UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945-1970

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 1-22Open Access

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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 23-53Open Access

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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 55-90Open Access

5. ‘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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 91-130Open Access

6. ‘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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 131-189Open Access

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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 191-242Open Access

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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 243-297Open Access

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

   • Gordon Lynch

   Pages 299-317Open Access

10. Back Matter

    Pages 319-338

    PDF

This open access book offers an unprecedented analysis of child welfare schemes, situating them in the wider context of post-war policy debates about the care of children. Between 1945 and 1970, an estimated 3,500 children were sent from Britain to Australia, unaccompanied by their parents, through child migration schemes funded by the Australian and British Governments and delivered by churches, religious orders and charities. Functioning in a wider history of the migration of unaccompanied children to overseas British colonies, the post-war schemes to Australia have become the focus of public attention through a series of public reports in Britain and Australia that have documented the harm they caused to many child migrants.
Whilst addressing the wide range of organisations involved, the book focuses particularly on knowledge, assumptions and decisions within UK Government Departments and asks why these schemes continued to operate in the post-war period despite often failing to adhere to standards of child-care set out in the influential 1946 Curtis Report. Some factors – such as the tensions between British policy on child-care and assisted migration – are unique to these schemes. However, the book also examines other factors such as complex government systems, fragmented lines of departmental responsibility and civil service cultures that may contribute to the failure of vulnerable people across a much wider range of policy contexts.

• religion
• charity
• colonies
• open access
• empire

“UK Child Migration to Australia is a significant and revealing book that presents a meticulously crafted and compelling explanation for a sorry episode in British and Australian history. Its findings, including those pertaining to individual homes, offer new insights to former child migrants and their families who want to understand their own histories more fully. Of equal importance, it shows how history can be used to prevent mistakes now and in the future.” (Caroline Evans, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 15 (3), 2022)

• University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

  Gordon Lynch

Gordon Lynch is Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent, UK. In addition to writing books and articles on the history of child migration, he has also given extensive evidence on this history as an expert witness to two national child abuse inquiries in the United Kingdom.