Oranges and Sunshine (dvd, 2010) 101 mins.
If you can remain unmoved by this story, you must have a heart of stone. While it does not have a specifically Christian background it is quite definitely a film with a clear moral message. It is based on true historic events with real-time historic characters. Margaret Humphreys is a social worker in Nottingham who, quite by chance (providence ?), uncovers what turns out to be one of the most significant scandals of recent times. In the 1920’s through to the 1970’s tens of thousands of children in care in the UK were deported to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. The children were often told, falsely in many cases, that their parent or parents were dead. They were offered the prospect of a better life – oranges and sunshine. When the children arrived in Australia, as the story here has it, they were treated as less than desirable, suitable only for slave labour and in poor conditions to boot.
We learn at the end of the film that it took 23 years for the UK and the Australian governments to acknowledge the sordid truth of what happened to 130,000 children. The heroine, Margaret Humphreys, never gave up in her primary quest to reunite these children, now grown up, with their families in the UK. The children whose stories are told in this film, had often lost any sense of identity because of loss of contact with their family which had been, in many cases, just a single parent. The human stories depicted there are harrowing, even though related in brief glimpses, especially upsetting when the news comes to light that their parent had died before a reunion could be effected.
There are, thankfully, some happier stories of reunion to be told. Watch the face of Margaret Humphreys throughout the film. She maintains the quiet, objective passivity of a true professional. Her smiles are rare. Her determination laudable even when faced with physical attack. Notice too the disturbing effect on her own family of this one-woman crusade. There was a price to be paid. A moving experience – unless you have a heart of stone.
Raymond Wilson