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The Australian government has recently issued a statement of public regret about the treatment of child migrants shipped from Britain after the Second World War. To some, this seems far too little, far too late. Certainly, the experience of those thousands of children, some told they were orphans while their parents were told they were adopted, many of them sexually and emotionally abused, is unbearable to contemplate.

Looked at another way, the Australian government's declaration shows how far we have come from the attitudes of that bleak post-war period when so many children could be wrenched away from their families and their country of origin without a whisper of public concern. Once upon a time a child could be adopted and never expect to trace their birth family. An adopted child now has the legal right to find their first family.

Whether poignant or joyful, there is something relatively straightforward about the adoption narrative. A baby given up at birth is usually placed with another family. The first family moves into the shadows there to remain unless, and until, they are reclaimed in later life. It is the stuff of some of the best fictional and real life dramas in the past decade.

Compare this to the situation of children in care about whom there is so little popular fiction, film or drama, although let's not forget the marvellous children's author Jacqueline Wilson. Here, the story may be much more ambiguous, the suffering more mundane. A child may very well know their mother or father. There is no secret, just a slow loosening of contact over the years. That same child may move from home to home or in and out of foster care. Records may not travel with them or worse, get lost. In the care of the state, there is no single adult or group of adults to hold the child's experience and memories of childhood.

The older the care leaver, the more likely there are to be big gaps in the record. On one of a number of recently established websites, care leavers write about their attempts to piece together both an official and more personal history. Some of these stories read like a Victorian novel or even a thriller, with a sequence of vivid snapshot memories; a bomb shelter during the war, a house on a bend in a road. The story is a blur of constant change, constant disruption. There is poignant recall of both adult cruelty and kindness.

One website contributor, now a grandmother, describes what it felt like to receive her records from the local authority. Somewhere in those bulging files was the only picture in existence of her as a baby. She also discovered her real birth date after years of celebrating somewhere round the middle of the month in which she believed she was born.

Human rights don't get much simpler than this. To know the day on which you came into the world. To know the names of your biological mother and father. To know something of why you couldn't stay with them. To know what siblings and wider family you might have. To know what happened to you as a child and young adult. To know salient facts about your medical history, including information about any potentially inheritable conditions.

Young people in care today can rightfully expect better record-keeping than in the past. That doesn't mean enough is yet being done to create an accurate and meaningful personal history for them. Some of this will depend on factors beyond the law or policy, in other words the individual kindness and creativity of social workers, doctors, teachers and others.

But some of it depends on resources. The Australian government has offered a £1.38m package to help those who were child migrants to trace their relatives back in Britain. That doesn't seem much to buy back the remnants of a shattered life but it recognises, at least, that tracing one's history can cost money.

At present, older care leavers often face an uphill struggle to find out where they have spent large parts of their childhood and why. Piecing together a coherent personal history brings a sense of liberation, a sense of wholeness. A childhood is, at last, returned to its owner. Settling with the past is the right and task of all humans. The more difficult the past, the greater the right and the more important the task.

Melissa Benn is a journalist and novelist.