Thousands of child migrants who were forcibly sent to Australia from Britain after World War II are likely to be compensated for the abuse and neglect they suffered.
An independent inquiry in the UK into the post-war migration policy found it was "fundamentally flawed".
It has urged the British Government to compensate the surviving former child migrants within 12 months.
About 4,000 children were sent to Australia and other countries after 1945.
Many of them were poor or orphaned and were promised a new life where "sheep outnumbered people".
They were sent by charities and the Catholic Church.
Clifford Walsh was sent to Western Australia.
He was nine in 1954 when he arrived by ship in Fremantle after a six-month journey.
They were sent to a Catholic institution known as Bindoon Boys Town.
"We were 60 miles from Perth," he told the BBC.
"We had no parents, no relatives. There was nowhere we could go. These paedophiles must have been in hog heaven."
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found successive UK governments failed to protect the children, and were more concerned with not upsetting diplomatic relations with other countries, including Australia, than protecting children.
David Hill, a former managing director of the ABC, was sent to New South Wales when he was 12.
He said he "generally welcomed the report" and was pleased the inquiry accepted his evidence and the evidence of other former British child migrants who had suffered lifelong consequences of the abuse.
"But it's of very little value to the victims of abuse, unless the British Government implements the recommendation to very soon introduce the comprehensive redress scheme the inquiry suggested," Mr Hill said.
About 2,000 are believed to still be alive — about half the number of child migrants who left the UK.
Time is not on their side.
"I'm a youngster among the child migrants," Mr Hill said.
"I pointed out in the decade since I wrote the book — that started a lot of this ball rolling — called The Forgotten Children … 25 per cent of the kids who were at the school with me have died, and since I gave that evidence more have died."
He said he was confident the British Government would move swiftly.
"They'd have to be heartless not to because the evidence is overwhelming."
