RN Documentary: Fairbridge Farm School
From: Radio Netherlands Worldwide
Series: RN Documentaries
Length: 29:30
After the liberation of Dutch POW?s from the Japanese camps in Indonesia, many of the women and children were sent to Perth Australia to recuperate. The children were starved and feral and so they were sent to the Fairbridge Farm School in Pinjarra in south western Australia. Here they ate good meals, spent time in classrooms and on the playgrounds again and generally learnt once again the essentials of normalcy and childhood. 60 years later, four Dutch people remember with gratitude what Fairbridge gave them and find they can even search their memories for the long lost words of Waltzing Matilda.
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Piece Description
After the liberation of Dutch POW?s from the Japanese camps in Indonesia, many of the women and children were sent to Perth Australia to recuperate. The children were starved and feral and so they were sent to the Fairbridge Farm School in Pinjarra in south western Australia. Here they ate good meals, spent time in classrooms and on the playgrounds again and generally learnt once again the essentials of normalcy and childhood. 60 years later, four Dutch people remember with gratitude what Fairbridge gave them and find they can even search their memories for the long lost words of Waltzing Matilda.
Transcript
I?m Bertine Krol and today as part of a Radio Netherlands commemoration of the 400 years of the relationship between Australia and the Netherlands, Dutch Horizons goes to Australia.
60 years ago, a group of skinny and half starved Dutch children and their parents arrived at the West Australian port of Fremantle. The children would eventually find themselves in enrolled in a school set on a farm in the town of Pinjarra not far from Perth. Today these children are grandparents who still treasure the photos and the memories of their time at the Fairbridge Farm school. Dheera Sujan visited them to hear their extraordinary story.
W ? id ?38
I?m Anneke Jongste.. ..10th b?day there
E ? id ?7
I?m EK..farm school
D1 These 4 were amongst the hundreds of adults and children who?d recently been liberated from the Japanese prisoner of war camps in the East Indies. Most of th...
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Musical Works
No recorded music used.
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Charles Lane
Posted on July 25, 2006 at 08:47 PM | Permalink
Review of RN Documentary: Fairbridge Farm School
How can you not air a story about children being freed from POW camps! Extraordinarily griping and disturbing stories about Dutch children returning from Japanese POW camps after WWII and then "civilized" on an estate in Australia. The half-hour piece is brimming with witnesses who speak in a way that's dynamic and engaging so that the listener is sucked into the story immediately. The producer did a nice job arranging the half-hour so that the tragic parts are in the beginning and then ending up when they talk about the details of how nice the farm was.
The piece is in the traditional BBC/RN style that might be too rushed for American audiences. Another small hurdler American audiences must leap is the lack of a more paced introduction that would include a bit of history about how children ended up in POW camps. I still don't know why the kids were in a war situation or how they were captured or freed.
But over all nicely done!