A rare Australian honour for a British citizen will be conferred on a world authority on child migration.

The director and founder of the Child Migrants Trust, Margaret Humphreys, will be in Canberra to be invested as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) on Tuesday (February 14).

While a social worker in the ’80s, Humphreys received a letter from Australia requesting assistance to locate someone’s family and went on to expose the UK child migration scheme, which had shipped about 130,000 British children overseas in the post-war period and placed in harsh institutions.

In 1987, Humphreys established the Child Migrants Trust, with offices in Nottingham, Perth and Melbourne. since that, both the Australian and British governments have made public apologies for discredited child-migration schemes, which saw tens of thousands of British children transported to Australia, Canada, NZ and Rhodesia, often without their parents’ knowledge.

Based on her book “Empty Cradles”, her story became the basis for Jim Loach’s 2010 Australian film “Oranges and Sunshine”, starring Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving and David Wenham.

Humphreys describes the honour as “another step on the long road to recognition for all that former UK child migrants have endured on their journey to family, identity and belonging”.