You couldn’t have done. It wasn’t anything to do with you and me. You’ve always been special to me, a true friend. I want you to know that I valued that over everything else. I don’t know if you remember but I told you once after I had that breakdown, that all going back to Bindoon did was oil the hinges on the door so I could open it and close it easily. For years after we split up, I did open the door and look at it sometimes, the more I looked, the more I thought I’d beaten it. I was doing fine at the farm, I had girlfriends and a few good mates. Even when Bruce died, I felt strong, I didn’t go out and get drunk, I just rode it out and everything came all right again.
But then a couple of years ago there were some articles in the Western Mail, and they made me feel uneasy, one was about kids like you and May being sent to Australia, another one was about Bindoon. You’d think I’d have been glad that someone had finally woken up to the sort of hell us kids were put through, but it just made me scared. I had this feeling that I was going to be pushed into that room again, the door closed on me forever, I found I was thinking about it every bloody minute.
Then that book came out called Lost Children of the Empire, it was written by a couple of Poms, all about all the orphan kids England sent to other countries, including here. I got it and read it, but though it mentioned Clontarf being a grim place and kids getting beaten for bed-wetting and stuff, it was only the sort of general stuff that people have been saying about orphanages for years.
Then one weekend about three months ago up at Kalgoorlie Iran into a bloke I knew at Bindoon. I wouldn’t have recognized him, he looked so old, but he knew me right off. We downed a few beers, and then he tells me he’s written a book about Bindoon. He said he was going to blow the whole thing open, and make the bastards pay for what they’d done to us boys.
Since then my life has been hell, I can’t get it out of my mind, every little detail keeps coming back, I’ve been having nightmares so bad I’m scared to go to sleep. I’m drinking too much, I’m angry all the time. I feel menaced. I knew if I phoned you and told you about it, you’d have told me it’s better that it all comes out. Well, maybe it will be for some of those poor bastards who suffered the same as me, but not this one. I can’t risk another breakdown, it would be the nut-house for me if that happened. So I’m taking the coward’s way out.
Don’t judge me too harshly, Dulcie. Unless you were to get inside my skin and head you couldn’t know how ugly it is in there. I can almost hear you telling me to be brave and stand up and be counted, when the shit hits the fan. But I can’t. All I can offer in place of courage is that you keep this letter, and if, and I know it will, the truth comes out about Bindoon, you use it in any way that might help the rest of the boys to face up to their demons, or to stop any more Brothers and priests beating and buggering little boys and getting away with it.
Don’t cry for me, Dulcie. I was always glad that Rudie gave you the happiness you deserved. He is a good man, and I hope your three kids inherit both of your kind hearts and gentle ways. I’ve got this picture of you in my head as you were that first time I met you when you were running away from the Masters’ place. Such a skinny little girl, with big eyes full of fear. I never told you before, but I saw myself in you that day. We came a long way didn’t we? I’m sorry I won’t be around to hear how you got on in England, or when your kids get married and have some of their own. I want you to have the furniture I made, give each of them a piece, and tell them I made it with love for you.
I wish you and Rudie a long and happy life together.
Goodbye.
Ross
Dulcie sobbed as she read it, imagining Ross sitting at that jarrah desk in their old house writing it, his dogs about his feet. It was impossible for her to see him as a man of fifty-two. To her he would always be young, lean, with a mop of curly hair.
She handed the letter silently to Rudie and took the paper clip from the newspaper cuttings. One had a headline, The Lost Children Britain Sent Away to Australia, the second was The Nightmare of Bindoon. The third said, The Book That’s Too Hot to Be Published. This was the newest cutting and clearly the old friend Ross had spoken of was pushing to get it published.
Then there were several other smaller cuttings where institutions other than Catholic ones were featured, including the Fairbridge Farm Schools at Pinjarra, but it was the Catholic ones which came under the most fire, with an ex-Christian Brother quoted as saying, ‘It was unbelievable the things that went on at Bindoon, including sodomy.’
‘The poor, poor bastard,’ Rudie sighed as he finished the letter. Tears were trickling down his cheeks, and he took Dulcie’s hand across the table. ‘It’s so cruel that he could never get over it. I just hope he’s at peace now.’
‘Stephan once said that there were some things no one could ever forgive or forget,’ Dulcie said sadly. ‘He had two patients who were survivors of the Holocaust, and they seemed fine for years after counselling. Then one of them killed themselves, the other went off into the outback and became like a hermit, living alone in an old shed. I suppose it was much the same for Ross.’
Rudie picked up the newspaper cuttings to read them. ‘I think Ross was right in one thing,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘These few articles are just the start of it, there’s bound to be more. I wouldn’t mind betting that before long old boys and girls from orphanages all over Australia will begin to speak out. Maybe too those responsible for ruining their lives will be taken to task.’
‘Don’t count on it, Rudie,’ she said, her voice full of cynicism. ‘The Church will shelter their own, and there’ll be plenty of Doubting Thomases out there who assume all orphans are human rejects and not to be believed.’
Rudie got up from the table and came round to her and pulled her up into his arms.
‘When the time comes, you must speak out then,’ he said, kissing her nose.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said, appalled at the thought.
‘Oh yes you could,’ he said firmly. ‘Not for yourself perhaps, but for the Mays and Rosses, and all those countless other boys and girls, British and Australian, who had their lives blighted by the cruelty and lack of care in institutions.’
‘But Ross was afraid of just that. Won’t it make things worse for other people like him?’
‘He wanted you to do something, it’s there in the letter,’ Rudie pointed out. ‘For all we know, those atrocities could still be going on. Could you stay quiet while little children were still being hurt?’
‘But they can’t be, surely, Rudie. This is the eighties, people are enlightened now.’
‘Are they, Dulcie?’ he questioned, looking at her with one eyebrow raised. ‘Maybe those big orphanages like the ones you went to are a thing of the past, but child molesting isn’t. Paedophiles target vulnerable children in every level of society, and I believe everyone should be aware of that.’
Dulcie broke away from his arms and went over to the window. She knew Rudie was right, but there was still a tiny place inside her where the hurts of the past lived on. Even in all the happiness she’d known in the last twenty-six years it remained. She didn’t speak of it, not to Rudie, Stephan or her children, but it was there.
She leaned her forehead against the cool glass and remembered how she used to do the same thing at the Sacred Heart, staring out of the playroom window in the hope that someone might come along to rescue her.
Of course her need to be rescued had gone many, many years ago, but Ross’s letter had brought it home to her that there must be thousands of other men and women who still had that need. Ones who hadn’t been as fortunate as her, where the hurt wasn’t tucked away in a very small place but dominated and poisoned their lives. She knew from her own contacts in the Welfare Department that lack of self-esteem was a major cause in turning people towards drink, gambling, crime and vice. That hurt people went on to hurt others, unless they could find a way to rid themselves of it.
She sighed deeply, knowing she was no Joan of Arc, able
to rush headlong into battle. But she did have the ability to listen, to care, and unlike the many do-gooders who would doubtless rattle their sabres at the first rallying call, she truly understood the nature of the terrible scars these people bore.
Turning back to the table, she picked up Ross’s letter, folded it with the newspaper cuttings and placed it in the box where she kept photographs of May and her old letters. It was only in the past few years that she’d put the photographs of her wedding to Ross and her certificate of annulment in there too. Even at the time she’d sensed something symbolic about putting them together.
May was gone, and now Ross, both deaths precipitated by their sense of worthlessness. She had loved them both, understood their pain. Maybe if their stories were told it would help others to overcome theirs.
She looked up to see Rudie was watching her curiously. ‘They belong together,’ she said by way of an explanation, wiping a tear away from her cheek. ‘Okay, when the time comes I’ll be ready to fight for their cause.’
Afterword by Bruce Blyth
British children transported to Australia – documents forged and names illegally changed – families torn apart – incarcerated in slave camps, exploited, starved and denied education – publicly flogged, humiliated, abused and sexually assaulted.
These atrocities belong not to the nineteenth century but to a period within living memory, with many of the children now in their fifties and sixties. In the middle of the twentieth century, the Child Migration Scheme was intended to relieve pressure on British orphanages straining under the upheavals of six years of war and at the same time populate the colonies with ‘good white British stock’. Australia in particular was crying out for British migrants, and who, it was thought, would make better ‘Aussies’ than young children languishing in UK orphanages? And what twelve-year-old, incarcerated in a dank and dreary English orphanage, would not be tempted by promises of a land of sunshine and beaches, of kangaroos and horses, where fruit falls off trees? In 1945 the Minister for Immigration told the Australian Parliament that the government intended to bring 50,000 orphans to Australia during the next three years.
In fact, between 1947 and 1955, 2,324 orphans were transported from Britain to Australia, their fate in the hands of men and women who wore black robes and habits and worshipped a Saviour who said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me.’
And how those children suffered! Four hundred and fifty of them were incarcerated in four orphanages in WA, which we now know, half a century later, were no more than slave camps where thousands of children, mostly Australian, were exploited, starved, denied an education and subjected to physical and sexual atrocities. Bindoon is particularly notorious following revelations of the horrific crimes committed during the rule of its founder, Christian Brother Francis Paul Keaney. Keaney was revered by an unsuspecting public and shortly before his death in 1954, he was awarded the MBE and ISO. Thousands of admiring citizens, many prominent in public life, paid tribute at his funeral, and in the main forecourt at Bindoon a life-size bronze statue was erected in his honour. Today, the atrocities committed by Keaney and other Christian monks are difficult to comprehend, but every victim is still living with the brutal realities of a childhood mutilated by tyrants like Keaney.
In July 2000 a group of Bindoon survivors wreaked a belated revenge on the monk who had blighted their lives for fifty years. In a howling gale in the dead of a winter night, they hacksawed the head off Keaney’s statue, an act of vandalism which André Malan, a leading Australian journalist, called ‘a funny form of symbolic justice and half a century too late. But Brother Keaney,’ Malan wrote, ‘has finally got what he deserved.’
But with no one to turn to for help or sympathy, many survivors never recovered. For decades they lived through agonies of misplaced guilt and shame and could not reveal to anyone the childhood nightmares which stalked them every day of their lives. It was to be forty years before a survivor of Bindoon was able to put his story on paper. But who could believe it? Not the big publishers who rejected it because, according to an Australian senator, it was ‘too hot to publish’.
As a small, independent publisher, the senator’s comments aroused my interest. I sought out the author, took his manuscript home and sat up all night reading it, unable to put it down. From that moment my life changed, never to be the same again. After reading thirty pages I knew I had to do something with it. It was a shock. Could nuns and clerics really savage children so cruelly? Was it a credible document? But every word and every line echoed with the ring of truth. It hit me hard. With a loving, caring childhood to remember and a long and happy marriage and two adult children to be proud of, I, like most others, admired and respected the dedicated nuns and Brothers who struggled on behalf of the poor, unfortunate orphans placed in their care. Why would anyone think differently?
Geordie Welsh, the author, was no ordinary man. He had spent five years at Bindoon under the notorious Keaney, followed by years as an alcoholic on skid row across Australia. He introduced me to men who had stories just as terrible and just as authentic as his own and my resolve to publish was strengthened by every one. Geordie – Orphan of the Empire was the first book written by a survivor and was widely reviewed in the Australian media, Geordie becoming a well-known character on radio and TV. But just as importantly, it aroused interest among his fellow survivors. At last the truth was out. My office quickly became a rallying point. Every day men poured out their secret stories of childhood terrors which had haunted them for as long as they could remember.
Those early days were emotionally loaded. Over the telephone, I listened to life-hardened men break down in mid-sentence, and as I waited for them to recover, I was filled with anger, horror and disgust. Nothing in life had prepared me for this onslaught. Letters flowed in, letters pages long, painfully written by men who had never written more than a few words at one time.
Out of this turmoil was born VOICES. Three hundred men in Perth, Western Australia, joined together not only to seek justice but to expose the truth. For six long years we fought a bitter battle in the media, through the courts, in parliament and with the support of the public: 30,000 West Australians signed a petition of support. Every inch of the way we had to fight the wealth as well as the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church. But for these survivors of the infamous Bindoon, Clontarf, Castledare and Tardun orphanages the truth was emerging, and at long last people were actually believing them.
The truth, however welcome, was not always kind. The Christian Brothers were not the only ones to suffer as their wicked deeds were finally uncovered. As the truth unfolded, it had to be told through the media. Dark secrets never whispered even to loved ones had to be revealed to the whole world. Facing up to the glare of the TV camera and telling the world that as a child of nine or ten you were raped by a lecherous monk is an act of extraordinary courage. Next day at the local supermarket, the stares and pointed fingers hurt and are hard to ignore. Even harder, perhaps, is the sneering jibe and ribald gesture in the Aussie-macho workplace.
The truth hurt at home too. Wives told me how they were caught unawares, that they knew nothing about the atrocities inflicted on their husbands so long before. One tried to explain to me her anguish and helplessness as her husband broke down beside her as they watched The Leaving of Liverpool on TV.
Another wife, who later became a VOICES committee member, wrote:
… one night he told me about his childhood at Castledare and by the time he had finished he was crying and so was I. He told me that every day of his life it had been with him – he could not get it out of his mind. At first I felt cheated. I could not understand why he had not told me before, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how hard it must have been for him to tell me at all… It will never go away. I still cry for my husband and I know he cries too. Sometimes his tears are silent, it is hard to hide one’s feelings.
In the cruel, bleak and isolated orphanages there was no mother
to love and cuddle a crying child; not a grandmother’s knee to climb up on in search of a comforting hug – just sex-starved Christian Brothers wielding monstrous leather straps and committing evil deeds upon innocent boys in the dead of night. In 1948, three inspectors of the Child Welfare Department reported:
Castledare is catering for children who are still little more than babies, who need love, affection, care and attention which a child of such age would get from a mother… there is an immediate necessity for the touch of a woman’s hand.
Another inspector visiting Bindoon reported: ‘… the home is entirely lacking in the necessary female staff.’
There is no doubt that the lack of a female presence in childhood has had a detrimental and lasting effect upon the survivors. Many men and their partners say how difficult their lives have been as a result of the husband’s upbringing. While many have found it impossible to establish and maintain relationships, the parental bond with children has also been difficult.
One man told me that when his wife died after their fifteen-year marriage, he stood by as his fourteen-year-old son and only child wept with grief. He said:
I knew I had to comfort him, put my arms around him, console him. He was my son, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. In the orphanage, no one touched us out of genuine love or affection and as my son sobbed in front of me, I was still trapped by the loathsome hand of the orphanage.
In fact, the wounds inflicted in the orphanages never heal. Paul Bennet, a Canadian therapist who treated boys abused by Christian Brothers, wrote: ‘None of these guys will ever be cured and they will probably spend the rest of their lives trying to recover… many of them carry tremendous rage, anger, confusion, guilt and shame.’
This volatility is never far below the surface and is often more wounding to the victim than to those who are subjected to it. Man after man has explained to me how they cannot control the anger which flares up with little reason and no warning. Those they love and those who help them are particularly vulnerable.