This Is a really heart-rending book dealing with the UK's child migrant schemes that oversaw the deportation of thousands of children to Australia, Canada, and Africa. Humphrey's details her almost single-handed investigation, driven to reunite children with parents who they'd been told were dead or had abandoned them. On the other side, the parents were told similar lies. While the investigative narrative is compelling, and the abuses of government, charity, and religious organizations is disturbing, the issues of identity are what really stand out in the book - what makes you who you are? ( )

saw this dvd. sad.compelling story ( )

bookshelves: nonfiction, nottingham, politics, published-1994, winter-20132014, under-1000-ratings, true-grime, tragedy, tbr-busting-2014, lifestyles-deathstyles, families, australia, catholic, bdsm
Read on January 30, 2014

Emily Watson ... Margaret Humphreys

Description: In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. Margaret Humphreys soon discovered that as many as 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britian and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the Empire—the last as recently as 1967. For numerous children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Western Australia and elsewhere. Margaret Humphreys reveals how she gradually unravelled this shocking secret, how she became drawn into the lives of some of these innocent and unwilling exiles, and how it became her mission to reunite them with their families.

The woman whose claim that she was exported at 4 year's old, started off Humphrey's investigation.

The Trailer

Margaret Humphreys

Constructing Bindoon

The song from the film: Cat Stevens 'Wild World'

'Bindoon and I'll slip you one' seems to have been the Roman Catholic nose tap between the Brothers. UGH!

I can't comment on the book or the writing style but I can tell you that this horror story has sickened me to the core.

24th Feb 2010, Gordon Brown Apologises for the abuse of children transported thousands of miles from home. ( )

Absolutely loved this book! It makes you think about how such things could go on unchallenged up until the 20th century! if you only read one book this year it should be this one! ( )

I first read this book in 1994. I picked it up in New Edition bookshop and had to buy it as I couldn't stop reading. A horrifying, tragic, gripping story of the foundation of the Child Migrants Trust by Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphries. We follow her journey from disbelief at the story of one woman, to her becoming a passionate advocate for the forgotten and often abused, now grown, child migrants. All the more engrossing because a lot of it is set here in Western Australia. Re-read it after seeing the recent film dramatisation "Oranges and Sunshine". Ironically the cinema (The Windsor) where I saw the film is on the corner of the street where the CMT had it's first office in Perth and where Margaret's life was threatened...
Re read it again this week (May 2014) when the Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse is sitting in Perth - The work of Margaret Humphreys and the CMT helped expose this abuse and again, I recommend this book, and the film, to everyone. ( )