Oranges and Sunshine ... a reflection

Just after Christmas, 1960, our family of four - Mum, Dad and my younger brother and I boarded the Fairsky for a five week voyage to the UK. I was eleven and my brother 14 months younger. Spending five weeks on a boat that was making the return trip to the UK to bring more '10 pound poms' to Australia was great for two young boys. Dad was an opera singer and was off to the UK to further his career.
We made the return journey 18 months later - this time the Fairsky was also carrying English families looking for a new life in the 'lucky country'. What I didn't know at the time was that that ship (and others sailing the same route) were bringing some of the 130,000 orphans to a land of 'oranges and sunshine' in a 'scheme of forcibly relocating poor children from the UK to Australia.'
I am the same age as many of these children whose story is now told in the just released feature film starring Emily Watson, David Wenham and Hugo Weaving.
Oranges and Sunshine is a simply told story with much of the detail of the abuse suffered by the children told in flashbacks to interviews carried out by Margaret Humphreys, on whose life the story is based. That both the UK and the Australian governments were party to such an arrangement is appalling. Worse is the treatment and abuse the children received at the hands of charitable and church organisations once they got here.
At last the story has been told in this moving film. See it ... you won't be the same afterwards.