0
On a summer's day in 1947, four small children excitedly boarded a huge ship. The O'Rourkes lived at a children's home in Belfast, and the nuns who ran it said they were sending them to England on a two-week holiday.
Instead, the SS Asturias finally docked at Fremantle, Western Australia, where a new group of nuns stripped and deloused the children, and announced they would never go home: their parents had been killed. It was a cruel lie.
The family was then split up: the eldest Ellen, aged ten, was sent to an orphanage with her younger sisters - Hannah, six, and seven-year-old Lil. The baby of the family, five-year-old Michael, went to another orphanage, one run by the Christian Brothers.
I discovered the O'Rourkes' story a few years ago while trying to find out about my late mother's mysterious background.
Mary McCauley was an orphan and obsessively secretive about her childhood, but it seemed that Ellen, her sisters and brother might be the children or even grandchildren of my mother's long missing uncle, Hugh O'Rourke.
Last week, an event in the news reminded me that my mother's silence was wiser than I realised. Knowing all the horrors I now do, I look back and wonder if she was trying to protect me.
The Australian and British Prime Ministers agreed to apologise to the estimated 10,000 children forcibly shipped from UK orphanages to those in Australia between the Forties and early Seventies under the scandalous and totally discredited child migrant scheme. My mother was lucky to escape it. Her relatives, sadly, were not.
Only a third of the child migrants were actually orphans - the rest had been abandoned by their parents or effectively stolen from them. As was common at the time, some parents put their children into care during hard times - a situation they hoped would be temporary. But when they returned for them, they were often told the children had died.
To make matters worse, the young migrants' documents were frequently destroyed, so they did not even know their parents' names and had no way back into the lives from which they had been ripped.
The O'Rourke children began their desperate search for their identity in the Seventies. Like most former child migrants, they were given scant help. When I found out about them in 2000, I longed to help. But I discovered something so shocking that I felt both horrified and betrayed.
I had stumbled across their search via the internet. When my mother had become terminally ill several years before, I'd begged her to tell me who raised her. But she refused.
Mum had no family photos, mementos, heirlooms or stories. All I really knew was that her family was poor, and it had been split up after her mother died during childbirth. My mother's father had to work away and while she was young, he died in tragic circumstances.
The most she would hint at was that various cousins took turns at raising her in Scotland and in Ireland. But my mother had 'married well' - to an English policeman - and lost touch with her relatives when she moved to London.
Mum was warm and feisty and made me laugh by performing Scottish sword dances over crossed kitchen knives. Yet her silences maddened me, and I longed to heal the pain that clearly never left her. When she died, I was sad yet relieved that she was released from the turmoil.
Source
