[attach id=345295 size="medium"]Lou Drofenik pictured with a copy of her new novel Bushfire Summer. Photo: Paul Spiteri Lucas[/attach]
As ravished Malta shuddered under the impact of World War II, several Maltese parents bundled up their children and sent them on a long voyage to Australia, towards what they hoped would be a better future.
Instead, the majority of the 310 who arrived Down Under were left uneducated, forced to work in institutions and a number even suffered physical and sexual abuse.
This traumatic event is the subject of a new novel titled Bushfire Summer by Maltese-Australian author Lou Drofenik, née Zammit.
Dr Drofenik, 73, left Malta aged 20, under a scheme aimed at single women. She met her husband in Australia and remained on the continent, although she visits Malta frequently.
In 2009, she was researching the subject of child migration, originally in order to write up a paper. She spoke to a number of former Maltese and British child migrants.
She found that they harboured a great deal of anger that their childhood had been brutally stolen away from them.
It’s a blot on both Malta’s and Australia’s history
In 1950, the Maltese government and the Catholic hierarchy in Australia signed the child settlement agreement which would open the doors for Maltese children to go to institutions in Western Australia run by the Christian Brothers.
“It’s a blot on both Malta’s and Australia’s history,” Dr Drofenik says. “The children were sent with the approval of the Church and the government – and the authorities didn’t follow up what was happening.
“Children were running away and the police merely escorted them back to the institutions. They didn’t have a voice.”
She hopes that her novel will help give those children a voice. One of the main characters, Garth Evans, is an embittered Maltese man who was sent to Australia as a child.
“The children were made to work and build churches and houses. They worked bare footed in the cement – in fact one former child migrant told me his feet were constantly cracked and bleeding. The beatings they received were terrible as well.”
Some British child migrants were even told their parents were dead, in order to erase their past history.
Most of the Maltese child migrants, Dr Drofenik adds, had both parents alive who gave their full consent to their child’s departure.
Yet, how could a parent possibly send their child all alone to a country separated by thousands of kilometres?
“After the war, Malta was devastated. There were no resources, no social services and no pensions. They had to look outwards,” said Dr Drofenik.
The noise of the raging fires was deafening
“Maltese people have always been very resilient and enterprising. They thought they were sending their children to be educated.”
The novel was also an emotional one to write on a personal level. It is set against the bushfires which devastated the state of Victoria in 2009 and killed some 170 people. Dr Drofenik herself lived through the ordeal, after the fires burnt down her property.
“Luckily, we managed to save the main house. But the workshops and sheds on our extensive property were all burnt down.
“I was alone in the house when it happened – the noise of the raging fires was deafening.”
She explains that, at first, she didn’t want to delve back into her memories of the event but managed to put pen to paper when she travelled to Slovenia.
“In fact, I don’t think I could have written it in Australia. I had to be away to be able to look back at those terrible days and be able to write lucidly.
“As I said, my intention was to write a paper about Maltese child migration. I suppose being personally involved in such a catastrophic issue put things in perspective and a shift happened in my thinking.
“I saw how the small rural community where I live reacted to the fires, how our relationships to each other and to the land changed overnight. So this novel became a story of relationships.”