I made Lizzie tell me what had happened on that night and she did.
When Lizzie was getting really drunk and needed to sit down, Martin walked her out to his car and got her to sit in the back seat. He sat next to her, putting his arm around her so she could not get out. Then despite her protests Will and Dan got into the car as well. They took her to the beach at Nielsen Park, just her with three big strong men.
They said, “You didn’t think we brought a pretty little poor girl out to a party just to admire her did you. Now it is time to pay us back for being nice to you”
Then two of them held her down while the third on raped her, and then they each had a turn. When they were finished they said she would be stupid to tell anyone, because no one would believe her.
In shame and terror Lizzie ran off and finally found her way back to her home next day while her mother was at church. She would tell no one. We, her friends, made little effort to find out and help. Two months later Lizzie discovered she was going to have a baby from that awful night, her only time with a man, she had never even held hands with or kissed a boy before.
She did not know what to do and at first tried to pretend it was not true. Then she felt the baby move and knew she wanted to have it, she decided that she would love this child despite its awful conception. She knew that if the secret came out it would be taken from her and she was determined not to let this happen. So she hid her pregnancy and saved her money.
At the same time she made a plan that when her secret was found out she would catch a train to Melbourne and have her baby there and find a way to keep it. On this day, when I saw her again, the factory where she worked, had just discovered her pregnancy and sacked her.
Now this fifteen year old girl, with only seventy pounds, was going to a city where she knew no one, so she could keep her baby, a baby that was the result of that rape by these brutal men.
When I found this out I was so ashamed at my part. But Lizzie said to me, “Don’t feel bad, you could not have known what would happen. And despite the awful way in which it happened, this baby is something to be loved and cherished.“
Next time I heard from Lizzie was a few months later. She was in Perth waiting for the boat to take her to Broome. She had her baby, Catherine, now just ten weeks old with her. At first Lizzie had tried to support herself by working in a café, but when she was down to her last ten pounds she had taken a job as a prostitute.
She said it was simple, her only choice was to do this so as to be able to keep and feed her baby. There was no self-pity; in fact she was proud and in control of her life. She had now saved three hundred pounds. Then someone had found out about her age, still not sixteen, and the baby. They told the authorities and they were searching for her. She knew she must leave Melbourne that afternoon or Social Security and the Police would come and take her baby away and place her in a remand home. So she caught a train to Adelaide and then Perth. She was still running.
So she went to the farthest side of the country, just her and her tiny baby to start a new life again. The letter said not to worry about her, her life had been hard when first she came to Melbourne, but now she was rich and going to a new place, where no one would find here. Here she knew she could make a new life for herself with the money she had saved.
The next time I heard from Lizzie was over two years later. She was now eighteen. She owned her own café in Broome, and had two thousand pounds in the bank. She sent me a photo of her and second photo of Catherine, playing with other children in the street. They both looked beautiful and so happy.
For Lizzie all those bad things were a distant memory and she looked forward to seeing me again one day, she said in another year or two if her business kept growing she would fly to Sydney with her baby to see her Mum and she would visit me too.
She said she had left her life as a street girl in Melbourne behind, as she did not want her child to grow up with that, even though she had no personal shame. It was a necessity that life had forced on her, but she would prefer that her daughter and mother did not know.
The years went by and for a while I heard no more from Lizzie. Finally I heard from Lizzie again three years ago, another letter which told me the last part of this tale. One of the men who had raped her had discovered she was living in Broome. Now he came to see her.
He told her that the three men who had raped her before, along with another man who had tried to abuse her in Melbourne, were all coming to Broome in a week’s time. They all knew she was there and they expected to spend a night with her, “to repeat their former pleasures”, he said. If she did not give them what they wanted they would tell the whole town of her life as a prostitute. They also threatened harm to her daughter.
Lizzie was terrified; she did not know what to do, she was in fear for her daughter, in fear for herself. Perhaps she should have fought back, asked her friends for help, gone to the police. But these were powerful and wealthy men; it was her word against four of them.
She took the only choice she could see, she ran again. This time she took her car, and her six year old daughter and a handful of possessions. She was almost totally unprepared but set out to drive across the desert to Alice Springs. Somehow, in her panicked brain, she felt that safety lay with distance and she must keep running, putting distance between herself and these evil men.
A hundred miles into the desert Lizzie’s car broke down, leaving her and her daughter with almost no water or food, in a barren and pitiless landscape. Almost certainly she would have died, had it not been for a couple strange, almost miraculous coincidences.
One was a friend of her childhood, Sophie, from back when she was eight years old and lived in their house in Balmain. Sophie came to her daughter, Catherine, appearing in her mind. She told her the way to a small pool of water, hidden a mile out in the desert. This water kept them alive when they otherwise would have died of thirst.
Three days later they were rescued by a group of aborigines who took then to their own place in the desert. These people fed them, they shared their houses. They hugged and played with Catherine, they made Lizzie into one of their family.
So Lizzie now lives in the desert with a small aboriginal tribe. Since going there she has married her true love and they now have two further children. She and her husband Robbie are the happiest people I know.
They share all they have with these aboriginal people and these people share all they have in return. Lizzie teaches all the children to read and write, Robbie helps with building and fixing things, the people share their knowledge of the desert and share their desert food, they teach her children the aboriginal ways and stories.
When I asked Lizzie to help me pursue and bring to justice these evil men, those who raped her when she was fifteen and fathered her first child, she agreed to do so. But she told me it was not in retribution for herself; she needs nothing from them and nothing they or anyone else can say can touch her happiness anymore.
But she said she needed to do it to stop them from hurting others, Mimi and Alicia and the many others whose names we do not know but who are out there too. Lizzie was not the first person they raped, and there have been many others since. We only know of three so far, but we know there will be others who hide the same secret.
So Lizzie says to them all, to Mimi and Alicia who she has met and hugged and cried with, and to the others to whom she would give her love if she knew your names.
“Have courage, speak out, tell your story! Do not let them make you run and hide like I did.”
And to us all she says; “Do not allow this outrage to go on. Do not allow these men to hide from their crimes through a legal fiction. Demand justice for them all. Speak!
Chapter 26 - Return to the Desert
The day the paper published the story all the phones rang of their hooks, both at this newspaper and also at the offices of every politician. It was 90% women though an occasional man rang through to lend support, and a few brave or stupid men tried to defen
d the indefensible.
But how could anyone say that it was anything but criminal for these three men to have deliberately plotted to rape fourteen and fifteen year old girls and to have continued this behaviour over at least ten years.
Lizzie’s was the first testimony but it was generally agreed that she was by no means their first victim; all were agreed that her testimony suggested prior events and a practised method. Then there was a known second case three years later and the last case, they knew of, barely two years ago, in this case with the involvement of a fourth man.
It enraged the public beyond belief that they had been denied the opportunity to see the men face trial by a legal technicality. By the end of the day a trading halt had been called on the shares on Newcastle Transport, with a fall of over 50% percent in the listed share price. With the expansion that the firm had done over the last two years, the share holding of Mr Martin Wallis was now reduced to less than 35%. So, with the desertion of support from all the other board members, his position was totally untenable along with that of his 3 friends. By the end of the day they all had lost their jobs.
The general business opinion was that nothing could save the company now, it was over geared and its business revenues would collapse due to the level of outrage across wide sections of the community, leading to demands that no future contracts with this firm be entered into. There was a wide view that all shares in the company would be worthless by the end of the month and, as soon as trading resumed, a fire-sale was expected.
Then there were also suggestions of a new trial being launched. The DPP had given an undertaking to review all evidence again to see if new grounds or offences could be found for a further trial. In addition several further girls and women had come forward claiming a similar experience and there was widespread opinion that this would give the basis for further charges. Commentators speculated on civil damages claims being launches by the injured parties as well which was considered likely to bankrupt the individuals and perhaps affect the company further.
All this largely passed Robbie and Lizzie by. They politely declined requests for interviews. Their representatives merely re-iterated that they stood by their stories and they would leave it for others to discuss what may follow.
Lizzie spent time with her mother, brother and close friends when not with Robbie or her children. Robbie swam in the harbour and walked along the Balmain streets relying on his largely unknown status to keep his freedom from being drawn in.
But the journalists were now beginning to hound the family, to stop outside the Balmain house in the hope for doorstop interviews, to try and snap photos of the children at play, or Lizzie through the window. Lizzie was pleased that justice had been served in this strange public way, but she had no desire to continue her own celebrity status.
After four days, Robbie came home from a walk and said that today some people had connected him with the case and had taken to following him with cameras and trying to ask questions. He was polite and thanked them for their well-meaning concern. But it was all becoming a complete pain in the behind.
So they made a mutual decision that enough was enough, they would take the flight tomorrow which returned to Darwin and the connecting flight to Broome the following morning.
It left early in the morning. Before the journalists woke up they were gone in a taxi to the airport. The next day they came back to Broome, on a steamy hot day, feeling pleasure in freedom.
But even here some assiduous journalists followed. So they packed up their bus, a four wheel drive camper model, and drove to the desert, down past Halls Creek.
It was late in the evening when they came to this place, the place which Cathy called Sophie’s Place, on the rock ridge gazing out across endless desert dunes. The stars were out. A low half-moon hung in the mid-sky. The five of them stood together gazing in awe at the bright desert sky. This was their place; the desert had brought them home and now welcomed them back into its endless embrace.
About the Author
Graham Wilson lives in Sydney Australia. He has completed and published nine books, including three in this Old Balmain House Series.
His first novel in this series, tells the story of a small girl who went missing 100 years ago with her best friend and was never found, leaving a trail of grief down through generations until the finally her story is discovered. It is based in the real Balmain, an early inner Sydney suburb, with its real locations and historical events providing part of the story background. This second novel in this series, ‘Lizzie's Tale’ builds on "The Old Balmain House" setting, It is the story of a working class teenage girl who lives in this same house in the 1950s and 1960s, It tells of how she becomes pregnant she is determined not to surrender her baby for adoption, and her struggle to survive. The series concludes with the book ‘Devils Choice’ which follows the life of Lizzie’s daughter Catherine and the awful choice she too must make through confronting her mother’s rapists.
Graham has also written five novels in the Crocodile Spirit Dreaming Series. The first novel ‘An English Visitor’ tells the story of an English backpacker who visits the Northern Territory and becomes captivated and in great danger from a man who loves crocodiles. The second book in the series, ‘Crocodile Man’, follows the consequences of the first book based around the discovery of this man's remains and the main character being placed on trial for murder. The third book, ‘The Empty Place’, is about the struggle of the main character to retain her sanity in jail while her family and friends desperately try to find out what really happened on that fateful day before it is too late. Book 4, ‘Lost Girls’ is the story of four missing backpackers whose lives are revealed in this man’s diary. It is also the story of the search for the main character who has vanished too. Book 5, ‘Sunlit Shadow Dance’ concludes the series and begins with a girl who appears in a remote aboriginal community with no memory and how she rebuilds her life but alongside this come dark shadows that threaten to overwhelm her.
Graham has also written a family memoir "Children of Arnhem's Kaleidoscope." It tells of his childhood in an aboriginal community in remote Arnhem Land, in Australia's Northern Territory, one of its last frontiers. It tells of the people, danger and beauty of this place, and of its transformation over the last half century with the coming of aboriginal rights and the discovery or uranium. It also tells of his surviving an attack by a large crocodile.
In his non writing life he is a wildlife veterinarian working with zoo animals and on national parks.
More information about Graham and his books and writing is available from the following sites:
Graham Wilson – Australian Author on Facebook
Graham Wilson Author Profile on Smashwords and Amazon
Graham Wilson’s Publishing Web Page
www.beyondbeyondbooks.com.au
If you want to contact Graham directly please use the email:
[email protected]
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