Monument to be erected for child migrants

Former child emigrants to Australia who have been campaigning for a plaque to mark the maltreatment and abuse they suffered will get more than they bargained for.

The government has decided to erect a monument to commemorate child migration to Australia, government sources confirmed yesterday.

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi has sent a letter to David Ploughman, the chairman of the Child Migrants of Malta Association in Australia, to inform him about the government's decision.

Dr Gonzi said he doubted whether a plaque, as had been requested, would be sufficient to do justice in this case and the government was proposing to erect a monument, possibly in the harbour area, where the child migrants embarked on their journey to Australia.

A number of Maltese migrants who went to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s were exploited, having been employed in cheap labour. Some were even physically and sexually abused.

Child migration was a very sensitive political issue and minutes of the parliamentary debates of the time show that the Nationalist Party was strongly opposed to the idea, which had been proposed by the Labour government.

John Cole, Labour's Minister For Emigration between 1955 and 1958, was among those who were in favour. Prime Minister Dom Mintoff had spoken in favour and argued that the government should exert pressure so that the Maltese government would not incur the cost of sending them.

Both George Borg Olivier and Giuseppe Maria Camilleri, from the Nationalist Party, had deplored the scheme, arguing the government should not assume the responsibility of sending orphans and young children to Australia, where they had no relatives to turn to.

The first Maltese child migrants arrived in Western Australia in April 1950 and were placed in institutions run by the Christian Brothers. A total of 259 males and 52 females were sent between 1950 and the mid-1960s.

The majority of those sent were not orphans but hailed from large families who had found it difficult to cope after the war and some were children of single parents.

Investigations carried out by the Australian Senate Community, contained in a report delivered to the Senate in August 2001, revealed that the migrants were given confusing information about their rights to Australian and British citizenship. Malta was a British colony at the time of the child migration schemes.

The children worked at institutions with no remuneration and many received no education and remained illiterate. A number of Maltese child migrants were abused sexually and physically.

The association was set up in April 1992 and has long sought recognition of the reality of Maltese child migration. Mr Ploughman wrote to the Maltese government in July 2003 seeking to commence the process that would close this sad story by commemorating the child migrants and what they went through.