Australia PM says sorry for 'forgotten children'

The Australian prime minister today made a historic apology to the hundreds of thousands of people, many of them British migrants, who were abused in state care as children.

At a ceremony in the capital Canberra, attended by tearful former child migrants, Kevin Rudd said sorry for his country's role in the migration and offered condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the programme who still live in Australia.

They included thousands of impoverished British children who were shipped to the other side of the globe with the promise of a better life, only to suffer abuse and neglect.

"We are sorry," Mr Rudd said. "Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care.

"Sorry for the tragedy - the absolute tragedy - of childhoods lost."

The British Government said Gordon Brown would apologise for child migrant programmes that sent as many as 150,000 poor children as young as three to Australia, Canada and other former colonies between 1930 and 1970.

The programmes were intended to provide children with a new start - and the fast-growing Empire with a supply of white workers.

But many children ended up in institutions where they were physically and sexually abused, or sent to work as farm labourers.

Some in the audience wept and held each other as Mr Rudd described children he'd spoken to, who were beaten with belt buckles and bamboo, who grew up in "utterly loveless" places.

He said: "Let us resolve this day that this national apology becomes a turning point in our nation's story.

"A turning point for shattered lives, a turning point for governments at all levels and of every political hue and colour to do all in our power never to allow this to happen again."

John Hennessey, 72, of Campbelltown, 40 miles south-west of Sydney, was six when he was shipped from a British orphanage to an institute for boys in the country town of Bindoon in Western Australia state.

At 12, he was stripped and nearly beaten to death by the headmaster for eating grapes he had taken from a vineyard without permission because he was hungry.

"What terrified me most was that in my mind I thought: 'That's my father. What's he doing?' I had nobody else and he was the one I'd looked up to," said Mr Hennessey, who now speaks with a stutter. "Before that I didn't have a stutter.

"I've sought medical advice since and they've said: 'John, you're going to take that to the grave with you.'But the one I'm waiting for is the British apology. That's the icing on the cake."

Children's Secretary Ed Balls said the child migrant policy was "a stain on our society" as he told Sky News: "The apology is symbolically very important. I think it is important that we say to the children who are now adults and to their offspring that this is something that we look back on in shame."

Britain has been trying to make amends since the late Nineties by funding trips to reunite migrants with their families.

Mr Brown's office said officials would consult representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology next year.