Remembering Australian Child Slavery

"Homework at the orphanage did not mean study and unfinished schoolwork. It was the unpaid labour we were required to do outside school time. The management had good reasons for teaching basic skills outside the schoolroom. Once trained, the older inmates were cheap supplementary labour."

In a poignant commentary on the status of children in such situations, one man related in his submission how, in the state’s Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland in the 1950s, the boys were reduced to stealing the fodder from the troughs of the animals they raised for the Home, because "even though we worked hard for our food, we were always kept near starvation point". The animals, he observed ‘were better fed than us boys’.

Using children in this way, as labour, contravened the law of all states of Australia. In all the Child Welfare Acts of the time (1920s-1980s) there were comprehensive provisions which spelled out very clearly that the employment of children was meant to be both limited and strictly regulated.

For some institutions the exploitation of inmates went further. As Forgotten Australians noted:

"…The exploitation of children as ''lave labour''- a term used in many submissions, often at a very young age, was a common means to gain income for the institution. This included working in commercial laundries, on farm plots or in other ventures that would create income for the institution."

Even very young children worked in the laundries of the Catholic Homes, one woman relating how she was stood on a box at age 10 to iron sheets – her work for the next 4 1⁄2 years. These little girls, and all the other girls and boys who worked like this instead of attending school, were doing unpaid work for which the religious bodies received payment. Here we have the unedifying spectacle of 'charity' children working for nothing to enrich organisations that, as charities, were exempt from paying any taxes to the state whose child welfare legislation they were flaunting. The resulting lack of education in most cases condemned these children, as adults, to low-paid work, and caused them embarrassment and shame.

Slavery, Australian style, goes back to the earliest convict days and endured throughout the last century in respect of Indigenous children, migrant and non-Indigenous children. In regard to the latter, there has been no full acknowledgement in NSW of the harm done to children, and no comprehensive system of compensation or provision of support services. Calls for a Commission of Inquiry have fallen on deaf ears. Tasmania and Queensland have led the way in terms of responding to the history of institutional abuses in their respective states by introducing compensation and a variety of support services. The NSW government could well follow this lead.