How Could You?Hall of Shame-Australia-Rex and Kevin Wade cases and Lawsuit

Rex Wade was 11 years old and his brother Kevin just 10 when authorities approached them in a British orphanage and offered them the chance of a new life in Australia.

The boys are believed to be the last to be transported under the Child Migrants Program, which began in the 1930s. They were shipped to this country in 1970 — a full three years after the practice was supposedly banned.

After their father’s premature death, the siblings were placed with foster parents but when the couple had their own child, the Wades were moved to a children’s home in Cornwall in south west England.

“When the child was born the husband no longer wanted anything to do with us and we were back to square one and put in a children’s home,” Rex Wade told The Mirror.

“Just after that someone from the council came to see us and gave us three choices — a pig farm, a boarding school or go to Australia.

“I was only 11 and the childish excitement just built up. My brother and I said ‘yes’ straight away. At that age how do you know what you are agreeing to?

“In the space of three months we were out of the country.”

Mr Wade was separated from his brother and sent to a care home in Tasmania, where he was subjected to daily beatings and put to work as a farm labourer in horrific conditions.

“The whole experience ruined my life,” he said. “We were treated like slaves. It was wrong and should never have happened.”

Mr Wade is one of more than 100 child migrants suing the British Government for abuses inflicted upon them at children’s homes across Australia.

The 59-year-old said he received brutal treatment at the hands of the couple who ran the Tasmanian institution, including daily beatings and emotional torment.

He ran away and started drinking excessively as a way of coping with his trauma and soon found himself in jail on a string of alcohol-related offences.

Following his release at the age of 26, Mr Wade sold everything he owned to buy a ticket back to Britain.

In the years that followed, Mr Wade struggled with alcohol addiction and post traumatic stress disorder, haunted by the violence and abuse which marked his time in Australia.

Now sober, he is fighting for justice and crucially, a direct apology from both governments for the systematic destruction of his childhood and ultimately his life.

In 2005, the Tasmanian government awarded Mr Wade £19,000 ($AU34,000) in compensation — a paltry sum given the brutality of his experience.

In 2010, the then-British prime minister, Gordon Brown, issued a blanket apology to the country’s child migrants, telling them: “We are truly sorry. They were let down.”

Of more than 130,000 children who were sent to Australia or Zimbabwe to be adopted to raised in orphanages, only 2000 are alive today.

n March this year, Britain’s Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse promised those survivors they would receive compensation within 12 months. However, there has been no sign of any payout yet.

“I have never had a direct apology from the Government,” Mr Wade told The Mirror.

“There was one made to the country, but I want to sit down with Prime Minister Theresa May face-to-face so she can hear what we all went through.

“I am not saying she is personally to blame, but she is at the top of the government that betrayed us. The Government should face up to the people whose lives they damaged.”

Mr Wade, who now lives with his wife Annie in Cornwall, said he still wants to know why authorities allowed him and his brother to be shipped to Australia three years after the practice was officially banned.

“I have never had an explanation of why it continued to happen until 1970,” he said.

“I never really thought about this until my wife said: ‘Out of all the thousands of children, why were you the last ones sent?’

“I had never thought of it that way. There were thousands of children sent before me, and I was the last one. I have never had a definitive answer why.””

Last child migrant to Australia sues UK over abuse suffered at Tasmanian orphanage

[News 9/3/18 by Marnie O’Neill]

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