One of the central theoretical discussions to have emerged in the historical study of children’s lives, and in the ‘new’ childhood studies more generally, concerns the nature of children’s agency in relation to institutional structures and practices shaped by adults. Moving beyond simple binaries of the structural determinism of children’s lives, or an emphasis on children’s agency as resistance against adult social worlds, this growing literature has sought to develop more nuanced accounts of how children sustain and extend adults’ institutional projects and recursively reproduce structures of childhood through their own actions.¹ Approaches which situate agency within the individual child have also increasingly given way to relational and distributed concepts of agency which understand it in terms of how it is enacted inter-subjectively through social relations and in social worlds shaped by both human and non-human actants.² Through this work, the conceptual boundaries of the social worlds of the adult and the child have become increasingly blurred and replaced with a growing recognition of complex and contingent patterns of interaction between children, adults and the social and material worlds that they inhabit.³

In the Introduction to this book, Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor rightly critique earlier studies in the history of welfare which have assumed that children were passive recipients of adult interventions. As this book has demonstrated, children’s engagement with welfare has been far more complex than this and their agency has played a far greater role in the experience and delivery of welfare than such studies have recognized. The nature and extent of children’s agency has also varied significantly across different welfare settings. This chapter seeks to complement the examples of children’s agency in the previous chapters in this book by returning to a case in which this agency was significantly constrained. In doing so, it seeks to challenge the assumption that children’s agency was always limited in welfare services by examining specific social, cultural and institutional factors through which constraint can occur.

The chapter will pursue this task by analysing the experiences of post-war UK child migrants to Australia.⁴ After providing an initial account of the policy and organizational framework for these assisted migration programmes, it will consider the ways in which the agency of these child migrants was often constrained. These limitations had particular significance in this historical period given the aspirations in the influential 1946 Curtis report for encouraging children’s autonomy and individual development in out-of-home care.⁵ The effects of such constraints in framing child migrants’ perceptions of what was possible for their lives and their sense of place in the world will also be discussed. The chapter will then go on to consider three contingent factors which gave rise to these constraints – macro-level governmental policies, meso-level organizational cultures and practices, and micro-level interactions between children and those charged with their care. The chapter concludes by considering two broader ways in which the approach used in this chapter might be relevant to studying children’s engagement with welfare in other historical contexts.

The policy and organizational context of post-war UK child migration to Australia

Post-war child migration to Australia built on a longer history of the use of assisted emigration as a form of welfare intervention, with an estimated 90,000 British children sent to Canada through such initiatives between 1869 and 1924, and just over 3,000 to Australia in the inter-war period.⁶ While Australia was the main destination for post-war British child migrants, with 3,170 sent there in 1947–65,⁷ hundreds were also sent through smaller-scale schemes to Canada, New Zealand and the former Southern Rhodesia.⁸ Originally conceived of in the late Victorian period as a means for improving employment opportunities for poor children, by the post-war period child migration had come to occupy a more limited place in British policymakers’ imaginations as an intervention that might benefit children with few or no family ties in the United Kingdom for whom a fresh start overseas might be beneficial. ‘Child’ migration was, throughout this period, understood as the assisted emigration of children under school-leaving age in contrast to ‘juvenile’ emigration schemes for children over school-leaving age, which were typically structured around placing older teenagers directly into work placements and also operated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁹ The increasingly clear separation of child and juvenile emigration schemes from the 1920s onwards reflected a growing emphasis on school-leaving age as a marker for different kinds of policy intervention.¹⁰ For those above school-leaving age, the concern was with ensuring that adequate training was being provided for their future lives overseas and that they were not simply being exploited as cheap labour. For those under school-leaving age, there was greater concern with their vulnerability in overseas placements and, in the post-war period, with the need for care that would support their emotional and social development.¹¹

Children emigrated to Canada before 1924 were more likely to be in their early teens, although some younger children were sent to Canada through a boarding-out scheme run by Dr Barnardo’s Homes.¹² By contrast, post-war child migrants to Australia tended to be younger (some as young as four or five years old), reflecting the view of Australian authorities and voluntary organizations that it was better for children to have longer to assimilate into the Australian educational system before entering the workplace.¹³ In the post-war period, boys were more commonly sent overseas than girls, with boys making up around two-thirds of post-war British child migrants to Australia.¹⁴ The experience of child migrants was, in important respects, gendered, with boys in the Fairbridge system trained to be farmers and girls as domestic workers or farmers’ wives. Although Fairbridge farm schools accepted both boys and girls (though accommodated them in single-sex cottage homes), residential institutions run by Catholic religious orders were, in most cases, single-sex and separated siblings across different institutions by age and gender. Although most tended to be emotionally austere, this gender division in Catholic children’s homes meant that most boys grew up in an ethos of aggressive masculinity, while girls grew up in environments characterized by shame in relation to their bodies and sexuality.

Child migration to Australia in the inter-war period had been understood primarily as an aspect of wider UK policy on empire settlement, overseen by the Dominions Office and part-funded under the terms of the 1922 Empire Settlement Act. In the post-war period, however, child migration came to occupy a more complex policy space.¹⁵ The Australian Commonwealth government sought to increase the population of Australia by immigration, and saw child migrants as one strategically valuable route to achieving this aim.¹⁶ By contrast, the Commonwealth Relations Office (until 1947, the Dominions Office) wished to reduce UK government expenditure on empire settlement schemes while preserving good relations with Australia and saw maintaining the comparatively small expenditure on child migration, while cutting the budget for adult emigration, as a way of maintaining these diplomatic bonds.¹⁷ Alongside this, in the wake of the Curtis report and 1948 Children Act, which were intended to mark a decisive break from the old fragmented provision of the Poor Law, the Home Office had assumed new responsibilities as the lead department responsible for children’s out-of-home care in England and Wales. In doing so, the Home Office acquired new interests and powers in the emigration of children by local authorities and voluntary organizations.¹⁸ Negotiation of these competing policy aims took place in the context of growing critical scrutiny of child migration by professional and voluntary bodies in the United Kingdom, including the British Federation of Social Workers, the newly appointed Children’s Officers for local authorities, the Provisional National Council on Mental Health and the Women’s Group on Public Welfare.¹⁹

The Australian Commonwealth government’s aspirations to receive many thousands of child migrants from the United Kingdom was never realized. In some post-war years – 1947, 1950, 1952 and 1953 – between 300 and 400 British children sailed to Australia per annum. These peaks usually coincided with higher periods of recruitment of children from Catholic children’s homes.²⁰ By the mid-1950s, the numbers sailing were beginning to fall with fewer than 100 child migrants leaving Britain annually for most years from 1957 onwards. Although Australian authorities acknowledged calls for child migrants to receive care compatible with the standards recommended in the Curtis report, in practice little significant change occurred in the decade 1947–56 in which most unaccompanied post-war child migrants arrived. By the mid-1950s, with decreasing numbers of children being put forward for emigration, the Fairbridge Society in particular began to focus its energies more on ‘one-parent’ or ‘two-parent’ schemes in which children would travel to Australia and remain in residential institutions for some months or years until their parents had also emigrated and found settled work and accommodation. These one- and two-parent schemes were to outlast the practice of sending unaccompanied child migrants, with 1,900 children sent to the Fairbridge farm school at Pinjarra through them up until 1980.²¹

The experiences of former British child migrants have, since 1996, been the primary or partial focus of nine public inquiries and reports.²² While child migrants’ experiences clearly varied, these have recorded accounts of physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, poor education and training, exploitation of labour and inadequate aftercare at several of the socially and geographically isolated residential institutions to which they were sent. In contrast to cases discussed in other chapters in this book, in which children usually engaged with multiple health and welfare services, the fact that most child migrants to Australia grew up with often little contact with external organizations, other than local schools, meant that standards of care in these institutions had a particularly significant bearing on their lives.²³

The failure to provide adequate safeguards for British child migrants, despite an awareness of the risks of such programmes,²⁴ was a result of competing policy interests between government departments and the problems created by multi-agency management of a trans-national welfare scheme. Policymakers’ perceptions of the risks of making choices that might antagonize Australian organizations or voluntary organizations (and their powerful supporters) in the United Kingdom also inhibited their willingness to take strong, but unpopular, positions on child migrants’ welfare. The legal and practical challenges of maintaining effective oversight and protection of children spread across the Australian land mass, over 9,000 miles away from London, also proved intractable. While, in 1957, the UK government did introduce a somewhat stronger inspection regime of the child migration activities of sending organizations, this was ten years after the first post-war child migrants had sailed to Australia and the UK government had little power to control standards of care, education and training once children were in Australia.²⁵ Powers to regulate the child migration work of voluntary organizations under s.33 of the 1948 Children Act were never introduced, after the Home Office decided in 1954, following a five-year consultation period, that such measures would have little legal reach or practical benefit.²⁶ Instead, the Home Office came to a working agreement with the Commonwealth Relations Office that conditions for child migrants in Australia should be improved by a process of gradual reform, made possible by on-going moral persuasion of Australian governmental and voluntary organizations to adopt standards encouraged in the 1946 Curtis report.²⁷

This approach was briefly interrupted when a Fact-Finding Mission to Australia, led by the former head of the Home Office Children’s Department, John Ross, returned a report in 1956 advocating much stronger regulatory controls over the child migration work of voluntary organizations and made even stronger criticisms of individual receiving institutions in unpublished, confidential addenda.²⁸ Careful management of the report’s publication by the Commonwealth Relations Office meant, however, that it did not disrupt the delicate equilibrium of relationships between the Commonwealth government, UK government and voluntary organizations involved.²⁹ The process did lay bare, however, the fact that Australian authorities were not willing to pursue reforms to the extent that British policymakers had hoped for. British civil servants ultimately resorted to the hope that child migration programmes would soon dwindle out of existence through fewer British children being made available to be sent overseas. As Pooley and Taylor note earlier in this book, the power of the nation-state in children’s welfare services has sometimes been over-estimated. The post-war child migration programmes certainly provide a clear example of the ways in which both complex systems of collaboration between voluntary organizations and national and local government, and policymakers’ own sense of the limits of their powers, contributed to a system of welfare over which the UK government felt it had only limited influence.

For the most part, post-war British child migrants were children who had been placed in residential institutions by their families, local authorities or court order. These residential homes included those run by charities such as Dr Barnardo’s Homes, the Children’s Society and the Middlemore Emigration Homes in Birmingham, as well as religious orders, particularly the Sisters of Nazareth.³⁰ Often they were children of single parents unable to maintain them, or had been placed in residential care because of other reasons of family ill-heath, bereavement, abandonment or breakdown. Other child migrants came from low-income families who were persuaded by organizations such as the Fairbridge Society and the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement that their child’s future prospects would be far better in Australia than at home. The child migration schemes to Australia were therefore usually inherently classed, and although a small proportion of child migrants were enabled to progress through secondary and occasionally tertiary education in their teenage and early adult years, most were directed to manual trades. The original vision of these schemes that boys would receive training and develop skills to be able to set up their own farms in later life was one that was rarely achieved in practice. The lower aspirations for these children contrasted with the post-war emigration scheme to the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, which explicitly sought to recruit children from middle-class families who had fallen on hard times with the intention that they would be trained up for more senior roles in white-governed Southern Rhodesia.³¹

The nature and extent of parental consent for children’s emigration remains a complex and contested issue. For some organizations, such as the Sisters of Nazareth and Catholic Child Welfare Council, written records of parental consent are less common than for other organizations such as Dr Barnardo’s Homes. Claims that parents may, in some cases, have given oral rather than written consent are made alongside other claims that, in some cases, parental signatures were not genuine. While these issues are not always easy to clarify through surviving records, there is more consistent evidence that children themselves did not have a very clear sense of what emigrating to Australia would be like or indeed even how far away it was. In many cases, former child migrants have recalled not giving any active consent to their emigration at all.³²

The nature and effects of constraints upon child migrants’ agency

Post-war child migration to Australia resumed in the context of a major restructuring of children’s out-of-home care in England and Wales in the wake of the Curtis report.³³ Beyond its recommendations for administrative reform, the report also played an important symbolic role in setting out an ethos and standards for children’s care which were widely seen as a progressive step away from regimented, impersonal and punitive approaches of the past.³⁴ The report also framed public policy discussions of post-war child migration by recommending that child migration be allowed to re-start, but only for children who had no meaningful family contacts or prospects and only if care overseas was of the standard that it advocated for England and Wales.³⁵

Central to the Curtis Committee’s understanding of the healthy care of the child was an emphasis on encouraging children’s individual and civic agency – an emphasis which was also carried over into the 1948 Children Act. Its report described children as being in need of care that was attentive to their individual emotions and grounded in ‘security of affection’ and that supported their increasing autonomy. Disturbed by what they had observed of children’s withdrawn or anxious behaviour in a number of large residential institutions they had visited while taking evidence, the Committee critiqued those institutions which operated in overly regimented ways, provided little opportunity for children to acquire their own possessions or have personalized spaces in the home and gave them little opportunity for developing their individual imaginations through well-resourced play.³⁶ While influenced by popularized notions of child psychology³⁷ which emphasized the importance of the development of a child’s emotional security and the value of play for their development,³⁸ the Committee also argued for the correct cultivation of children’s agency as essential to their preparation as future citizens. Children should be given regular pocket money, it recommended, so that they learned how to manage their money. They should also undertake a reasonable amount of housework – appropriate to their age – and older girls should learn to maintain and mend their clothes, so that they would develop the necessary skills to run their own households in the future. This understanding of the need to cultivate children’s personal and civic agency was fundamental to the Committee’s critique of large residential institutions which it felt, for reasons of scale and lack of individual care, would provide less individual attention for children and place greater constraints on their choices. Although some well-run large institutions might be able to mitigate these risks to some extent, Committee members had seen too many examples of socially isolated, regimented and unimaginative children’s homes to be persuaded that they could be as beneficial for children as adoption, foster care or smaller grouped or scattered residential units.³⁹

Unlike the programme operated by the Overseas League and New Zealand government, in which British child migrants were placed directly with foster carers on arrival in New Zealand, the Australian Commonwealth and state governments consistently took the view that it was safer to receive child migrants initially in residential institutions run by voluntary organizations and with foster-placements to be arranged from there.⁴⁰ Australian authorities regarded this approach as entailing far less risk to child migrants than the New Zealand scheme, as it would provide time for child migrants and their prospective foster carers to meet each other before foster-placements were finalized. Without such a precaution, state child welfare officials feared, such placements were at much greater risk of breaking down with the care of child migrants then becoming the primary responsibility of state governments rather than the voluntary organizations who had arranged their immigration.⁴¹

While this principle of using residential institutions as initial receiving homes for child migrants was accepted by the United Kingdom government, it became increasingly clear that only a small proportion of British children were in fact being placed out in Australian foster homes. Most were retained by residential institutions until school-leaving age when they were placed out in work. Alongside the hope that more child migrants would, in due course, be boarded out, civil servants in the Home Office Children’s Department were particularly concerned that receiving institutions in Australia might replicate the regimented and impersonal approaches to childcare that the Curtis Committee had deplored. With only sporadic information about conditions in these institutions provided over a number of years, these concerns were eventually vindicated by the confidential comments of the 1956 Fact-Finding Mission led by John Ross, which indicated that a number of Australian children’s homes fell below standards that the Curtis Committee would have considered acceptable.⁴² In the absence of any other system for recording child migrants’ experiences or concerns, these very occasional visits became the only way in which the United Kingdom government had any independent views on the conditions in which they were living.

Contemporaneous source material for accounts of child migrants’ experiences of their early lives is very limited. Unlike nineteenth-century periodicals published by organizations such as Dr Barnardo’s Homes and the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuges and Homes, publicity materials and annual reports for post-war child migration schemes gave no space to child migrants’ own words. Instead, photographs were used to illustrate organizations’ claims about the beneficial effects of their work.⁴³ Child migrants’ letters were, at best, sporadic and often censored by the children’s homes in which they were living and there were few other opportunities for them to record their experiences at the time. More substantial material on child migrants’ reflections on their experiences has been generated through later public initiatives, including written and oral evidence given to public inquiries and investigations (see footnote 9 above), and oral histories.⁴⁴ Former child migrants have also published their own autobiographical accounts of their early lives.⁴⁵ While this source material needs to be interpreted in relation to the context in which it was produced, there is considerable continuity in the experiences described in this chapter across a number of these accounts.⁴⁶ As the Introduction to this book notes, such material can be valuable in informing our understanding of the significance of childhood experience across a person’s life course.

From this material, it is clear that child migrants experienced a range of constraints on their lives.⁴⁷ In a number of receiving institutions, the large numbers of children being accommodated and low staff–child ratio tended inevitably towards a regime in which children’s days were structured around a rigid timetable which left little time in the day for free play.⁴⁸ Time structured around work to support the running of the institution and participation in religious services, lessons and meals made up much of the child migrant’s week.⁴⁹ While some institutions offered more opportunity for free time at weekends, in many cases leisure activities were also carefully structured, group events. Some former child migrants recalled being compelled to undertake work that they found arduous or distressing, whether physically demanding building work in hot conditions, the slaughter of animals on farms or nursing care (including preparation of dead bodies) in wards for elderly residents attached to some receiving institutions.⁵⁰

The experience of having one’s time managed within a ‘total institution’⁵¹ was compounded by the fact that, in a number of cases, these residential homes were located some distance away from local communities. The Curtis report had emphasized the importance of locating residential units in local communities to enable children to build up their own friendships with other children outside the home and make their own use of activities and resources in their neighbourhood.⁵² The isolation of a number of receiving institutions in Australia, however, made such informal contacts impractical and meant that many child migrants’ engagement with local communities tended only to take place through structured group activities such as sporting fixtures or musical performances. Some receiving institutions in suburban neighbourhoods were more successful in encouraging children’s more autonomous engagement with their local communities, but the isolationist cultures of homes run by some religious orders meant that these opportunities were not always realized despite them being located in larger population centres.⁵³

Child migrants’ sense of isolation was, for many, also deepened by their lack of communication with family members outside of the institution. There were complex variations in voluntary organizations’ approaches to supporting children’s on-going contact either with siblings placed in other institutions in Australia or with family members back in Britain. The failure by some sending organizations, such as the Sisters of Nazareth and the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement, to send children’s case histories over with them meant that receiving institutions appear often to have assumed incorrectly that these children were orphans.⁵⁴ Even where contact was supported, censorship of letters meant that children were usually not able to express their unhappiness at institutional life in this correspondence and letters and presents from family members were not always passed on to them either.⁵⁵ Child migrants’ capacity to complain about their treatment was also limited because they were rarely provided with the opportunity to speak with external state government inspectors without residential staff being present. This issue was compounded by a more pervasive sense that any complaints that they made might not be believed.

Constraints on child migrants’ choices also extended to their transitions from life in residential institutions to their post-institutional work placements. By 1945, civil servants and ministers in the Dominions Office had become increasingly concerned at the very limited vocational opportunities being offered for British child migrants in Australian farm schools. Officials began to give serious thought to ending funding for children to be sent to institutions such as the Fairbridge farm school at Pinjarra, Western Australia, which were regarded as having particularly poor records in this regard.⁵⁶ While some child migrants were more supported with their personal choices of career, most were placed into whatever work their institution or child welfare officials found for them. Some work placements were located in urban areas, but many were situated in remote local areas, further compounding the isolation and lack of opportunities that child migrants had experienced in their residential homes. As child migrants began to adapt to their new work placements, their undeveloped skills for life outside an institution also became more obvious.

While child migrants therefore experienced a number of constraints on their lives as a result of these organizational practices, other limits on their agency occurred through their personal treatment by staff. A number of former child migrants have spoken about how their confidence was undermined by staff members who mocked them, told them that they were unwanted by their families, or humiliated them after they had wet their beds.⁵⁷ A sense of reduced agency was also felt by children in residential institutions in which there was systemic violence against children by staff or sexual abuse. Some former residents of Christian Brothers’ institutions in Western Australia have, for example, spoken about how the pervasive culture of violence against boys in these institutions created conditions in which they felt less able to resist staff members who wished to exploit them sexually.⁵⁸

The experience of heavy constraints on their agency was not shared among all child migrants. Some found pathways at particular institutions, or through contacts with particular members of staff, which gradually increased their sense of autonomy and meaningful place in the world. In many cases, however, the childhood agency recalled by former child migrants more commonly took the form of ‘tactical’ resistance against the institutional regimes in which they were living.⁵⁹ Sometimes this took the form of hiding personal possessions, breaking rules by going into areas designated as out of bounds, or stealing food.⁶⁰ The cultivation of friendships with other children in an institution, or the keeping of pets, were also expressions of agency that former child migrants later looked back on positively. At times, more dramatic forms of resistance took place such as threatening a staff member who had acted in a physically or sexually abusive way, or running away from the institution.⁶¹ The act of running away rarely meant any long-term respite from the institution, however. The geographical isolation of institutions, child migrants’ usual lack of external contacts and the fact that, as wards of the state, absconding child migrants would be returned to institutions by the police, meant that those who ran away would almost always find themselves returned back to the institution they had left. Such acts of resistance, perhaps unsurprisingly, became more common as child migrants entered their teenage years.

Such experiences were, of course, not entirely unique to child migrants. Many of the constraints they encountered were common more generally in cases where restrictive regimes operated in children’s homes in the post-war period.⁶² What appears to have compounded these institutional constraints for many, however, was the geographical and social isolation of many of these residential homes and children’s sense of displacement in a new country in which they felt they had no one to whom they could look for care and support. As one put it, ‘As children we had nowhere to turn. I was out in the middle of nowhere. I spent my time there in a state of anxiety, looking over my shoulder, never comfortable because anybody bigger could do what they wanted to’.⁶³

Learning from children’s experience of constraint in welfare services

Such constraints for child migrants occurred at the intersection of macro-level national policies and administrative systems, meso-level organizational cultures and practices and micro-level interactions with staff. The recollections of former child migrants suggest that their sense of limited agency was not simply caused by institutional conditions over which they had little control but, in many cases, an internalized sense of diminished capacity built on a sense of social isolation, lack of belonging and worthlessness. Their accounts suggest that children’s agency be usefully understood not simply in terms of social assemblages of networks, relationships and power, but in psycho-social terms in which it is constituted by both the social worlds children inhabit and the internalized meanings of that world for them learned over time.⁶⁴ There is, of course, no neutral vantage point from which to conceptualize children’s agency, and to think in such psycho-social terms is, to at least some extent, to continue in the same vein of attention to the internal and external world of the child that animated the Curtis report. While recognizing the contingent historical roots and context of such a psycho-social perspective, this approach nevertheless has value for identifying not simply the social nature of children’s agency but its on-going significance for the individual in terms of their internalized emotional rendering of their place and capacities in the world. As one former child migrant put it, institutional practices such as the failure to celebrate birthdays or lack of choice about his work placement was a ‘way of life’ that he accepted as the social reality that he inhabited.⁶⁵ He only came to an expanded sense of his agency and of possibilities for his life through relationships which he developed in adult life. Another commented, ‘I sailed over here for a good life and I got messed up. I was bashed, flogged and molested … I haven’t really had a good life. I still go to bed now sometimes and feel scared. It’s with me all the time.’⁶⁶

A psycho-social approach therefore encourages a recognition of the effects on the individual child of significant constraint in their experience of welfare, as well as the specific conditions through which such constraint occurs. In terms of the former, it is important to recognize how in later life a number of former child migrants experienced these constraints as holding them back from fuller experiences of personal and working life and as a form of existential pain. An existential perspective on people’s experience of their social worlds recognizes the importance of their fluctuating sense of connection to meaning, value, purpose and well-being.⁶⁷ As the anthropologist Michael Jackson has argued, while concepts of well-being are always culturally constructed and change through time, the experience of arbitrary constraint from the life well-lived can give rise to a more fundamental sense of existential frustration or despair.⁶⁸ Although such cultural notions of well-being shift through time (as Jackson found, for example, in relation to people in his field-site in Sierra Leone whose sense of well-being and deprivation had been changed through experiences of uneven access to new mobile phone technology), these concepts nevertheless provide interpretative frames through which individuals evaluate their lives. To feel permanently excluded, for reasons beyond one’s control, from an experience of well-being that should be within reach, can generate an existential sense of dislocation between one’s self and the world. This sense of an ‘existential wound’ can be felt in the present, or it can, as many former child migrants have found, be experienced in relation to deprivation in early life which has had long-lasting consequences. As one put it, in an emotional concluding statement to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse:

The sources of suffering identified by many former child migrants in later life were not therefore always necessarily the physical and sexual abuse which have been the focus of more recent inquiries, but other aspects of their experience which had enduring effects on their adult lives. These included a lack of adequate education, a lack of sex education, barriers to maintaining meaningful contacts with other family members, an absence of emotional nurture which affected their capacity to express intimacy with partners and their children in later life and a more general failure to prepare them for life in the world beyond the institution. In reflecting back on their lives, many former child migrants have also talked about how they managed to mitigate these early constraints to varying degrees through the care of partners, the support of other child migrants, taking up educational opportunities in later life, the support of external agencies in reconnecting with close and extended family, and their own resilience in refusing to allow their lives to be defined by their early experiences.

Alongside a recognition of these psycho-social and existential dimensions of children’s experience of constraint in this context, it is also important to acknowledge the social and cultural factors that contributed to these constraints. While these were primarily mediated through the different structures and practices of the receiving institutions to which child migrants were sent, these were grounded not only in factors specific to those individual receiving organizations but in a wider framework of policy systems and decisions in which the particular forms of post-war child migration to Australia had evolved.

A number of macro-level policies had a significant bearing on the conditions in which child migrants lived in Australia. An early version of the Commonwealth government’s ambitious plan to bring 50,000 ‘war orphans’ to Australia in the immediate post-war years entailed building new cottage homes in urban areas which would be run by state governments, reflecting the model of smaller residential units embedded in local communities which the Curtis report also went on to endorse.⁷⁰ While preferred as an approach that would prevent the institutionalization of child migrants, a financial assessment of its costs quickly established that building cottage homes on this scale would be prohibitively expensive.⁷¹ With growing uncertainties as to how many child migrants might be available anyway, the Commonwealth government adapted its plans by funding the expansion of existing residential institutions run by voluntary organizations in Australia, most of which tended to be larger and more socially and geographically isolated.⁷² As noted above, the Commonwealth government’s aversion to placing child migrants immediately in foster homes also led to a system in which children were received and usually retained for many years in these residential homes. Despite initial aspirations from the Home Office to pressure voluntary organizations to adapt their receiving institutions in Australia along the lines of those recommended by the Curtis Committee, its gradualist approach to encouraging reform brought few practical changes to child migrants’ lives in Australia. There was, therefore, nothing inevitable in British child migrants spending their childhoods in large and isolated institutions in Australia. Rather, this occurred through a series of policy decisions that emerged out of the complex interplay of the structures and interests of the various governmental and voluntary bodies involved in this work.

In addition to these macro-level policies, child migrants’ experiences in residential homes in Australia were also, to varying degrees, shaped by the different understandings of children’s agency held in the organizations running them. In some cases, for example, children’s agency was understood in terms of their need for religious formation in which their expressions of agency could be perceived as sinful dissent from religious authority. In post-war Catholic child migration programmes, there was a strong emphasis on the moral rescue of the children involved and the importance of them being maintained in a Catholic environment on arrival in Australia. In this context, a number of Catholic receiving institutions in Australia seem to have perceived child migrants primarily as disciplined members of the wider body of the Church and of their religious order, rather than in terms of individuals whose autonomy needed careful cultivation.⁷³ By contrast, the Fairbridge Society projected an organizational view of children as individuals whose inherent capacities could be given healthier expression in the open spaces of the Commonwealth.⁷⁴ Both views, in practice, occupied a complex place in the structures, relationships and practices of those organizations and among the staff who worked in them. In some cases, notably at the Christian Brothers’ institutions in Western Australia, staff exploited the authoritarian religious culture of their order to sexually exploit boys in their care.⁷⁵ At the Fairbridge farm schools, the ideal vision of the child’s expanded agency in the Australian countryside was too often undercut by unsuitable staff, lack of educational support and over-reliance on their labour.⁷⁶ While not simply determining child migrants’ experiences, different organizational views of the nature of children’s agency and how it should be cultivated nevertheless did play a role in shaping the different organizational cultures in which they grew up. As noted earlier in the chapter, other constraints could arise for child migrants through specific organizational practices such as the failure to transfer family histories or case records to Australia and over-reliance on children’s labour at specific institutions.

Alongside these macro-level policies, and meso-level organizational factors, child migrants’ micro-level interactions also played an important role in their experience of agency. While individual institutions did, to a large extent, have common cultures and rules, child migrants’ pathways through these institutions were also shaped by the individuals with whom they most interacted. In the Fairbridge farm schools, for example, which operated on the basis of a grouped cottage home model, children’s experiences were often profoundly shaped by whether cottage mothers were empathic, kind, controlling or cruel.⁷⁷ Children could also have quite different experiences of the same member of staff, for example if a child was considered to be one of those staff member’s ‘favourites’ or not.⁷⁸ Even in institutions in which abuse was more systemic, child migrants could sometimes remember staff with whom they experienced a greater sense of individual recognition.

Conclusion: thinking about children’s experiences of agency in relation to welfare

This chapter has sought to analyse how children’s agency was understood, shaped and constrained in the context of post-war child migration programmes to Australia. Physical, social and emotional dislocation through movement to a new country, compounded by life in isolated institutions, constituted a very different experience of welfare compared to most post-war British children, other than perhaps those who continued to live in authoritarian and isolated institutions into the 1960s.

Arguably, part of the value of this more extreme case, though, is in providing some insights into how children’s agency in relation to welfare might be understood more generally. Two broad observations can be made in relation to this.

First, this case exemplifies how concepts of agency are not something merely brought by historians to their field of study but that different understandings of agency are already present and at work in these historical cases. The post-war child migration schemes operated in a context in which tensions were becoming clearer between more secular views of the need to cultivate children’s agency through supportive social and emotional conditions and religious views of the importance of cultivating children’s agency primarily in terms of their immersion in a particular denominational milieu. Exemplified in dissenting opinions expressed by members of the Curtis Committee on whether it was more important for a child to receive care in a ‘family-like’ environment regardless of its religious affiliation, or whether a child’s carers should always be of their same denomination, this tension also found expression in contrasting understandings of children’s development held between governmental bodies and religious organizations involved in child migration. This tension became particularly clearly expressed in differences of view between policymakers on the risks of institutionalization for children in large, impersonal residential homes, and the defence of these institutions by the Church and religious orders as an integral part of a distinctive Catholic system of education in Australia.⁷⁹ As noted above, the cultures of the residential institutions in which child migrants grew up in Australia were also shaped by different organizational understandings of what constituted healthy agency on the part of the child and how this should be developed. Concepts of children’s agency are always historically and culturally situated – whether the concepts used by the historian or the concepts in use in the contexts they study. An analysis of children’s agency in the context of historical welfare provision will therefore usefully attend to the ways in which that provision was itself shaped and practised in relation to particular understandings of children’s agency and its development.

Second, this case demonstrates that children’s experience of agency in relation to welfare is shaped by contingent historical and social factors. As discussed earlier in this chapter, it is possible to identify how macro-level policy processes, meso-level organizational factors and micro-level personal interactions all combined in ways that, for many child migrants, placed significant constraints on their sense of agency and fell below standards of supporting children’s development which had been endorsed in the Curtis report. As has been demonstrated in other discussions of children’s agency,⁸⁰ such agency is never a static or timeless trait within the individual child, but is interpreted, evoked, worked on and constrained through contingent assemblages of concepts, people, structures, practices and the affordances of material spaces and objects. This chapter has argued, however, that it is insufficient merely to locate an analysis of children’s agency in the realm of the social, and that a psycho-social approach is needed to recognize these social factors as well as the internalized meanings which they come to hold for the child. Through such an approach, it is possible to see not only how children’s experiences of agency were shaped through the particular historical and social conditions in which they grew up, but how these experiences developed their on-going sense of self and social world as they moved through their adult lives. Again, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, while significant constraints on a child’s agency can be experienced as a form of existential wound, the effects of these can both be enduring through a person’s life course and be mitigated or re-worked through later life experiences. Understanding the interplay between specific historical conditions of welfare provision and children’s experience of agency in relation to them can therefore involve not merely an analysis of social and cultural factors at play but the internalized effects of these for the child’s later life.

Taken alongside the other chapters in this book, this analysis will therefore hopefully contribute to on-going discussions about how we conceptualize children’s experience of welfare as historical subjects embedded in wider social and institutional contexts which simultaneously range from the trans-national to the local.