Forgotten Children Get a Formal Apology

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull will, today, apologise to the 500,000 Australians who grew up in institutions, orphanages and foster care.

David Hill's bestselling book THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN is both a tribute to the children who were betrayed by an ideal that went terribly awry and a compelling account of an extraordinary episode in Australian–British History.

This book is a heartbreaker you can’t put down, a calmly narrated and impeccably researched tale of children from poor British families transported to Australia not in the eighteenth but in the twentieth century; of their bewildered and graphic adventures under the emotional and physical parsimony of the Fairbridge Farm School ... The reader yearns to reach out to the children who, say, are given guns to shoot rabbits and use them to suicide instead. For Hill to be able to detail the story in such clinical detail is itself a triumph of spirit and craft and humane forgiveness.’ TOM KENEALLY