For most of my life Fairbridge has been happy memories of an almost idyllic country childhood. That began to change a few years ago when the stories of abuse and institutional oppression began to be more widely canvassed, and I talked to my elder sister for the first time regarding her experience and that of my younger sister when, due to family circumstances, we spent a few months back at Fairbridge in 1966 while Dad looked for a house in Orange.
In 2008, out of the blue, we three kids finally connected with an Uncle, our mother’s brother, who had been searching all his life for the brother and sister he lost back in the thirties. Suddenly we three had an entirely new family narrative we’d never heard before.
Since then the whole matter of Fairbridge, our Mother’s experience there, her meeting Dad, and the effect that Fairbridge continued to exert over our lives, even years after we’d left, has become something of a compulsion with me. I’ve read anything I can find, I’ve visited the Molong Museum and talked with the indefatigable Ruth Bigrigg and soon I plan to become a serial telephone and email pest to any of the friends of our family from Fairbridge.
Even so I find there’s still a lot to understand so I’ve been writing about it.
At the moment that writing is taking three distinct fictional forms; one a yarn about Molong in 1955 that revolves around two strays dogs and a bunch of local misfits, another a yarn about twin brothers given up to Fairbridge in the thirties; and the third a yarn about a group of boys, one of whom is a Fairbridge boy, growing to men, and the baggage they drag with them. They’re all fiction of course, and are related by common themes, but I would very much like to make them as true to reality in terms of the human experience described. Mine alone is a little too rosy to be believed.
I would be enormously grateful if any Old Fairbridgians would share their stories with me, both good and bad, so that I may more accurately portray our common experience as well as highlight some of the more illuminating and signal experiences of individuals. Names will of course be changed and I offer absolute discretion with any personal information you might share. You can respond here or contact me directly through rob@laughingpartners.com.au Thank you, and I hope to hear from you soon.
