‘I can still hear the kids’ screams’

As a film examines the injustices of the child migration schemes, Susan Chenery talks to those left scarred by the shame of two countries.
In the winter the children left blood on the frost. Their bare feet stumbled on rocks that peeled the skin, but they were so numb with cold that they barely felt the pain.
They were children forced into hard labour; being punished for being born without hope. And punished again if they protested.
”If you complained it was bang over the head, ‘You little sook, you little girl,”’ says John Hennessey, who was one of those children.

On treacherous building sites little boys were flogged if they slowed down, carrying loads of bricks up the scaffolding, lime burns lacerating their legs, hands blistered and cut. This was not Dickensian England; this was Australia and it was happening until 1970…

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”Bindoon was nothing more than a paedophile ring,” Hennessey says. ”Most of the brothers were into raping and molesting little boys, sometimes sharing their favourites with each other.”
The boys were put to work building the series of grand buildings that Bindoon became. ”It was slave labour,” says Hennessey. Many of them are now deaf or partially deaf because they were constantly bashed around the head.
He recalls children resorting to stealing food from the pigs they tended – because the pigs were better fed. Brother Francis Keaney, the head of Bindoon, would eat bacon and eggs in front of boys who were fed porridge mixed with bran from the chicken feed. The boys would raid the bins for his scraps.