So many tragic stories of young children sent from Britain to Australia and other countries and their terrible treatment at the hands of their “caregivers”. The criminally cruel migrant scheme which removed thousands of British children from everything familiar, including, in some cases, family members who wanted them and were told that they'd died, and plunked them down in foreign countries, is now more known. Many of the children were subjected to the most inhumane and brutal treatment, such as at Bindoon where they built the building they eventually lived in, using their bare hands. It is a testament to their courage that they managed to live adult lives after such desperate childhoods.

The author of this book started the Child Migrant's Trust to help reunite these children with theri mothers. As you read this memoir, though, you understand that there is no end to the pain and its repercussions. When they were grown up they were turned out and left to get on with life wherever they might be, with no explanations of where and why and who they actually were. For me the stories have always been diverse, the needs of the people involved varied, and the journeys seemingly individual and private despite their occasional similarities.This is just another sad example that powerful governments and powerful institutions think they can do what they like to whom they like, when they like and they can lie about it (and similar things continue to happen today), all the while it inflicts unnecessary suffering on people who deserved better. They have incredible hope and determination matched only by the truly remarkable Margaret Humphreys. Indeed, well over 1,000 families have been reunited after decades of separation thanks to the Child Migrants Trust. The reality was anything like it, children's homes where the children were severely abused and treated like slaves. Humphreys worked miracles to uncover information, open up records and bring hope to so many lost children.

Margaret Humpreys, a social worker in England, found out about the children when she heard about one case of a child who had bee sent to Australia, and years later was looking to find out if the now grown up child had any relatives left in England. The author of this shocking non-fiction tale, Margaret Humphries, was originally a Nottingham social worker who, in 1986, began investigating the claim of a woman who stated she’d been transported to Australia on a boat, unaccompanied, at the age of four years old. At times a book that made hurtful reading when learning what these children suffered by the people that were supposed to love and care for them. And then suddenly there is a programme on the television and he somehow finds the courage or the anger, or whatever it takes, to come and say, ‘I’m giving you this, I’ve carried it for long enough. Much love and thoughts to you, so kind of you to think of me and lovely to know my music is being played.Margaret Humphreys was a social worker in Nottingham who happened to receive a letter from a woman living in Australia, saying, in essence, "I was sent here as a child and would like to know if I have any family left in England. Some of these stories end in further disappointment as Humphries and her team reassemble the pieces of a child migrant’s past only to find reunion is no longer a possibility. The novel seeks to know the extent of these deportations that spanned decades and saw children as young as three exiled and abused. As many as an estimated 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britian and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire - the last as recently as 1967. Despite the sadness and anger at its centre, hope remains the principal message of this remarkable book.

There is possibly still a lot of work going on to help the children who are now men and women coming into their twighlight years of life. In fact, for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. It was presented to Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown at the public apologies and reissued as 'Oranges and Sunshine' to coincide with the film in 2011. In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a British social worker, investigated a woman's claim that at the age of four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. The longing to know who we are and where we come from, to know who we belong to lies deep inside each of us.

It reminds us that no matter how badly we feel about ourselves, and how difficult life is, it’s important to know, and keep remembering, that we can develop the inner strength to cope with the life that we actually have. Empty Cradles is a well-written, heart-wrenching, tragic, but ultimately uplifting, story about the child migrant scandal from the UK to Australia post WWII, and I would highly recommend it to readers interested in such shocking social issues as this.

It should also have the advantage of bringing the story to a wider audience than would be captured by the book alone. This is due to the belated apology from Gordon Brown in 2009 and the film "Oranges and Sunshine" (which I have yet to see) which is apparently based on this book. Sorry for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost, childhoods spent instead in austere and authoritarian places where names were replaced by numbers. She was and is blessed to have a loving and supportive family who shared her with this cause, but the emotional strain of taking on endless stories of pain and abuse, the death threats, and the sheer amount of work almost killed her. Such a shameful act of how both the English and Australian governments organized it, how religious organisations managed to get away with hiding monsters who held positions of power and abused it in the worst possible way and only came to light when one of these children approached Margaret in the 1980’s and she started to investigate the allegation.For numerous children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Western Australia and elsewhere. This book was an amazing insight into a long and ill conceived period of social engineering presided over by several governments and many powerful institutions and probably the most absorbing and informative books I have read in a long time. Empty Cradles is a harrowing memoir which details the uncovering of an appalling part of British history: Child Migration Schemes. The most shocking part of this to me was that this migration of children happened clear up until 1970.