Walking towards her with both trepidation and excitement was a man. 

The flush of youth had been and gone from his face and instead the lines of life and emotion had made their mark.

“You look just like your father,” Mary said.

Now frail, sick and aged well into her 70s, Mary reached for her purse. From here she retrieved a small, tattered image of a baby in a pram.

“She had carried that with her, her whole life,” Mick (Michael) Kenny said.

“And it was a picture of me.”

Mary was 19 when she gave birth to Mick, a child born from a relationship with a Canadian soldier. But plagued with shame and poverty, Mary sought the advice of a Catholic priest who suggested the young mother place her child into care. 

So, when he was barely a year old, Mary travelled to the Nazareth House Orphanage in the small market town of Romsey in Hampshire, England, and left her baby boy behind.

“My mum couldn’t afford to keep me,” Mick, now 67, said.

“In my mother’s letter (written in 1946) she states that she would pick me up when my uncle fixed the house.”

But when Mary and her sister came to collect Mick in 1948, the women were told the young boy had been adopted out to a British family.

However, this was not the case and almost five years later Mick, then aged six, boarded the SS Ormonde to be shipped off to the colony of Australia.

Here, he was told, he would see the sunshine and be able to pluck oranges from the trees.

And so began Mick’s story as one of the thousands of British child migrants sent to Australia in a scandal that continues to rock the world.

This Sunday Mick will reunite with a handful of British child migrants who arrived in Newcastle in 1952 as part of a policy that involved shipping tens of thousands of children to institutions in distant lands within the Commonwealth.The origins of the scheme go back to 1618 when 100 children were sent from London to Virginia. The final party arrived in Australia in 1970. It is estimated that child migration programs were responsible for the removal of more than 130,000 children from the United Kingdom to Canada, New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Australia.

The children were sent away with the expectation that they would never return, to start new lives in a foreign land, always without their families and often in harsh, understaffed institutions.

In November 2009, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered an emotional apology to the forgotten Australians, including those child migrants and children who grew up in foster and care orphanages.

The official apology followed a 20-year campaign for a national apology for the thousands of working class children who were sent away.

Mr Rudd said it was a national shame that many children were abused, sexually assaulted and denied an education, suffering emotional starvation and the cold absence of love and tenderness. 

“I remember coming here (to Australia) as though it was yesterday and we all thought it was a big adventure,” Mick, now living in Lambton, said.

When Mick disembarked the ship at Circular Quay, he and 30 other boys were placed in the care of the Daughters of Charity and then they began the train ride to the Murray Dwyer Orphanage at Mayfield.

“After a few months we realised this wasn’t a holiday,” Mick said.

“We even attempted an escape at one stage. We thought that because we came here by boat and we managed to get across the river we’d be half way home. That’s just how little kids think.”

As the years went by Mick experienced the good and the bad in equal measures.

“It could be cruel,” he said. “There was one nun who would pick you up by one arm and belt you with the other . . . and we were skinny little fellows then.

“But it was the only life we knew. And there were good times too. Every now and then the social clubs from the big industries would organise outings for us and we’d wait and watch for the big double decker buses from our windows. As soon as the buses would appear there would be big yells and they would take us out for the day.”

Mick also recalls visiting BHP every second Thursday to ‘rattle the poor box’.

“Every pay day, the nuns would take us with our Murray Dwyer sashes across our chest and we’d go down with the poor boxes and give them a rattle and I remember everyone being very generous.”

When he was 12 Mick was sent to St Vincent’s Boys Home at Westmead. Then, at 15, the Marist Brothers asked him where he wanted to live.

“I said Newcastle and I came to a boarding house in Cooks Hill,” he said.

Here Mick was given two quid, a new pair of shoes, a job and a place to stay.

“Then I was on my own. But I eventually moved on to work at a farm at Wollombi and at that place you could see daylight through the boards.”

In 1990 Mick travelled back to England on a heartwrenching mission to find the family he was forced to leave behind.

He credits Margaret Humphreys – a woman who has spent more than two decades campaigning for the victims of forced childhood migration – for the reunion that changed his life.

“Really it was Margaret who found my family and it turns out I had six brothers and sisters and it was brilliant,” Mick said.

“My mother was 78 when I found her. She was in a hospital in Leeds and no-one told her I was coming. But as soon as I walked into that room she looked up, this little frail body, and she said you look like your father, straight off.”

A few weeks later Mary Kenny died.

Alongside Mick aboard the SS Ormonde was Michael Reilly.

A little boy who – at just three weeks old – was put into care at the Nazareth House Orphanage in Bristol, the ceremonial county of South West England.

“Historically, I believe, I am the youngest child to ever go into an orphanage,” Michael, 68, said.

“My mother was married and her husband was over in Egypt for a couple of years. But my father was a Canadian airman who promised to take my mother back to Canada after the war but he perished on D-Day. So that’s pretty much that in a nutshell.”

Michael, now living in Wollombi was eight when he came to Australia.

“I remember it vividly,” he said. “I remember hitting Sydney and then this big, long train journey to come up here to Newcastle. It was like one big adventure to me,” he said.

“But my story is probably a bit different to those of the other boys. I’ve got nothing negative to say but some of the other boys have a different story to tell.”

Just like Mick, Michael became one of the Murray Dwyer boys and similarly he progressed to another orphanage in Westmead.

“When I left the orphanage at 16 I went to work on a dairy farm at Wollombi. I stayed with nice people, they were good-hearted people but they got their pound of flesh out of me,” Michael said.

“But I was given the chance of starting a whole new life and I thought it was great. It was a big buzz for me and something to look forward to. 

“Also I was so young and I really didn’t know any different.”

Also like Mick, Michael was encouraged to find his family. 

“I was encouraged to write to my old address but I didn’t think anyone would be there, not more than 40 years later,” he said.

“But I got a letter back and there were two uncles still living at that same house where my mother lived. They were her brothers. So in the end I found five brothers and five sisters.

“And I have a good life. I built my own place at Wollombi and I’ve got grandkids and a good family around me.”

This Sunday Mick and Michael will join 16 of the 31 child migrants who arrived at Mayfield’s Murray Dwyer Orphanage for the 60th reunion of the British Child Migrants.

Following a mass and apology from Bishop Bill Wright, the men will then visit the site of the orphanage (which no longer exists) and make the emotional trek to the pine tree of their childhood.

“The pine tree is the landmark of the orphanage and I think seeing it again will certainly jolt some memories,” Michael said.

“And there’ll be some good ones and some bad ones. It is a terrible thing that happened and there are still ramifications from it. Some men are totally withdrawn.

“But life is full of ups and downs isn’t it?”

For their contribution to the reunion, Elermore Vale Lions Club has cleared the path to the pine tree and designed a small plaque in honour of the boys forced to leave their families all those years ago.

“Sunday will mean something for us,” Mick said. “It’s only in the last 10 to 15 years that I’ve really opened up, before I used to clam up. I was ashamed of what I was but not anymore.”

A mass will be held for the British child migrants who arrived at the Murray Dwyer Orphanage on Sunday at 9.30am at the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newcastle.