Fairbridge Village | |
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Location | |
Australia | |
Coordinates | 32°35′59″S115°56′44″E / 32.59972°S 115.94556°E |
Information | |
Other names |
|
Type | Secondary School, part of Fairbridge WA Inc |
Established | 1912 |
Founder | Kingsley Fairbridge |
Status | Currently used for education, school camps, and tourism purposes |
Authority | Independent |
Chief Executive | Gavin Nancarrow |
Age range | 11–18 |
Enrollment | 150 |
Official name | Fairbridge Farm School |
Type | State Registered Place |
Designated | 2 June 1998 |
Reference no. | 1762 |
Fairbridge, Western Australia is a former farm school near Pinjarra in Southwest Western Australia. It is now used predominantly for education, school and community camps and tourism purposes. It is also home to Fairbridge College, a curriculum and reengagement secondary school.
It is also a rural locality of the Shire of Murray in the Peel Region . [1] [2]
On 15 April 1912, Kingsley Fairbridge and his wife, Ruby Fairbridge, arrived in Albany, Western Australia, from England and made their way to Pinjarra, arriving on 16 July that same year to establish the world's first Fairbridge Farm School. [3] The school opened on 19 October 1912. Kingsley wanted to see "little children shedding the bondage of unfortunate circumstances and stretching their legs and minds amid the thousand interests of the farm." [4]
From 1913 to 1982, Fairbridge Farm School was home to a total of 3,580 children [5] who came to Fairbridge under various child migration schemes. The school provided education in task-learning, husbandry, metal work and wood work. During World War II, Dutch refugee children evacuated from Indonesia were based at Fairbridge while they were waiting to be reunited with their families. The site was also used as a training ground for the Women's Land Army, and Guildford Grammar School partially relocated there while their school was used as a hospital base. [6] An airfield was constructed and operated from the school during World War II until the 1950s.
The Australian Heritage Commission commented, when announcing the listing of Fairbridge on the Interim List of the Register of the National Estate in December 1997 that "Fairbridge is a striking example of Australia’s early philanthropic movement to resettle and educate migrant children." The Chair of the Heritage Commission at the time, Wendy McCarthy stated that; [7] [ verify ]
by entering Fairbridge in the Interim List of the Register of the National Estate, we are not only recognising the efforts of this philanthropist, Kingsley Fairbridge, but also its role in a significant phase in Australia's migration history. From 1912 to 1980, Fairbridge Pinjarra played a significant role in the development of the British Empire and Australian migration history on child, single parent and family migration schemes.
Many of the child migrants were falsely told that they were orphans and consequently never saw their families again. [8] In 1986, the first Australian child migrant approached the British government to seek reparation. The approach eventually led to the establishment of the Child Migrant Trust in 1987. [9] The Australian Government apologised for its involvement in the scheme, and in 1998 the Western Australian Government apologised to the former child migrants: "The Western Australian Government apologises to former child migrants who suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse in the state's institutions". The following year the Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy and Poor Sisters of Nazareth launched a computerised personal history index to the records of former child migrants.
On 24 February 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to the families of children who suffered. [10] [11] On 31 January 2019, the UK Government announced that following the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which handed down its report in May 2018, the UK Government would make an ex-gratia payment of £20,000 to any former British child migrant who was alive on 1 March 2018, or if alive as at that date and since deceased, the payment would be made to the deceased's beneficiaries. [12]
In July 2020, it was reported that the Australian Government had named Fairbridge Restored Limited as one of six institutions that had failed to sign up for the National Redress Scheme by the June 30 deadline. [13] In November 2020, The Guardian reported that Fairbridge Restored Limited was dormant and under administration, and that the administrator, Chris Laverty, had claimed that insolvency law in the UK meant Fairbridge was unable to comply with the redress scheme criteria. [14]
The chapel is the only building in Australia designed, and with construction overseen by noted British architect Herbert Baker. Described as "the architectural jewel in the crown" of Fairbridge Village, the chapel was built in 1930–31 by the Western Australian Government with construction funded by British interests. [15]
Fairbridge Western Australia Inc. was established as a charity in 1983 and owns and operates Fairbridge Village. The organisation runs programs and services for young people including an independent school, registered training organisation, school and community camps. Fairbridge work closely with local employee Alcoa providing traineeships to youth from the local community.[ citation needed ]
As a not for profit organisation all surplus funds are invested to provide opportunities for youth.
The 30-hectare (74-acre) Village is run as a training facility for young people and as a tourist destination providing visitors with accommodation, catering and activities in its historic surroundings. It is the only Fairbridge Farm School site remaining out of the eight that were originally built around the world.[ citation needed ]
Fairbridge offers historical tours and activities. It has a number of buildings which are used as conference and function venues and a coffee shop featuring local artworks.
Fairbridge Village consists of 55 heritage listed buildings and ten newer buildings. [16] The Village also has a chapel, dining hall, single and double storey cottages, training and sporting facilities. Accommodation can hold 370 people. There are 23 different self-contained cottages that sleep from 2 to 56 people.
Guests staying at the village have access to a 30-metre (98 ft) swimming pool, full sized sporting oval, tennis, beach volleyball, mini golf, art gallery and museum.
Fairbridge was Western Australia's Silver Medallist 2006 and 2007.[ citation needed ]
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
The Scheyville National Park is a protected national park that is located in the northwestern suburbs of Sydney in New South Wales, in eastern Australia. The 920-hectare (2,300-acre) national park is situated approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of the Sydney central business district, northeast of Windsor, near the settlement of Scheyville. Longneck Lagoon lies in the northern section of the park. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 9 April 2010.
Home Children was the child migration scheme founded by Annie MacPherson in 1869, under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The programme was largely discontinued in the 1930s but not entirely terminated until the 1970s.
Sir Herbert Baker was an English architect remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture for two decades, and a major designer of some of New Delhi's most notable government structures. He was born and died at Owletts in Cobham, Kent.
Pinjarra is a town in the Peel region of Western Australia along the South Western Highway, 82 kilometres (51 mi) from the state capital, Perth and 21 kilometres (13 mi) south-east of the coastal city of Mandurah. Its local government area is the Shire of Murray. At the 2016 census, Pinjarra had a population of 4910.
David Hill is an English-born Australian business leader and author.
Margaret Humphreys, is a British social worker and author from Nottingham, England. She worked for Nottinghamshire County Council operating around Radford, Nottingham and Hyson Green in child protection and adoption services. In 1986, she received a letter from a woman in Australia who, believing she was an orphan, was looking to locate her birth certificate so she could get married.
Kingsley Ogilvie Fairbridge was the founder of a child emigration scheme from Britain to its colonies and the Fairbridge Schools. His life work was the founding of the "Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies", which was afterwards incorporated as the "Child Emigration Society" and ultimately the "Fairbridge Society".
Fairbridge may refer to:
Clontarf Aboriginal College is a co-educational Aboriginal college for indigenous youth aged between 15 and 18 years, located in the Perth suburb of Waterford in Western Australia. Since 2000 the college has also been the centre for the Clontarf Football Academy run by the Clontarf Foundation a program of Australian rules football for indigenous youth.
The Fairbridge Festival was a music festival held annually from 1993 at Fairbridge village near Pinjarra in Western Australia until 2022. The festival was held over a weekend in April and was FolkWorld Inc.'s flagship annual event.
Fairbridge was a UK charity that supported young people aged 13–25 from 1987. Each year it supported around 3,700 disengaged young people who were either not in education, employment or training – or at risk of becoming so – at one of its fifteen centres on the country.
The Group Settlement Scheme was an assisted migration scheme which operated in Western Australia from the early 1920s. It was engineered by Premier James Mitchell and followed on from the Soldier Settlement Scheme immediately after World War I. Targeting civilians and others who were otherwise ineligible for the Soldiers' scheme, its principal purpose was to provide a labour force to open up the large tracts of potential agricultural land to ultimately reduce dependence on food imports from interstate. It was also seen by Australians as boosting the ideals of the White Australia policy by strengthening the Anglo-Australian cultural identity of Australia. High levels of post-war unemployment in Britain saw the UK Government seizing on the scheme as a way to reduce dole-queues. Over 6,000 people emigrated to Western Australia under the scheme which was funded jointly by the state, federal and UK governments.
Forgotten Australians or care leavers are terms referring to the estimated 500,000 children who experienced care in institutions or outside a home setting in Australia during the 20th century. The Australian Senate committee used the term in the title of its report which resulted from its 2003–2004 "Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care", which looked primarily at those affected children who were not covered by the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which focused on Aboriginal children, and the 2001 report Lost Innocents: Righting the Record which reported on an inquiry into child migrants.
Castledare Boys' Home was a residential college in Wilson, Western Australia owned and operated by the Congregation of Christian Brothers from March 1929 to 1983 and established for the treatment and training of intellectually handicapped children. A 1929 newspaper article announcing the opening described it as a "training school for sub-normal boys". It opened with ten boys and under the directorship of Brother G. Hyland. The state psychologist, Ethel Stoneham, travelled to Europe and the United States to study similar institutions and was influential in the design of the home.
Mount Saint Canice was a Roman Catholic former convent that was located in Sandy Bay, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and run by the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, commonly called the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, from 1893 to 1974.
Sir Ernest Augustus Lee Steere was a prominent Australian businessman and pastoralist.
The Long Journey Home is an Australian TV documentary in which former child migrants relate their generally unhappy experiences as inmates of a Fairbridge school establishment at Molong, New South Wales. The script is largely based on an autobiographical book by David Hill, published in 2007. The documentary first went to air on ABC Television in November 2009, with Hill as one of the presenters. It included his report of allegations made by three former residents that the former distinguished governor-general Sir William Slim had sexually assaulted them and other young boys during visits to the Fairbridge farms.
Marrinup is a rural locality and former town in the Peel region of Western Australia between Dwellingup and Pinjarra. Its local government area is the Shire of Murray. The town was destroyed in the 1961 bushfires and the townsite is now used as a campground. The ruins of the townsite are heritage listed. Little remains of the town other than an old bridge over Marrinup Creek and some wooden railway sleepers.
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