Australia - Inglese

Orphans of the Empire

[Times - World]

His staff called him “God” and, as managing director and chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, David Hill’s brilliant career was all the more astonishing given his poor start in life. He was a “migrant child” – one of thousands of impoverished English children whose parents sent them to Australia in the hope of giving them a better start in life. Born in 1947 into a one-parent family on the Langney council estate near Eastbourne, East Sussex, Hill and his three brothers were raised by their mother; their father had deserted them. One day, in the depths of despair, Hill’s mother received a visit from “the ladies from Fairbridge”, who persuaded her to send her three youngest sons to an Australian farm school under the child-migration scheme run by the Fairbridge Society, an English charity.