Kingsley Fairbridge - Legacy

Legacy

The school continued under a principal. At the time of his death, 200 children were at the school, and enrolment gradually reached a peak of 400.

After his death six other schools were established by the Child Emigration Society, including the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School at Cowichan Station, near Duncan on Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1935 as well as schools in Australia at Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and Molong, New South Wales in 1937.

Towards the end of the Second World War, many Dutch children from Indonesia and Singapore moved to the Pinjarra school, after having been interned in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.

By the 1970s, however, only the original school at Pinjarra survived, a result of reduced demand through improved economic and social conditions in Britain and changed laws that had reduced the flow of unaccompanied children. During World War II, a ship carrying child emigrants from England to Canada had been torpedoed with large loss of life, and this in part had caused the British Government to start bringing the practice to an end. The society then moved to provide Fairbridge Scholarships for British students to attend universities throughout the Commonwealth.

With the establishment of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (UCRN) in 1957, the Kingsley Fairbridge Trust set up a bursary fund to provide finance for suitably qualified students to attend the college. In 1958 three British students were awarded bursaries, and thereafter the number was increased to four per year. This continued until 1965 when Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) declared independence and the scheme terminated.

In 1981, the Pinjarra school closed. 1,195 children had come to Pinjarra and were housed and educated under the scheme between 1913 and 1981.

The "Kingsley Fairbridge Child Development Unit" was established in Adelaide at the Women's and Children's Hospital in 1981.

As well as his autobiography (published posthumously in 1927) and his anthology of poetry, Fairbridge wrote an unpublished novel called The Afrikander.

"Redress WA" was a scheme established in 2008 to financially compensate children abused in State care, and applications for ex-gratia payments under the scheme closed in 2010. Payments of more than $1.1 million were made to 205 child migrants who went to Fairbridge Farm School between 1930 and 1981.