Oranges and Sunshine – review

Len stopped crying at the age of eight and doesn’t know how to cry any more. Jack was told as a child that his mother was dead. As an adult he discovers that she might be alive, but he does not know what to do with the information.

It is one of the great scandals of our time that 130,000 children in the post-war period – some as young as three – were shipped from the UK to Canada, New Zealand, the former Rhodesia and Australia, a practice that continued as late as 1970. The children sent to Australia had the promise of riding horses to school, picking oranges off trees for breakfast, and the sun shining every day. They were lied to and told that their parents were dead. The truth was that they were often sent to highly abusive settings, used as cheap labour, and many lives were irrevocably damaged by years of cruelty.

This film tells the story of Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys who started to uncover the scandal in the mid ‘80s. Against many odds, both personal and bureaucratic, she did not give up and in 1996 published her book, Empty Cradles, about her harrowing work in this country and Australia, helping many migrants discover their true identities. Humphreys suffered personal risk and trauma in the course of her work. It was only in 2009 during the making of the film that the Australian and UK governments finally apologised for the unforgivable child migration schemes that had damaged so many lives.

I was a young child in the late forties and fifties, living in Lincoln, and remember often walking past a large gate leading to a big house where I was told in hushed tones that the ‘unmarried mothers’ had their babies. I find it unbelievable that during my lifetime many of these children were probably shipped off as part of the migration scheme. But this was post-war, life was austere, single parenthood a scandal and financially unsustainable, and the work of John Bowlby and child attachment only just emerging.

Oranges and Sunshine has been made by Jim Loach in the tradition of his father, Ken Loach, whose films are well known for their social realism. I was lucky enough to be invited to a premiere viewing and hear the film maker, actors and writers talking afterwards. Emily Watson portrays Margaret Humphreys and the role is beautifully played. It was heartening to see a social worker being shown in a positive light. The stories of the child migrants and the discovery of their past is painful and uncomfortable viewing.  But it is an important story and, for me anyway, an essential film to see.

More information from the Child Migrants Trust.

Oranges And Sunshine (15)
Director: Jim Loach
Cast: Clayton Watson, David Wenham, Emily Watson, Greg Stone, Hugo Weaving, Tara Morice
Runtime: 105 mins

Oranges And Sunshine is showing at the Rio Cinema until 14 April.