In 1959 David Hill's mother, Kathleen, a poverty-stricken single mother who tried to raise four boys on a domestic servant's income, reluctantly decided to send her three sons, Malcolm, Richard and David, to Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales where, she was led to believe, they would have a good education and a better life.

Hill and his twin brother, Richard, were the last of Kathleen Hill's five boys. The twins were born in 1946. They never knew for sure the identity of their father and were living in poverty with their mum and half-brother Dudley on a council estate outside Eastbourne when two "ladies from the Fairbridge Society" came calling one day in 1959.

Kathleen decided to make the sacrifice of surrendering her boys to a better future and soon the trio was on the P&O luxury liner Strathaird bound for Pyrmont's pier 13.
r n"Unlike a lot of the other children, I'm not the victim," Hill says. "I'm like a kid who went to a tough boarding school. Because I came from a mum and went home to a mum. I'm not typical of Fairbridge. Fairbridge was a tough school and I did it bloody hard. ..."

David was deemed bright enough to attend Orange High School during his time in Molong; however, these few boys were refused school uniforms.
r n"Our grey coats stood out like sore thumbs amid the black-and-gold uniforms at Orange High," he said.

We had short pants and all the other boys had long trousers. We felt like second-class citizens.

I had great mates and great adventures at Molong but it was a nearly self-sufficient farm run on child slave-labour and we worked very hard.

There was nothing like a family structure and there was no love or affection. Some of the cottage mothers were brutally sadistic."

Getting up at 3 a.m. to milk cows or look after pigs was, he recalled, a very tough life, for the dairy work ended at 7 p.m. "and all the day you had only had two slices of bread to eat."

David's mother arrived in Australia two years later and in late 1961 her boys left Molong to join her in Sydney. "Mum was horrified by Fairbridge. She lived until the 1980s, long enough to see her boys do good. And I'm really grateful for that."

David graduated from the University of Sydney with an economics degree in 1968, one of the few Fairbridge children to achieve tertiary qualifications.

During his remarkable career, David Hill has been Chairman, then Managing Director of the ABC, Chairman of the Australian Football Association, Chief Executive and Director of the State Rail Authority NSW and Chairman of Sydney Water Coporation and Chairman of CREATE - a national organisation responsible for representing the interests of young people and children in institutional care. He is the author of two books, the bestselling THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN (Random House, 2007), and 1788, the story of the migration of convicts to Australia.

The Forgotten Children, a semi-autobiographical book, came about because Hill visited Molong in 2005 to undertake a "dig" as a skills test, having just completed a diploma of classical archeology at the University of Sydney. The place was in ruins so he and others formed the Fairbridge Heritage Association. He has recorded the oral histories of about 60 former residents. A television documentary has been produced and an exhibition is in the wings.

At 52, David Hill married his long-time girlfriend, Stergitsa Zamagias, 28. She had been his personal assistant at the ABC. Their son was born three years later. He and his family reside in Sydney, Australia.