The Australian Women's Register

Dilys Budd was born in St David’s Hospital, Cardiff, Wales, on 23 February 1936 the daughter of Mary Winter and an unnamed father. She was placed in foster care in infancy, and at the age of five was sent to the Catholic orphanage, Nazareth House, Cardiff. There she discovered her older twin sisters, Monica and Sheila and met her mother, who visited weekly until she died of tuberculosis when Dilys was about six. 

In 1947 Dilys volunteered to migrate to Australia, not realising that this would mean permanent separation from her sisters. She arrived in Fremantle with a group of other child migrants on the ship Asturias in September 1947, and was placed in St Joseph’s Girls Orphanage, Subiaco, run by the Sisters of Mercy. At 16 she was placed in employment with the State Department of Health, and required by Catholic Welfare to live with approved Catholic families.

At 18 she joined the Army Nursing Corps and at 21, when she was free of supervision, she moved to Melbourne where she worked at Kew Mental Asylum and then with the Victorian Taxation Department. She married Bob Budd in December 1959 and came they to Canberra in 1965, where she worked from 1970 with the Commonwealth Department of Trade (later the Department of Foreign Affairs). 

In 1976 she and her family travelled to Wales where she was reunited with her sisters. She revisited the United Kingdom again in 1997 with a group of former child migrants to commemorate the 50 anniversary of their emigration. In 1988 she was awarded the Australia Day Achievement Medal by the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, where she is still currently employed. She and Bob have five children and eleven grandchildren.