When Ian "Smiley" Bayliff and three of his brothers left their home in Manchester for Australia in the mid-1950s, their parents believed they were doing the best for their sons.
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Mr Bayliff, then 8, and his brothers were sent to Fairbridge Farm near Molong, where they were promised a good education, healthy diet and an outdoor farming lifestyle.
Instead, Mr Bayliff and his siblings, aged 4 to 11, were repeatedly flogged with a riding crop and forced to do long hours of hard labour. He ran away to Sydney at 16 without having learned how to read.
"We hated it at Fairbridge," he said. "We just wanted to get out and get home."
Now 68 and living in Ambarvale in Sydney's south-west, Mr Bayliff is part of a landmark international research project into the long-term welfare of adults raised in care.
An estimated 500,000 children grew up in care homes in the last century and the research project headed by the University of NSW will examine the experiences of those who left care from 1930 to 1989.
Chief investigator of the Long-term Outcomes of Forgotten Australians Study and professor of social work at UNSW, Elizabeth Fernandez, said the project was well overdue.
"There is national and international concern about how those individuals were treated while in care, particularly with the royal commission, which has highlighted some of the important issues about abuse," she said.
"We know from a number of inquiries they experienced sexual abuse, they experienced physical abuse, very harsh punishment, a great deal of psychological abuse, high levels of deprivation and educational neglect.
"The knowledge from this research will contribute to refining systems for children currently in care so we avoid some of those mistakes of the past."
Universities in the United States and Britain, and Australian support groups will contribute to the three-year project, to be launched at UNSW on Wednesday.
Alliance for Forgotten Australians chairwoman Caroline Carroll hopes the findings will be used to provide better support for adults leaving care .
"There's just not enough data about the lifelong impacts of growing up in institutional care," she said.
"People left care and that was the end of it as far as everyone was concerned but we live with the effects every day, 50, 60 years later.
"We need to be able to admit that the lives of many of these people were ruined by the policy of the day and we need to look after them in their old age. We need to not make the same mistakes."
