There were actually five attempts to make me a cup of tea. The brothers couldn’t manage it. They seemed even more nervous around me than I was in their company.
‘Would you like breakfast?’ I was asked.
‘No, thank you,’ said Desmond. ‘We might take a stroll. What time is mass?’
‘We don’t have mass on a Sunday. We don’t open the church,’ said a brother. ‘We have it on Saturday evening.’
This surprised me a little. I expected the Christian Brothers to be far more traditional in their worship, or at least to leave the church open on a Sunday.
‘Can we look at the workshops?’ Desmond asked.
‘If you wish,’ came the reply.
As we left the dining-room, Desmond shook hands with several of the brothers he knew well and then stayed by my side as we emerged outside. It was barely 8.00 a.m., but the temperature had already begun to climb. We kept to the shade of the administration building and began walking.
I was very quiet. Desmond said I just grew smaller and smaller like Alice in Wonderland. He thought I might disappear. I was tiptoeing, as if in a church, while Desmond pointed out different buildings and told me stories.
As a boy, Desmond had visited Bindoon regularly, normally on weekends because there was work to be done or sporting events being arranged. Later, when he left Clontarf, he would attend the Old Boys’ reunions to keep in touch with friends.
As we walked, Desmond would say things to me like, ‘Of course, loads of fiddling went on in there.’ That’s how he described the sexual abuse.
It was hard to believe that over a decade successive boatloads of boys could have built the great central building, plus the church, school, farm buildings and a dam for irrigation. They dynamited rock from the quarry, loaded it on trucks, unloaded it at the building site, chiselled it to size and put it into place under the supervision of two Italian stonemasons.
Because the migrants had told me so much, Desmond assumed that I’d know every brick in every building. He was nearly right. As we walked, all the stories came back to me. The descriptions given by so many men over the years were so accurate, that I felt as if I’d been to Bindoon hundreds of times. I could have found their dormitories and probably identified individuals’ beds.
There is a grandeur and serenity about the buildings which is totally at odds with what happened there. On one level it was quite beautiful, but at what cost? Here was this wonderful place surrounded by trees and rolling hills; with handsome buildings and cooling shade. For a moment, its beauty made me forget – but only for a moment. I reflected that flowers can grow everywhere, even in an unloved garden.
Desmond led me to a large classroom with lathes and benches that looked quite old. This was where the boys had learned woodwork. At the front desk, an elderly brother seemed quite shocked to see us. He was shaking, and I thought perhaps he was unwell.
He wouldn’t look up as we walked between the benches toward him.
‘Hello, Brother, how are you?’ said Desmond. ‘I’m just showing Mrs Humphreys round the workshops. Do you mind?’
We all shook hands and they began talking, about the weather, the school and farming, until the brother lapsed briefly into silence and raised his sad eyes to Desmond’s.
‘You’re that man with the factory who has done all the repairs for us over the years and never charged us.’
Desmond said, ‘That’s right. That’s me.’
‘Have you found your family then?’ he whispered.
‘I’ve just come back from England. I went over to meet my mum.’
There was absolute quiet. Even the clock on the wall seemed to slow.
‘And this is Mrs Humphreys who found my mother. She’s the lady who takes the boys home.’
The brother appeared uneasy and we all stood in silence.
We left soon afterwards. The car sent a cloud of dust drifting on the breeze and carried us away as fast as Desmond dared drive over the ruts and potholes.
On the way back to Perth, Desmond persuaded me to visit Clontarf, the orphanage where he had spent most of his childhood. Initially I refused to go through the same experience again. I was happy to rest and listen to Mozart on the car stereo. At the same time, I was worried about the impact of Barry Coldrey’s insensitive remarks in the morning’s papers. There would be calls waiting for me at the hotel from outraged child migrants. But Desmond was insistent, and I sensed that he wanted me to see the place where he’d grown up because it would help me understand him and what he had been through.
St Joseph’s Clontarf, like Bindoon, is set in beautiful surroundings on the banks of a river and surrounded by well-established trees. Desmond told me that some years earlier it had become an aboriginal college, still run by the Christian Brothers.
The buildings weren’t built on such a grand scale as at Bindoon but it still looked idyllic. We drove through the large stone pillars along the straight driveway and parked in front of the main building. The college was almost deserted.
Desmond was full of stories, pointing out familiar places. He told me how he would wake each morning to the sound of birds in the gum-trees.
I asked him, ‘Where are the verandas where the rain used to slant in and wet your beds?’
‘You’re walking on them. You’re walking in the puddles.’
As we left, Desmond picked some flowering gumnuts from the trees and gave them to me as a reminder of my visit.
We sat for a long while saying nothing after he parked at the hotel. I leaned against the car door, staring up at a clear sky. I realized that Desmond, too, had been disturbed by the visit. For the first time he’d seen Bindoon through somebody else’s eyes. The unquestioning loyalty, his enormous capacity to forgive, his unwillingness to look back in anger, were all brought sharply into focus.
Maybe some good will come of it after all, I thought.
‘I put you in a difficult position out there at Bindoon,’ he said, obviously upset.
‘I was expecting it,’ I told him.
But I wondered, with a shudder, whether one of the brothers I had shaken hands with had been involved in the abuse.
I decided I’d rather not know the answer.
30
I arrived back in Melbourne nine days before The Leaving of Liverpool was screened. My plane touched down only ten minutes before Yvonne’s flight from England.
It was obvious that John and I weren’t coping with the demands created by the television series – the media and political interest were both greater than anyone had imagined. The trustees decided to send Yvonne out to help.
John and Harold met us at the airport, both anxious about the death threats in Perth. Harold explained things to a bemused Yvonne as they drove to Canning Street. It was a terrible beginning to her first trip to Australia.
We were staying at the house – John and I each took the bedrooms and Yvonne had a camp bed downstairs in the office, near the fax machine which beeped and hummed through the night. It didn’t matter – none of us caught much sleep in the next fortnight.
Frances Swaine arrived a day later and began interviewing the child migrants. Frances had asked if she could use our offices to ensure that counsellors were near by if a child migrant became distressed.
For legal purposes, it was essential to obtain very detailed histories and discover the precise circumstances under which each child migrant was sent to Australia. Frances believed they deserved to have the circumstances of their emigration and the damage they suffered investigated fully, and the question of compensation explored.
The traffic coming through the house made it difficult to work. I was also worried about the Trust in Nottingham. Our full-time social worker Joan Kerry was virtually holding the fort on her own. What I didn’t need was a problem with the ABC.
‘Auntie’, as the corporation is affectionately known, had not budgeted for a telephone help-line service. I knew The Leaving of Liverpool was destined to cause an enormous stir and I wanted
trained counsellors to field the calls.
In a series of angry exchanges, I made it clear to the ABC that it was uncaring and potentially dangerous to put such an emotive programme out and not provide facilities to cope with the reaction. Eventually, the funds were found.
We were given eight lines in the corporation’s Melbourne studios, and after the first episode, a message was screened stating that counsellors were available on certain numbers.
If anything, the reaction was more powerful than the response to Lost Children of the Empire in 1989.
When the drama finished, shortly after 10.00 p.m., the phones began ringing. There were tears and pleas for help; more stories of abuse and desolation. Our lines were so jammed that people began calling the ABC’s general switchboard – not just in Melbourne, but in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.
The flowering gumnuts that Desmond had given me from St Joseph’s Clontarf were sitting on the tables as the counsellors began taking the calls. It was bitterly ironic. I listened to old boys talking of their abuse and desolation, and in front of me were these flowers that could easily seduce one into thinking that Clontarf was a lovely place.
‘It was like a bloody concentration camp – floggings unlimited,’ said one man who had suffered abuse.
A young woman rang: ‘I’m ringing on behalf of my mother who was a child migrant. She’s dead now but she always wondered why she was sent. Why? Why?’
Another woman wanted to tell us about her old school friend, Margaret, who was from the UK. ‘Nuns would strap her all the time, mercilessly. Welts all over her. They wouldn’t feed her. We tried to give her food. We used to save our collection money to buy it. Poor Margaret. She’d done nothing wrong. The nuns wanted to break her spirit.’
A wife rang to say her husband still had nightmares about his life as a child migrant. ‘Inside he’s still just a little boy,’ she said.
In the early hours of the morning, I turned the telephones off and went back to Canning Street to sleep. There, the answering machine was full and the telephone rang all night. By morning, child migrants began arriving. Some of them had driven hundreds of miles.
John answered a knock at the door and found an anxious man on the doorstep with tears rolling down his face. Another had driven about 250 miles from Holbrook in NSW; and one arrived on a flight from Brisbane. We invited them inside and gave them cups of tea while they waited.
I will never forget one particular child migrant who arrived that day. I hadn’t met him before but he had this terribly haunted look. Immediately I knew that I couldn’t ask him to wait, or to come back later.
I showed him into the back sitting-room, the quietest place, and made him a cup of tea. As we sat down, he turned to me and said, ‘You know what they did to us, don’t you? You know! You know what happened to us. Have you been there? Have you been to that bloody terrible place?’
He was talking about Bindoon.
‘I’m in a terrible mess. A terrible mess. I was five years old and a brother put me on the back of his horse and took me out to the country and tied me to a tree and just raped me time after time. Then he left me there – tied to this tree – and just rode off. I was crying and bleeding. When I got free I ran to this convent, to the nuns, to the women. I ran there and they put me to bed.’
I was perfectly still. I didn’t blink, or reach out to him, or utter a word. When somebody tells you that he was tied to a tree and raped by somebody he trusted, and then left there, crying, you don’t move an eyelash because he’s looking to see if you’re disgusted. He wants to know if you find it repulsive or degrading. You don’t move. You sit still to show him that it doesn’t matter; that he’s still the same person. You accept him as an individual who needs to share his pain.
No matter how many stories of abuse I hear, I am always shocked. You can’t be prepared. I’m not shocked by the knowledge that brothers or priests or others are capable of such brutality. It’s the total devastation of the victim that stuns me; the fact that he has held on to his pain for all these years. It humbles me.
When you think of that raped child being eight years old, and then ten and fifteen and then being a young man and going to work for the first time; and finding a girlfriend, becoming a husband and a father – all those phases of life that we go through – and this is his baggage; this is what he takes with him through all those changes. And then suddenly there is a programme on the television and he somehow finds the courage or the anger, or whatever it takes, to come and say, ‘I’m giving you this. I’ve carried it for long enough. I’m giving it to you now.’
It’s no good sitting there saying I don’t want it. You take their baggage because you know it’s too heavy for one person to carry through a lifetime.
31
The headlines said it all.
‘Liverpool the Best’, ‘Gripping Tragedy of Child Migrants’, ‘Castaways of Empire in an Inspiring Drama’.
Every major newspaper carried the story, publishing interviews, location reports or television previews and reviews.
The Leaving of Liverpool became one of the ABC’s best-rating series ever and took top honours at the Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, picking up the prize for best original mini-series.
Philip Adams, one of Australia’s leading social commentators, wrote in The Australian: ‘If this isn’t a masterpiece, it’s the next best thing. The Leaving of Liverpool is so compelling, so beautifully crafted, you view it with a mixture of anguish and wonderment, wishing you could disbelieve it, looking for flaws that might allow you to escape its pain and sadness …’
Of course, the child care agencies were less enthused. The Catholic Church displayed an uneasy mixture of defence and concern, learning perhaps from past mistakes that outright denials won it few friends. Far better to display a sense of sadness and an eagerness to help.
Dr Barry Coldrey fielded most of the calls from the media, and described the drama as powerful but ‘unbalanced’. At the same time, he continued the quiet offensive, directing blame to the British and Australian governments.
The Editor of the Catholic Record was more outspoken, telling readers: ‘A very small group of complainants are riding on the back of Liverpool and the earlier BBC production Lost Children of the Empire to captivate press, radio and television with their selective defamatory reconstruction of documented history …
‘The smug middle-class Australian critics of today had best go back to what their parents were saying about migration in the 1950s and whether Australia House London is to be indicted for the millions of Britishers who landed with a jolt in Australia’s so-called post-war “paradise”.
‘In what passes as a media debate in the late 1900s the Christian Brothers will have to live with being damned whether they do or don’t reply to these cultivated impressions …’
By September, Western Australia’s State parliament was drawn into the debate. Philip Pendal, a Liberal Party MP and ‘product of a Catholic education’ told the House he was fed up with ‘Kick a Mick Week’.
‘Over the last 160 odd years, Western Australian society has bled dry the services of Catholic institutions that were among the few to minister to outcasts in our society.
‘Thousands of priests, nuns and brothers have devoted their lives to lepers, drunks, orphans and rejects at a time when those people were abandoned by most sections of society, including successive governments. The efforts of those people are unquestionably being denigrated because of an errant few …
‘I am sure that some misfits crept into the priesthood and the religious life of the Catholic Church. The bad-apple syndrome is as old as time itself. Those who know their Bible history from a Christian perspective will know that our friend Judas was only the first weak link. To the extent that misfits creep into the system, I do not condone their actions and neither does the Catholic Church.’
The media debate raged on. My main concern was that in the furore surrounding The Leaving of Liverpool, everybody was focusin
g on the involvement of the Christian Brothers and the Catholic Church. The child migration issue was not limited to one country or one agency. Western Australia wasn’t the only place where children were sent and suffered hardship, degradation and abuse.
I also stressed to journalists that not all child migrants complained of such harsh treatment. Some felt they were treated with kindness and compassion in the children’s homes. They did not witness or suffer abuse or cruelty and had fond memories of their childhoods. This, however, did not stop either their longing to find their families or their anger at having been told they were orphans.
In the first forty-eight hours after The Leaving of Liverpool, we received more than 700 calls on the hotlines – increasing the backlog of missing families. When I returned to Perth before flying home, my hotel room floor was littered with new files.
Amid this organized chaos, a large brown envelope was delivered to the hotel. I didn’t have time to open it or recognize the handwriting. I simply assumed it contained documents sent to me by a child migrant who wanted to find his or her family.
I slid the envelope into my briefcase, hoping to read its contents during the flight or when I got back to Nottingham.
32
It was wonderful to be home. I wandered through the house, constantly ambushing Mervyn, Ben and Rachel with unexpected hugs. I needed the reassurance and comfort of holding them close.
By now Rachel was old enough to understand. While she wanted us to spend more time together, she appreciated that time was running out for many child migrants and that our family sacrifice was minor compared with their problems.
But not long after I returned, Rachel said something that stopped me in my tracks. She had noticed that my hair was falling out again – it was all over the towels and the bathroom floor. Putting her arms around me, Rachel whispered, ‘Oh, Mum, it’s time somebody said to them that you belong to us.’
Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine) Page 27