Former ABC managing director David Hill has held back tears as he told a British inquiry of the sexual abuse and suffering of children sent from the UK to work at Australian farm schools.

The 70-year-old urged the London-based inquiry to “name the villains” to bring some sense of justice to those they abused.

Hill was one of tens of thousands of poor, illegitimate or orphaned British children who were sent to Australia and other Commonwealth countries from early last century until the 1970s.

In many cases they were kept in appalling conditions, exploited for their labour and sexually abused by members of the church and charity organisations charged with their care.

Mr Hill told the UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse on Monday that he and his two brothers were among the lucky ones as they were later reunited with their mother in Australia.

But he said so many others never saw their parents again and endured “a loveless childhood with nobody ever putting an arm around them, giving them encouragement and warmth”.

Mr Hill was sent to a farm school at Molong, NSW, run by the Fairbridge Society.

He told the inquiry that on the basis of his research for his book The Forgotten Children he believed around 60 per cent of children sent to Fairbridge farms were sexually abused.

Mr Hill had to pause and hold back tears as he told of the long-term suffering of those who were sexually abused at Fairbridge and other church and charity institutions in Australia.

He said many never recovered and suffered from guilt, shame, fear, trauma, low self-esteem and thoughts of suicide.

Mr Hill said that in 1956 a UK fact-finding mission to Australia reported appalling treatment of migrant children and recommended a blacklist of institutions.

But he said political pressure from the Fairbridge Society and other institutions had the blacklist overturned, meaning he and hundreds of other children went out on migrant schemes subsidised by the British government.

Former child migrants David Hill, Carol Walisoliso and Derek Moriart listen to the British High Commissioner read a formal apology in 2010. Photo: AAP/Paul Miller

Mr Hill told of a seven-year fight in the Australian courts for redress from “stonewalling” institutions, during which time 12 of the former child migrants involved died before the case was won.

“We’ll never be able to undo the great wrong that was done to these children,” he said.

Aswini Weereratne of the Child Migrants Trust told the inquiry that the migration program was about “coerced deportation” of healthy children to “populate the empire”.

She said children and parents were often lied to by authorities, with some children wrongly told their parents were dead.

Ms Weereratne said despite concerns about the program, the British government bowed to pressure from prestigious charity groups, and the Australian government, which wished to boost its post-war population with “good, white British stock”.

She said many children ended up in virtual “labour camps”, working in bare feet to build cow sheds, shear and kill sheep while living in fear of beatings and sexual abuse.

In 2010 the UK government issued an apology for its role in the child migration programs.

– AAP