Former Australian ABC managing director tells UK inquiry the youth charity set up by Prince Charles had child abuse files years before expressing abhorrence
The former Australian ABC managing director David Hill has accused a youth charity set up by Prince Charles of “covering its backside” by denying it had known of serious abuse suffered by child migrants sent to Australia.
Hill told a UK national inquiry in London on Monday that the Prince’s Trust had recently criticised the Fairbridge Society over the physical and sexual abuse suffered by children who were sent to its farm schools in Australia.
Fairbridge had high-level connections in the UK, including royalty, when it was running the Australian schools in the 1950s and 60s. Fairbridge was absorbed in 2011 by the Prince’s Trust, a youth charity set up by Prince Charles in 1976.
Hill told the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse on Monday that he was sent to a Fairbridge farm school at Molong in NSW in 1959.
In May the society heard from many former child migrants about the appalling treatment they received at institutions run by Fairbridge, the Christian Brothers in Western Australia and other church and charity groups.
It heard that children were forced to work barefoot on farms or in quarries, their schooling was inadequate, their food substandard and they were regularly beaten and in many cases sexually abused by their so-called carers.
Hill said Fairbridge had in the past routinely lied and denied any wrongdoing when confronted about the abuse. He said the Fairbridge files had been with the Prince’s Trust for the past six years and contained many references to abuse.
Hill noted that the inquiry had received a letter from the Prince’s Trust in recent days expressing its abhorrence of the abuse suffered at Fairbridge farm schools. But he said he suspected the trust of cynicism as it had not previously acknowledged such abuse despite it being in the records they held.
“I can’t help thinking that the Prince’s Trust is simply covering its backside,” he said.
Hill was one of nearly 7,000 British children in state or charity care who were sent to Australia up until the 1970s, supposedly to improve their prospects. He said a 1956 inspection of Australian institutions had resulted in a blacklist of places that were deemed “unfit for children”.
But because the Fairbridge Society had royal and aristocratic backing the blacklist was torn up and its farm schools continued to operate.
That meant “hundreds more children, including me and many as young as four”, continued to be sent into conditions “harsher than at adult prisons in Australia”, Hill said.
