year.⁵⁰ In 1934, a bequest of £200,000 was also left by the estate of Lady Northcote, the wife of a former Governor-General of Australia, specifically to support child migration to Australia following the Fairbridge model.⁵¹ By October 1936, the trustees had received agreement that the UK Government would contribute £14,000,⁵² and the Australian Commonwealth Government £7000, towards the capital costs of setting up a new farm school at Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, as well as contributing towards the maintenance costs of child migrants sent there.⁵³ The Fairbridge Society in the United Kingdom agreed to take on the role of recruiting, selecting and arranging passages for the children under this programme, and Colonel Heath, who had been Principal at Pinjarra, was appointed to take charge of the new Northcote farm school. Setting a precedent for post-war child migration, the Commonwealth Government undertook an inspection of the farm school site before agreeing to the arrival of the first party of boys in July 1937. Whilst agreeing to accept this project, the State Government of Victoria indicated that the on-going effects of economic depression in the State meant that its resources needed to be directed to its existing population and it could offer no financial support. The political sensitivity of child immigration was further illustrated by a strong letter of complaint at the creation of the farm school sent to the Commonwealth Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, by the City Council of Port Melbourne, which stated that ‘the Council feels that in view of the acute unemployment problem which has every indication of being intensified with the growth of mass production methods in industry, …such action is ill-advised and will react to the detriment of Victorian children’.⁵⁴

New initiatives also began to develop in New South Wales. Support for Fairbridge’s work led to a call in 1935 at the biennial conference of the fellowship of Rhodes scholars for farm schools to be established across all Australian States.⁵⁵ This suggestion was taken up with particular enthusiasm by former Rhodes scholars in New South Wales, who sought to lobby staff of the Fairbridge Society to make New South Wales one of the sites for the new farm schools envisaged in the charity’s Prince of Wales appeal in 1934.⁵⁶ By mid-1936 they had been sufficiently successful with initial fund-raising and lobbying of the State Government to make the creation of a Fairbridge farm school in New South Wales a viable proposition. The London headquarters of Fairbridge were initially unhappy with this proposal, wishing to concentrate on potential further expansion of their work in other countries and fearing unnecessary competition for work placements in New South Wales with Barnardo’s farm school at Picton. However, having failed to make progress with the hoped-for establishment of a farm school in New Zealand and having reached an agreement that this new Fairbridge farm school would be situated at a site far from Picton, Fairbridge’s London office decided to support this proposal. With the UK Government providing a £15,000 capital contribution⁵⁷ and contributing to child migrants’ maintenance costs,⁵⁸ and maintenance contributions also being made by the Commonwealth and New South Wales State governments, the first party of children arrived at the new Fairbridge farm school at Molong in March 1938.⁵⁹ The Australian Commonwealth Government refused a request to provide capital funding for the Molong farm school on the basis that it was now receiving similar requests from other organisations (including the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army), and did not want to consolidate a precedent through which these would also have to be approved.⁶⁰

From 1936, attempts were also made to send child migrants to the Burnside Homes run by the Presbyterian Church in Parramatta, New South Wales. Efforts to recruit children through the Church of Scotland, however, proved unsuccessful with insufficient numbers of children being put forward.⁶¹ In a letter to Walter Garnett, Assistant Secretary to the UK High Commissioner in Canberra with particular responsibility for immigration, the Dominions Office civil servant, G.E. Crutchley, commented that this failure called into question whether there would be sufficient children to recruit for the expanding number of Fairbridge farm schools and noted that the reluctance of parents and guardians to send children overseas was ‘not uncommon’.⁶² With recruitment to Burnside continuing to prove difficult, the Presbyterian Church turned to Cyril Bavin, the Migration Secretary of the YMCA, to attempt to find suitable children from the United Kingdom—although as Garnett noted the YMCA had ‘no previous experience in connection with the migration of young children’.⁶³ A party of 17 children was eventually sent to Burnside in 1939 from the Quarriers Orphan Homes of Scotland in 1939. These relationships between Bavin and the Presbyterian Church in Australia were to be revived in the early 1950s when similar problems arose with the recruitment of child migrants through the Church of Scotland for the Dhurringile Rural Training Farm in Victoria.

Towards the end of the 1930s, plans were also successfully introduced to begin child migration to Catholic residential institutions run by the Christian Brothers in Western Australia. An earlier attempt had been made in 1928 to secure government funding for 50 boys per annum to be sent to the Christian Brothers’ orphanage at Clontarf on the basis that this would function in a comparable way to the work of the Fairbridge farm school at Pinjarra. The proposal for Clontarf reflected other attempts by voluntary organisations in both the inter-war and post-war to secure government funding by arguing that their proposals were comparable to schemes and institutions which were already receiving public money. This initiative was rebuffed, however, coming as it did at a time when the Commonwealth Development and Migration Commission had recently challenged the cost-effectiveness of the Pinjarra scheme and argued that it no longer be funded as a migration scheme.⁶⁴

In 1937, however, renewed proposals for child emigration to Catholic residential institutions in Western Australia were initiated through contact between Canon George Craven, Secretary of the Catholic Emigration Association and the Principal of the Tardun farm school, Brother Conlon. With the prospect of increasing levels of assisted migration in the future, and continued concern about the risk of loss of faith if Catholics emigrated through non-Catholic organisations, this proposal developed alongside one for the creation of a more general co-ordinating body for Catholic immigration in Australia. Concern about the loss of Catholic child migrants to non-Catholic receiving institutions had also been made more acute by the recent opening of the new Northcote and Fairbridge farm schools.⁶⁵ By January 1938, the Catholic Archbishop of Perth, Redmond Prendiville, had secured the financial support of the Commonwealth and Western Australian governments for the immigration of children to Catholic institutions in Western Australia, now successfully using the precedent of funding for the Pinjarra farm school to argue for this. Brother Conlon was appointed to administer this process. Whilst formally operating as an initiative undertaken under the patronage of the three Catholic bishops with dioceses in Western Australia, Conlon’s role as its Australian administrator and the placement of boys at Christian Brothers’ institutions at Castledare, Clontarf, Tardun and Bindoon meant in practice that it was delivered on the ground through the Brothers’ organisational structures. Publicised more generally in the United Kingdom by the auxiliary bishop of Birmingham, Bernard Griffin, as Secretary of the Catholic Emigration Association,⁶⁶ Conlon recruited 110 boys for these migration parties in 1938 and 1939 mainly through direct contact with institutions run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

Despite having gained approval for this scheme from the Australian Commonwealth Government on the basis that child migrants would benefit from the advanced agricultural training available at Tardun,⁶⁷ Conlon subsequently informed the Dominions Office that boys could only be placed there if government capital funding were made available to increase its accommodation. The total cost of this, Conlon proposed, would be £20,000: £10,000 in cash costs and £10,000 in costs of labour and services provided by the Brothers (which in practice was made up to large degree by the labour of teenagers resident at Tardun). Conlon later added to this the cost of £4000 to construct a convent for a small group of Sisters of Nazareth at Tardun to provide domestic care of boys placed there.⁶⁸ The Dominions Office took the view that these costs appeared high and included elements, such as a chapel and classrooms, for which Empire Settlement Act funding would not normally be provided.⁶⁹ Some concern was also expressed at funding a large building that felt like putting children into an institution resembling a ‘huge “Concrete Block”’, not in keeping with recent trend of favouring ‘cottage’ style accommodation for overseas training farms, and with providing a substantial capital contribution towards a building which would remain under the permanent control of an independent religious organisation.⁷⁰ Despite reservations from the UK High Commission in Canberra about the necessity of providing this support, there was a strong endorsement of the Tardun scheme from Walter Garnett, now based at the Dominions Office.⁷¹ A comparatively cautious financial offer was made to Conlon in which the UK Government would pay A£250 per annum to cover the interest costs of a £5000 overdraft that the Brothers would be able to take out to fund this construction work. The Dominions Office informed the Australian Commonwealth Government that they were making this offer to Conlon with the tentative condition that some comparable capital funding be provided by the Commonwealth and Western Australian State governments. Rather than simply reflecting an expectation for some matched funding, this condition was unusually introduced in this case as a means of obtaining ‘confirmation from the local authorities that the methods of training at Tardun are on the right lines and to enable us to refer for advice to authority on the spot independent of Christian Brothers on any point of difficulty that might arise’.⁷² The agreement that maintenance funding would last for no longer than five years for any individual child was also seen as a disincentive for the Brothers to arrange the emigration of very young children.⁷³

This request for a contribution towards capital funding for Tardun was actively supported by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, a devout Irish-diasporan Catholic. The Commonwealth Department for the Interior refused capital funding for Tardun, however, having just refused a similar request for the farm school at Molong on the basis that it would create a precedent that would make it difficult to refuse any other future requests by voluntary organisations wishing to accommodate child migrants. By the time this refusal was confirmed to the UK High Commission in Canberra in July 1938,⁷⁴ the first party of 37 Catholic child migrants had already left Britain for Western Australia with a further 31 sailing just four days later. On the advice of Walter Garnett, the Dominions Office took the view that having agreed to provide capital funding for the Molong farm school despite no contribution from Australian Commonwealth or State governments, it would not be reasonable to refuse similar capital assistance with regard to Tardun.⁷⁵ Garnett was supported by Robert Wiseman, Assistant Secretary in the Dominions Office, who argued that the Commonwealth and State governments’ commitment to pay maintenance for child migrants placed at Tardun could be considered sufficient indication of their endorsement and continued commitment to that scheme.⁷⁶ Despite the failure to secure any specific reassurance of the calibre and oversight of the Brothers’ migration scheme from the Commonwealth and Western Australia State governments, the Dominions Office therefore proceeded with its proposed annual capital funding contribution for Tardun in addition to its maintenance payments.⁷⁷

The benefit of the doubt extended to Conlon’s work at Tardun quickly proved unwarranted. A civil servant from the Commonwealth Department of the Interior, Reuben Wheeler, visited Tardun with the Bishop of Geraldton in mid-July and expressed concern that child migrants should not be sent there until more permanent accommodation was completed. The Bishop reassured him that Brother Conlon would not allow any child migrants to be sent to Tardun without satisfactory accommodation being provided.⁷⁸ However, Conlon subsequently wrote to Lyons on 22nd August indicating that 50 of these child migrants had indeed been placed immediately at Tardun and that whilst accommodation was in the process of being built for them this would place an unbearable financial burden on the Brothers without further capital funding support.⁷⁹ This request was again refused by the Commonwealth Department of the Interior.⁸⁰ A further 42 boys sailed to Western Australia under this scheme in 1939. Despite concerns about the exploitation of labour of child migrants to Canada, and the value of Tardun being premised on child migrants’ receiving secondary education and agricultural training, the Dominions Office raised no concerns when Conlon confirmed that trainees and staff at Tardun were undertaking most of the building work of the site, including making concrete blocks, quarrying stone, transporting materials from the nearest railway siding (ten miles away), laying foundations, brick-laying, and installing electric lighting and plumbing.⁸¹ Whilst other residential institutions accommodating child migrants undertook significant expansion and renovation of their buildings as more children arrived, the unpreparedness of the site at Tardun—and use of child migrants to rectify this –contrasted with the Northcote training farm where sufficient accommodation was available to receive child migrants whilst new cottage homes were being built.⁸²

The migration of children to Christian Brothers’ institutions stimulated further proposals for child migration to other organisations in Western Australia. In 1939, approval was given for assisted passages and maintenance funding for child migrants to be sent to the Methodist Homes for Children, in Victoria Park, Perth, and a newly built residential institution to be run by the Sisters of Nazareth in Geraldton.⁸³ In both cases, however, no children were sent before the suspension of assisted migration with the outbreak of war that September—a decision made by the UK Government on grounds of both the anticipated security risks of long sea journeys and the significantly increased cost of shipping berths.⁸⁴ Methodist involvement in child migration to Australia in this period was not limited to the Victoria Park proposal, however, as 38 children were also sent to the Northcote farm school by the National Children’s Home.⁸⁵

Policy Consolidation and the Implications of Institutional Diversity

By the outbreak of war in 1939, child migration to residential institutions in Australia had evolved from a precarious experiment at Pinjarra to become an established part of United Kingdom empire settlement policy. Between 1913 and 1939, 3029 children had been sent to residential institutions in Australia through such schemes.⁸⁶ In some respects, the policy motivation for empire settlement was unchanged from the period immediately after the First World War. Under-populated Dominions were seen as constituting a significant risk to the security of the Empire, a concern renewed with increased global military spending through the 1930s. However, whilst empire settlement had previously been undertaken in terms of a transfer of human resources to stimulate imperial trade and economic development, the economic depression of the 1930s had demonstrated that policies of empire settlement were highly vulnerable to economic conditions in receiving countries. The passing of the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which made the national governments of the Dominions legally autonomous from the United Kingdom,⁸⁷ reflected a wider pattern of change in which the United Kingdom’s Dominions could no longer simply be understood as part of an integrated political entity. In one sense, this growing political and legal autonomy made imperial emigration even more important as a means for maintaining a sense of shared identity between the United Kingdom and its Dominions, which it was hoped would find expression in continued political and economic co-operation.⁸⁸ In practice, however, it made overarching policy initiatives—such as population transfer through empire settlement schemes—more difficult to enact. Although the Empire Settlement Act was renewed in 1937, it was in the context of more chastened aspirations for empire settlement planning despite signs of economic recovery in the Dominions. It was hoped by some organisations that the Imperial Conference of 1937 would lead to a renewed commitment and strategy for assisted migration, not least because of the perceived need to strengthen imperial ties with the acceleration of international rearmament.⁸⁹ However, assisted migration did not even become a matter of substantive discussion at the Conference.⁹⁰ Group settlement schemes had been shown not always to be successful, and adult emigration had been found to be subject both to economic constraints and political pressures in receiving countries. But child migration—even on a relatively modest scale—appeared by 1939 to be one form of assisted imperial emigration that had a more viable and stable future.⁹¹

The number of voluntary organisations sending child migrants to Australia were to increase in the post-war period, and policy encouragement for these schemes from the Australian Commonwealth Government was to become much stronger. However, the fundamental administrative architecture of the schemes was clearly established in the pre-war period. Operating with the framework of assisted migration policy, funding and administrative systems, child migration functioned on the basis of organisational collaboration between a range of voluntary organisations and the United Kingdom, Australian Commonwealth and State governments (with contact between the national governments mediated through the UK High Commission in Canberra and immigration officials at Australia House in London). The different ethos, social networks, systems of governance and economics of voluntary organisations participating in this work meant, however, that child migration was never a homogenous form of welfare intervention.

This point can be illustrated, briefly, through a comparison of the Christian Brothers and the Fairbridge Society. As a trans-national religious order focused primarily on the provision of Catholic education, and with its roots in Irish nationalism, the Christian Brothers occupied a significant role in an Australian Catholicism still dominated at that time by Irish diasporic social networks.⁹² Support for the British Empire within Irish-Australian Catholicism was far from solid. The influential Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, had been both a leading opponent of conscription during the First World War and faced attempts by the UK Government to prevent him from addressing public gatherings in Ireland and Britain in 1920 following his appearance at Irish nationalist rallies across the United States.⁹³ For many Irish-Australian Catholics, their sense of relationship to the British Empire was refracted through opposition to the effects of British colonialism in Ireland—as Mannix put it, ‘the Ireland that England was to do justice to was not merely the Ireland at home, but also that Ireland of men and women who were scattered to the ends of the earth’.⁹⁴ Such sentiments towards the British Empire were further reinforced by Catholic experiences of Australian society as dominated by an Anglo-Protestant elite. Against this background, Catholic immigration from Britain was perceived as having the potential to increase the Catholic population in Australia, thus strengthening its position not only against Protestant hostility but also against the threat of the anti-Christian sentiments of both sections of the political left in Australia and the powerful non-Christian countries of East Asia.⁹⁵

In the wider context of Catholic education that sought greater social mobility for a predominantly working-class Australian Catholic population, the Christian Brothers practised a disciplinarian and instrumentalist educational approach focused on achieving strong examination results. This was underpinned by an organisational ethos of emphasising the corporate mission of the order over the importance of personal attachments. As the Brother’s rules of the order stated, their communal life sought to ‘reduce within the bounds of Christian charity all those sentiments for relations with which flesh and blood would inspire them’ as it was ‘not sufficient that the body quits the world, the heart also must break off all attachment thereto’.⁹⁶ Although the Catholic Church’s interests were rarely prioritised in the policy platforms of the main Australian political parties, there were strong links between Catholic working-class voters and the Australian Labor Party, as well as influential Catholic politicians in other parties. Bonds of religious affinity between Catholic leaders and Australian politicians—exemplified in direct correspondence on child migration matters between Br Conlon, Archbishop Prendiville and Prime Minister Joseph Lyons—underpinned attempts by the Brothers to utilise the resources of the State to support their organisational goals. This could also lead to an assumption that State systems would simply facilitate these goals without close attention to the administrative processes through which those systems operated—exemplified by Conlon’s arrival in the United Kingdom to recruit child migrants in 1938 without the required group nomination for them having previously been submitted to Australian immigration officials.⁹⁷

The possibility of leveraging such resources had particular economic significance in an Australian policy context in which Catholic schools had, by 1893, no longer been eligible to receive public funding. Religious orders such as the Brothers benefitted from periodic donations and bequests—including the donation of the land on which Bindoon and Tardun were built. But the fact that much financial resource was expended by Catholic families on supporting the costs of fee-paying Catholic primary and secondary schools—considered a pressing religious duty by the Australian Catholic hierarchy—meant that private donations would always offer a limited source of income. Conlon’s correspondence with Australian and British government officials in the early years of Catholic child migration to Western Australia was therefore characterised with repetitive requests for additional funding to an extent not evident with any of the other voluntary organisations undertaking similar work.⁹⁸ The Brothers’ approach to child migration also reflected an arguably wider Catholic understanding of children in their out-of-home care as corporate resources of the shared body of Christ with limited agency and individuality.⁹⁹ Publicity images of children in Christian Brothers’ institutions, produced to support Conlon’s recruitment work, showed boys in ordered groups—disciplined, studious, productive and serious—embodying the principle in the order’s rule that the good student was one who understood both the importance of obedience and that ‘religious life is a life of labour and devoutness’.¹⁰⁰

The Fairbridge Society, by contrast, functioned on the basis of two inter-locking social networks—the British upper-class of colonial administrators (often also bound through shared contacts in the officer classes of the armed forces) and the trans-national network of the Rhodes Trust, with its hub at the University of Oxford. As noted above, these networks enabled contacts and support both amongst serving politicians and the Royal Family in the United Kingdom, as well as to a certain extent with senior politicians in Australia. Although its support extended beyond this, the social class of Fairbridge’s leading figures led naturally to affinities with the Conservative Party, with Kingsley Fairbridge himself regarding rural settlement of British emigrants an important means of preventing their assimilation into undesirable socialist masses in urban areas. This proximity to government circles in the United Kingdom—with a civil servant from the Dominions Office, G.F. Plant, serving on Fairbridge’s Council for most of the inter-war period¹⁰¹—was reflected in a comparatively stronger appreciation of state administrative systems compared to the Christian Brothers. The mutual recognition and shared social networks of government, civil service and the social circles from which Fairbridge’s leaders were drawn made Fairbridge’s operations feel, culturally, more like an extension of the work of the colonial British State¹⁰² and appears to have been reflected in the more generous capital funding extended to its work by the Dominions Office than that given to Dr Barnardo’s Homes or the Christian Brothers.¹⁰³ Its organisational sense of being embedded with the broader British policy structures of assisted migration was reinforced by the repeated praise given to its work in Government reports, praise that was re-circulated through Fairbridge’s annual reports. The inter-twining of inter-personal relations between Fairbridge and the State was exemplified in Sir Ronald Cross’s recruitment of Charles Hambro as a senior officer in the Special Operations Executive at the start of the Second World War, whilst Cross was Minister of Economic Warfare. Hambro was already at that point the chairman of Fairbridge’s London Committee, a role he continued into the post-war period. By 1941, Cross had been appointed UK High Commissioner to Canberra.

Although Kingsley Fairbridge had initially envisaged his farm school proposal as a stand-alone experiment that could be taken up more widely within a government-managed system,¹⁰⁴ the Child Emigration Society quickly evolved into a charity with its own organisational logics of self-publicity, consolidation and growth. Its close association with elite social networks both created the potential for significant individual donations and helped to build up a wider national network of local supporters for its work. Although suffering greater financial pressure through the depression in the 1930s, Fairbridge’s income from supporters and the UK Government had enabled it to build a comfortable surplus through the 1920s that the economic slump did not substantially deplete. Its requests for additional government funding were, thus, far less frequent than those made by the Christian Brothers. The fact that its work at Pinjarra relied to a large degree on charitable funds raised through donations in Britain was also to create tensions between the London and Western Australian Committees about what such funding implied in terms of the degree of control the London Committee might expect to exert over Pinjarra.

Although at times presenting its activities as a form of non-denominational religious work, the ethos of the Fairbridge Society was grounded more in an emphasis on the importance of settling Britain’s dominions with British stock and a belief in the power of the open spaces of the Dominions to release the inherent health and vitality of children removed from the enervating effects of British slums. In contrast to the disciplined group photographs of boys in Christian Brothers’ publicity materials, Fairbridge annual reports contained romanticised images of children at work and play in their farm schools, focusing on the individual’s effort, pleasure and pride at their achievements.¹⁰⁵ The effect of this understanding of the atomised child—just as with the Brothers’ view of the child as corporate member of the Church—was to downplay any enduring emotional significance of bonds that the child might still have with family members left behind in Britain. The self-presentation of its work as bringing civic and moral flourishing to the individual child-settler, and thus to the British Empire, was intrinsic to its capacity to attract public support, and provided an attractive philanthropic narrative that glided over the more complex, and often more painful, lives of the children in its farm schools.

The policy framework and administrative architecture of assisted child migration to Australia therefore created a context in which voluntary organisations with very different social networks, modes of operating and organisational cultures, could pursue their different organisational aims within a common funding framework. Whilst delivered as an element of wider empire settlement policies, voluntary organisations undertaking this work did not necessarily share a common commitment to the political project of building up the empire through the transfer of white, British stock to Australia—exemplified in the unsuccessful attempt by Archbishop Prendiville and Brother Conlon to recruit child migrants from the Irish Free State.¹⁰⁶ Regardless of these organisational differences, by 1939 politicians and civil servants in the Dominions Office saw the general policy of child migration as a wholly positive development. However, the war years were soon to bring a greater awareness of the potential shortcomings of these schemes.