AustLit

'The story of how David Hill and the other Forgotten Children took on the the institutions that tried to break them - and won.

'The Forgotten Children was David Hill's heartbreaking account of the abuse that he and other 'orphans of empire' survived at the Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales. Part memoir, part oral history, the book became a bestseller. It was also the catalyst in a subsequent battle for justice, which resulted in the Fairbridge kids being awarded a record $24 million in compensation by the NSW Supreme Court. And that was just the start of a reckoning with institutional abuse of power that reverberates to this day.

'In Reckoning David recounts stories of the shocking systemic abuse at Fairbridge, and how he led the fight against the powerful people and organisations - including the Australian and British governments and the Royal Family -- who denied and covered up terrible crimes perpetrated on innocent children, some as young as five years old. David's fight for acknowledgement and restitution was for himself but especially for those kids, who as adults showed remarkable, enduring resilience and determination in holding to account the establishments responsible for their suffering.

'Reckoning is both a tribute to the children who were betrayed by broken system and a compelling account of an extraordinary quest for justice. It is the story of how David Hill and the other Forgotten Children took on the institutions that tried to break them - and won.'  (Publication summary)

'If anyone is qualified to talk about sport in Australia, it's David Hill. In this book, with the benefit of his years of personal experience both playing and working in the sporting world, he vividly narrates its rise in Australia since the end of the nineteenth century, from the first cricket tour of England in 1868 by an Australian team – an Aboriginal team – to our earliest successes at the Olympics in 1896, when Edwin Flack was the only Australian competitor and won two gold medals, to the golden age of the 1950s when Australia ruled the world in tennis, swimming and athletics.

'In this book David also recalls his battles as president of the North Sydney Bears with tobacco sponsorship lobby groups; his coup as managing director of the ABC in buying the broadcast rights for the AFL; his gargantuan efforts to clean up soccer as chairman of Soccer Australia. And he takes us through the shift in sport from the relative innocence of the amateur era to its commercialisation, which, through the years, has undoubtedly contributed to the uglier sides of our national obsession: the corruption, the drugs, the sexism and racism. Have we plunged to a nadir in recent times, or are these characteristics of our sporting nation an inevitable and permanent effect of the need to succeed?

'This book is a riveting, personal take on a subject that so many Australians follow fanatically – a must-read for sports lovers, but also a compelling, revealing account for those who have never quite understood the appeal of our national obsession.' (Publication Summary)

'In a single leather-bound volume of 238 unlined pages of parchment, Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth describes his two-and-a-half year journey with the First Fleet from Portsmouth in England to the new colony in Australia and back. He is a frank, articulate and observant writer, and his diary, a treasure of the National Library of Australia, covers life at sea, stopovers in the slave port of Rio de Janeiro and the tropical paradise of Tahiti, and three months of early settlement in Australia.

'As surgeon to more than 100 convict women on the Lady Penrhyn, Bowes Smyth gives an insight into the plight of these women, sentenced to transportation, and their children. Their voyage was marked by seasickness, miscarriage, infant deaths, a diet of salted meat and dry hardtack biscuits, and cruel punishment from thumb screws to gagging and flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails. When they finally set foot on Australian soil, their travails did not end, being set upon by drunken sailors and crew in a ‘scene of debauchery and riot’.

'Bowes Smyth also describes medical incidents that would make a modern reader squirm, from extracting a ‘jigger worm’ from his own foot to a scurvy outbreak which resulted in bleeding noses, contracted muscles, emaciated bodies and swollen, blackening limbs. There are moments of high drama when mountainous seas threaten to overturn the ship or when passengers fall overboard, as well as calm days at sea spotting porpoises, whales, seals and all manner of sea birds.

Upon finally reaching Botany Bay, Bowes Smyth describes ‘the joy which possessed every breast upon so long wished for an event’. He details early encounters with Aboriginal people and the struggles in setting up the new colony, which was plagued from the outset by food shortages, outbreaks of disease and crop failures. He also describes the promiscuity and lax morals of the convicts with typical flair, declaring their audacity ‘not to be equalled amongst a set of villains in any other part of the globe’.

'In First Fleet Surgeon, author David Hill brings to life the voyage of the Lady Penrhyn and the early months of settlement at Port Jackson (modern-day Sydney) through Bowes Smyth’s colourful language and frank anecdotes. Each chapter includes a page of Bowes Smyth’s handwritten diary entries accompanied by a full transcript, and is richly illustrated with paintings, lithographs and maps from the National Library of Australia’s collection. Information boxes on subjects such as eighteenth-century medical knowledge, brewing beer on board, and a surgeon’s typical day provide context to Bowes Smyth’s story. ' (Publication summary)

'"In 1959 David Hill s mother a poor single parent living in England reluctantly decided to send her sons to Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales where, she was led to believe, they would have a good education and a better life. David was lucky his mother was able to follow him out to Australia but for most children, the reality was shockingly different. From 1938 to 1974 thousands of parents were persuaded to sign over legal guardianship of their children to Fairbridge to solve the problem of child poverty in Britain while populating the colony. Now many of those children have decided to speak out. Physical and sexual abuse was not uncommon. Loneliness was rife. Food was often inedible. The standard of education was appalling. Here, for the first time, is the story of the lives of the Fairbridge children, from the bizarre luxury of the voyage out to Australia to the harsh reality of the first days there; from the crushing daily routine to stolen moments of freedom and the struggle that defined life after leaving the school.'