A New Hope: Oranges and Sunshine
Thousands of disadvantaged British children were promised oranges and sunshine when they were deported to Australia in the decades after WWII. A new co-production is now bringing attention to their once forgotten story.
The film chronicles the journey of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who in 1986 brought public attention to a little-known Government program that saw up to 150,000 British children shipped to Australia (and other Commonwealth countries), often without the parents’ knowledge. Humphreys established the Child Migrants Trust to help them reclaim their identities and, when possible, reunite them with the family they didn’t know they had. The Trust has also allowed them to tell the stories of abuse they suffered as a result of the forced migration process.
The son of director Ken Loach, Jim, read Margaret Humphreys’ 1994 book Empty Cradles and contacted her in 2002 to discuss the possibility of a documentary. They stayed in touch and eventually, he realised that her personal journey could be made into a film.
A producer at Loach’s company Sixteen Films, Camilla Bray, joined Jim on this project, and then Rona Munro came on board as writer. Loach and Munro visited Perth in 2005 and met a number of former child migrants. It was this experience that confirmed the potential of the project.
