The Leaving of Liverpool
Clip 2: Building pyramids
1 min 57 sec
Taken from the TV program The Leaving of Liverpool (1992)
Original title classification M – this clip chosen to be M
Availability of the complete title
Curator’s clip description
Young Bert (Kevin Jones) is caught up in the dream to build a huge church and a religious community in the middle of nowhere. He’s willing to give his all without realising that the dream is demented and Brother O’Neill (Bill Hunter) is mad and dangerous.
Curator’s notes
This is a fictional story based on the survivors’ stories. Out of sight and out of mind, these vulnerable children were deprived of their childhood, used as slave labour, exploited and bullied mercilessly like little Wilson (David Kaff) and brutalised like David (Darren Yap), without the opportunity to learn a trade or even the ability to read and write.
This series stands as a savage indictment of a cruel and poisonous bureaucratic solution to an all too human situation. It was 1954 and while Australia plans an ecstatic welcome for the visit of its newly crowned Queen, these young orphans of Empire are being exploited as cheap labour on sheep stations or condemned to a life of servitude and sexual exploitation by the Church and other institutions that had undertaken to look after them.
Janet Bell, curator
have teachers’ notes.
