Former UK children who were sent to Australia's notorious Fairbridge farm institutions feel betrayed again as the Australian government delays payments for abuse suffered while in care.
The Australian government agreed in March 2021 to pay redress for sexual abuse the former UK child migrant suffered at five Fairbridge institutions across Australia after a long battle for justice.
In December a group of child migrants who boarded at the institutions were told that their claims had been frozen, causing further anxiety and mistrust.
Thousands of unaccompanied children, some as young as four, were sent through the new defunct Fairbridge Society to Australia until the 1960s.
The homes were established in Molong in NSW, Crafers in South Australia, Exeter in Tasmania, Northcote in Victoria and Pinjarra in WA.
A five-year-old Claire Emanuel, her parents and eight siblings, came to Australia from the UK in 1966 through the Fairbridge Society'sFairbridge Society's two-parent scheme, which assisted large families.
Our parents were promised that we were going to go to this beautiful farm school with horses and animals and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The now 61-year-old said that we would all be together.
She wept as she remembered how the family of 11 was separated immediately upon arrival at Perth Airport.
My sisters got put in a cottage in Pinjarra, my brothers got put in another cottage, and my younger sister and I were put into the babies cottage, she said.
Dad left the next day and we didn't see our parents for weeks. Ms Emanuel said as a five-year-old from a close and loving family, life at Fairbridge was physically and emotionally brutal.
She said it wasn't a normal childhood, it was just lonely and sad.
The cottage mother was really mean in the older girls' cottage.
I started to wet the bed, which she didn't like, so she'd make me wash my sheets by hand in a big trough.
Ms Emanuel's family was reunited after a period of years, but she said things were never the same.
She said that it just made us strangers because we hadn't been around each other.
The Australian government agreed last March to pay redress to claims to Fairbridge child migrants after years of wrangling with entities associated with the now defunct Fairbridge organisation.
In December, Ms Emanuel said she was told her claim for redress had effectively been frozen because she was not classed as a former ward of the state.
She said that my application was put on hold and there was no more funding from the government when I get a phone call from the blue.
They make you drag it up and you're totally let down again, they make you drag it up.
They make you go through a very drawn out process and then leave you in a heap.
Ric Hinch is the president of the Old Fairbridgians Association in Western Australia and said there were widespread delays to the scheme.
He said that the additional delays for the children who came out under the one-parent or two-parent schemes was another blow.
The thinking of the majority of child migrants in Australia and Western Australia is based on that. The Department of Social Services acknowledged that there had been some delays in processing Fairbridge applications.
The federal department wouldn't say how many applications had been affected, citing privacy.
The government is working to get applications naming Fairbridge Farm Schools as soon as possible.