She was wanted and loved. So why was a four-year-old sent to be a slave in Australia?

Marcelle O’Brien was just four years old when she was sent into slave labour.

O’Brien was transported from the UK to Fairbridge farm school in Pinjarra, Western Australia. She was put to work doing chores.

The little girl was so hungry that she would eat pig swill. She was given no coat or shoes, and would warm her feet by putting them in a fresh cow pat. She was repeatedly beaten with a stick by one of the male teachers. She was also sexually molested from a young age by the deputy principal.

O’Brien was not an unwanted child. She had been living with a foster family in the village of Lingfield, Surrey, since the age of one, and had a foster mother who loved her. She also had a biological mother, who hadn’t given permission for her to be sent to Australia.

Her foster mother didn’t give up on her. She wrote to the Queen, asking if O’Brien could be brought back to the UK so she could adopt her. The villagers even raised enough money to pay for the young girl’s trip back home.

The Palace made enquiries with the Fairbridge Society. But word came back that O’Brien was “happily settled at our school in Pinjarra” and to uproot her would be “not be in the child’s best interests”.

Four children bound for Fairbridge Farm School in Molong, 1938. Image via National Archives of Australia. 

O'Brien is now 71. She has been giving evidence this week into the UK's Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

So why was O'Brien - along with so many other children - condemned to years of misery and abuse in Australia?

It was a man called Kingsley Fairbridge who came up with a child migration scheme in the early 1900s. He had a grand vision of sending orphans and poor children to former colonies, before they fell victim to "the vices of professional pauperism". His scheme won the approval of the British establishment and even the royal family.

It's estimated that a total of 150,000 British children were sent to institutions or foster homes overseas. For several decades last century, Australia was the main destination, with children promised a land of sunshine.

Imran Khan, representing one of the former child migrants at the inquiry, says the aim was to "populate the empire with good, white British stock".

Most of the children were aged between three and 14. They were often told their parents had died, with the belief that this would help them make a clean start. In fact, many of them were children of unmarried mothers, who had been forced to give them up for adoption, because of the social stigma of the era.

Children bound for Molong, 1938. Image via National Archives of Australia. 

These children were enormously vulnerable. They were used as slave labour, often on remote farms. If they had siblings, they were separated from them. Physical abuse was the norm. Sexual abuse was rife.

Another witness at the inquiry, known as A2, was also sent to Fairbridge farm school at Pinjarra. He says he was raped by a priest up to four times a week, and was also raped by the farm's pig and poultry manager.

When he told his "cottage mother" and the school principal, he was accused of lying and beaten with a cane.

A2 was also raped by older boys at the school.

"You had to take it, there was nothing else you could do," he told the inquiry. "We were just like a lump of meat to them, really."

Children at other institutions have told similar stories. David Hill, who was sent to the Fairbridge farm at Molong in NSW, says 60 per cent of the children who spent time there allege they were sexually abused.

Children put to work at Bindoon Boys Town, WA, 1952. Image via State Library of WA.

There was one real chance for the scheme to be stopped.

In 1956, three inspectors were sent from the UK to Australia to see how the child migrants were being treated. The institutions were given some warning, with the manager of the farm at Molong advised to put the children in shoes and socks.

The report didn't mention physical or sexual abuse. No doubt, children at the institutions would have been too afraid to tell the inspectors about it. But the report was critical of the standards of child care, and came up with a blacklist of institutions that should not receive any more children. Two Fairbridge schools were on the list.

The Fairbridge Society was outraged. The secretary threatened there would be a "first-class row" if the schools were not taken off the blacklist. At the time, the president of the society was the Duke of Gloucester, who was the Queen's uncle.

Within days, the schools were taken off the blacklist. The recommendations of the report were largely ignored.

The child migration scheme continued. The British government even subsidised the cost of transporting the children.

The man who fought back after being sexually abused as a boy. Post continues after audio.

Molong Farm School closed in 1973.

In 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the victims who were still alive.

"We are sorry," he said. "Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused.

"Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy – the absolute tragedy – of childhoods lost.

As for O'Brien, she eventually tracked down her birth mother, when she was in her eighties.

She held up a picture of her at the inquiry.

“That’s my mum," she said.

"That’s a picture of her when I first saw her. She told me: ‘The bastards took you from me. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of you.’”