
The sky bruises at the same time each day in Angeles City. Then the rain comes. The weather is so similar – steamy heat, then rain and evening relief – that it can seem as though time is circular, and the same day recurs. It can seem that life in this Philippine city, north of Manila, is lived on a vast wheel of actions without consequences.

But that would be wrong. Children are conceived and born, and they grow older. Here, in an area called Hadrian's Extension, the laneways are made of compacted rubbish, rubble and dirt. Mid-afternoon the children are playing a game of throwing their thongs, or slippers, as they call them, at an old tin can.

Eleven-year-old John* wants to be a doctor. Kevin, ten, wants to be a pilot. Francine, seven, hopes to be a teacher. Another child, Pedro, lives a little distance away in an actual house on a paved street. He wants to be a lawyer, to help himself and all these other children.

Scroll down for video

Francine, 7, outside her home in Hadrians slum. Francine's father, was an Australian visitor who her mother met while working as a dancer at Blue Nile, a bar on the Fields Avenue red light strip

Kevin, 10 and his mother Rochelle, 24, outside their home, a shack of approx 9 square metres. Rochelle met Kevin's Australian father via an internet chatroom when she was fourteen years old.

John, 11, is one of the few children lucky enough to live with a guardian. He is separated from his mother, a bar worker in the city's red light district. His father is an Australian who no longer provides any form of child support

All of them have Australian fathers. Some of the fathers paid to support their children, then stopped. Some never paid at all. Some don't even know they have children. Kevin's father was a paedophile in his mid 50s called Peter. He groomed his victim, Kevin's mother Rochelle, from Australia using social media. He visited her for two nights of sex then cancelled his Yahoo email address, the only contact she had for him, when she told him she was pregnant. She was 14 years old.

Hadrian's Extension is named after the nearest thoroughfare that could conceivably be called a road. It is a hidden place. Google Street View has never been down these laneways. There are people who have lived in Angeles City for decades who don't know Hadrian's Extension exists. Yet, even here, there is a hierarchy. The poorest live next to the rubbish dump, where people open the stinking bags in the heat to comb for saleable plastic and metal.

This is where Kevin lives, in a 9-metre-square shed patched together from scraps of building refuse. He and Rochelle share it with his grandfather and his uncle, who work as labourers in the construction industry and look as though they are made of sinew and leather. The family sleeps on sheets of cardboard and cooks on an outside open fire. There is no running water.

Angelo, 7, and his mother Janice at her cousin's house in Hadrian. Angelo has a father from the USA who Janice met when she was working in Nero's Bar. She was with him for one night and knows nothing about him

Seth, 6, at his home in the Hadrian slum, which he shares with 17 relatives. Seth hopes to be a boxer one day

Francine, 7, and her mother Susan, 34. 'He was nice, he was bald, he was older than sixty', says Susan of Francine's father, Marshall. Marshall sent two Western Union transfers totalling less than AU$300 before he cut off contact prior to Francine's birth

Just beyond the whiff of the dump, John is being raised by his grandmother's cousin, Lilia, and her family. They are comparatively well off, living in a solid house, five people in three rooms. They have a small farm and sell the produce to their neighbours from a tiny shop. There is enough to eat and to pay the bills, but not enough to send John to school.

John's Melbourne-based father is acknowledged on his birth certificate. He used to visit John, and his Facebook page includes pictures of them playing together. Intermittently, he paid about 5000 pesos (A$145) to Lilia to raise his son.

That allowed John to attend a private school, the only decent education in Angeles City. Now the money has stopped coming and John's father has blocked the family from contacting him on Facebook. John has been pulled out of school. Until the bill is paid and his school report is released, he won't be able to attend even the dilapidated public school, where kids are packed like sardines, educated in two shifts because there is not enough room, and the teachers have to buy chalk and paper out of their meagre salaries.

Australia and the Philippines have a reciprocal arrangement whereby a child-support assessment raised under Philippine law can, in theory, be enforced against an Australian resident. In practice, it never happens.





The idea that these women come from the provinces, naively seeking the city lights, is out of date. Most of them are second-generation city dwellers

Francine, and her 15 month old brother James play in their home

The entire town – with a population of about 350,000 – is a brothel, and its support system

The Spanish colonialists named this place Pueblo de los Angeles, or 'town of the angels'. It sits 85 kilometres north-west of Manila. During the Vietnam War it was the home of the Clark Air Base, then the largest American military facility outside the US. The base stayed open until 1991, when an eruption at Mt Pinatubo, the volcano looming 15 kilometres to the west, precipitated its closure. By then, the town of the angels had become one of the centres of Asian sex tourism.

According to the local department of tourism, more than 4.7 million foreigners come to the Philippines each year. More than 60% of them are men, and Australians are among the most numerous and are the third biggest spenders, behind the Americans and South Koreans and just ahead of the Japanese. The US Department of State report on human trafficking states that Australians are also one of the groups most active in child sex tourism, although in Angeles City, it seems, most of this is not 'preferential' but situational – men who have sex with prostitutes, and simply don't care about their age.

In 2011 the then US ambassador to the Philippines, Harry K Thomas Jr, stated that 40% of male tourists visited the country for sex, and no other reason. His statement was both controversial and impossible to prove. He backed down. But nobody who has been to Angeles City doubts that he was right.

Figures are one thing. The experience of being in Angeles City is another.

The only people who visit here are sex tourists and, in our case, those who report on them – my 55-year-old self and 39-year-old photographer Dave Tacon. The entire town – with a population of about 350,000 – is a brothel, and its support system.

More than 4.7 million foreigners come to the Philippines each year. More than 60% of them are men, and Australians are among the most numerous and are the third biggest spenders

In 2011 the US ambassador made a controversial statement that 40% of male tourists visited the Philippines for sex, and nothing else

The idea that these women come from the provinces, naively seeking the city lights, is out of date. Most of them are second-generation city dwellers. Many completed school, but that is no guarantee of anything. Jobs are so rare that even fast-food outlets require their workers to have a degree. A job in a call centre is the best that can be hoped for, but that requires high-level English language skills. Among men the most common occupation is to be a labourer in the construction industry (building hotels for more tourists) or a garbage collector (carrying away the refuse of the only industry of any size – the selling of sex).

Abortion, like prostitution, is illegal in the Philippines. There is medicine available, for a price, that makes you bleed. Once you are haemorrhaging, the hospitals will take you in, but it is dangerous. There are also traditional midwives who can bring on an abortion, but that isn't safe either. Women have died. Meanwhile, the contraceptive pill is regarded as sinful, and in any case unaffordable.

Some of the women themselves are children of sex tourism. Grace, 35, is the daughter of an American serviceman whom she never met. She was the youngest of six daughters, all of whom had different fathers – most of them American servicemen. Now she is the mother of eight-year-old Pedro, whose Australian father, Max, apparently chose his son's second middle name in honour of a Melbourne Cup winner.

She last saw Max recently when he visited Angeles City. She had a charge made out against him for failure to support his son, and he was jailed temporarily. After that, the child support stopped entirely until a few weeks ago, when he sent her 3000 pesos to pay for Pedro to have some dental work. It was the first money for seven months.

Jobs are so rare that even fast-food outlets require their workers to have a degree. A job in a call centre is the best that can be hoped for, but that requires high-level English language skill

Azumi, 2, and her mother Angelica, 25, at accommodation provided to them by Renew, a charity that helps Filipina women leave the sex trade. Azumi's mother claims her father is a German named Ralf, 50, who is the owner of Camelot bar on the Fields Avenue red light strip. Ralf has been confronted by both Azumi's father and a representative from Renew, but he denies that Azumi is his daugher

Max, now 91 years old, has asked her to drop the charges against him so he can return to Angeles City. He still loves the place. Meanwhile, Grace believes he has nominated his brother as his next of kin. Grace doesn't know if Pedro, Max's only son, will inherit anything when he dies.

Australia and the Philippines have a reciprocal arrangement whereby a child-support assessment raised under Philippine law can, in theory, be enforced against an Australian resident.

In practice, it is a fiction. The Australian Department of Human Services, asked to spell out the procedure by which this can be done, advises that mothers should lodge their request first with the Philippine solicitor general. Neither the Philippine solicitor general nor the public advocate, who is meant to provide legal aid to the impoverished, responded to numerous attempts to make contact. There is no hint of the correct procedure to claim child support on the Philippine government websites. Nor could I obtain any information about the costs involved, which would in any case almost certainly be prohibitive for the families of Hadrian's Extension.

Perhaps Angeles City sent us mad.

By the time we left it was clear there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children with Australian fathers – and not just Australian. We were discovering a new one every day. We could not interview them all.

Meanwhile, in Angeles City the children are growing older. Every day, in the mid-afternoon, the sky bruises and it rains.

*Some names have been changed

Judith, 19, and her three month old baby, Jaden, at a sorting site next to a rubbish dump in the Hadrian slum. Jaden was fathered by a British man called 'Colin' who Judith met in a bar but says is unaware she fell pregnant