by Denis Ryan
Mick was a self-effacing copper who’d lived a life of adventure in the navy and then the police. He’d been a CIB detective in Melbourne. I’d worked with him out of Russell Street. His sister, Kath, had married my old senior officer, the straight-laced, tough Detective Sergeant Jack Meehan.
Mick had got back into uniform, was promoted to sergeant and transferred to Mildura. His wife had family in the district, including an uncle in Ouyen. Like me, he had come to Mildura unaware of the dark force of nature that was Jim Barritt.
Mick’s surname preceded him to Mildura and Barritt, the Catholic bigot, must have rubbed his hands together, thinking he had another like mind on his way up to bolster the town’s Catholic Mafia.
Barritt would discover that assumption is the mother of all stuff-ups. Despite the Irish name, Mick O’Donnell was a lapsed Catholic who had married a Protestant and become a Freemason. His wife’s uncle in Ouyen was the grandmaster of the local lodge. Barritt knew none of this at the time. When Mick arrived, Barritt, expecting another member of the ‘one of us club’, took Mick to his heart and showed him around the traps, introducing him to Joe Kearney, clerk of the courts, and Joe Hayes, the magistrate who was in Mildura at the time. The excursion with Barritt took longer than expected and Mick did not get the grand introduction to Father John Day, as I did.
Somewhere along the line, one of Barritt’s confreres let it be known that he had met Mick at the annual Freemason’s picnic at Ouyen and that Mick’s wife’s uncle was a bigwig in the local Masons. And that was the end of the conviviality between Mick and Barritt. From ‘one of us’, Mick became ‘one of them’, and Barritt went out of his way to make Mick’s time in Mildura as difficult as he could.
One minor infringement of the police regulations—an ‘i’ not dotted or a ‘t’ not crossed—and Barritt would fire off a report to the inspector. But Mick was a very good police officer. I didn’t give a damn about his associations outside the force.
Mick had received a complaint from a Mildura local. The man’s young son was in grade six at Sacred Heart Primary School. The boy had come home from school one day to tell his dad that Father John Day had set upon him, pinned him down and fondled his penis.
It was a serious complaint—a CIB matter—and Mick referred it to Trippy. Trippy told Mick that it was not the first time he had received complaints about Day for sexually assaulting young children, mainly boys. Almost apologetically, Trippy informed Mick that these complaints were invariably snaffled by Barritt. Trippy wasn’t allowed to touch them. It was all part of the agreement that Trippy had with Barritt, so they would stay out of each other’s way. Any complaint against Day went straight to Barritt.
In the normal course of events, a uniform police officer would simply approach the detective and follow up on the complaint—ask the detective what had transpired. But Barritt was such an unapproachable bastard that the uniform boys rarely did this. And Barritt had been bullying and picking on Mick ever since he had arrived in Mildura.
Having heard nothing, and not wanting to have another scrap with the obdurate Barritt, Mick went straight out to the complainant’s home to ask what was going on. The bloke told him straight out that Barritt had come around to his house and talked him into withdrawing the complaint. Barritt had painted a picture of untold scandal and shame, and told him that his boy had made serious allegations against a good man and a fine priest. The Catholic Church would not take that lying down. Sound and fury and the wrath of God were to be expected if the man proceeded with the complaint. The man felt he had no choice but to withdraw the complaint. Mick asked him if he was willing to reinstate it, but the man steadfastly refused.
There was nothing Mick could do but now he had an inkling of Day’s secret crimes against children. Trippy had told him that this was not the first time Barritt had stood over an anxious parent who had learnt that his son or daughter had been abused by Day.
Neither Mick nor Trippy ever told me about these complaints or about how Barritt had intervened and let Day off the hook. But in 2006, Mick published his memoirs, A Little Bit O’ Luck, a collection of mostly amusing anecdotes of his life. He sent me a copy with a note inside the front cover written in his own hand.
‘Here you go, Dinny. There are parts in this book that will interest you,’ the note from Mick read.
I was thunderstruck when I read it. It was evidence of Day’s paedophilia and confirmation of Barritt’s collusion with Day, protecting this vile priest from the reach of the law, and a succinct rebuttal of Barritt’s subsequent denials of any knowledge of Day’s disgusting abuse of children.
Why had Mick and Trippy not acted? Why had they not taken these complaints further, over Barritt’s head and up the chain of command? And why didn’t they tell me? Perhaps they saw me as one of the Catholic Mafia, or maybe they thought that because of my faith I would be disinclined to pursue Day. They were wrong about that. But they knew the Victoria Police better than I did. Mick and Trippy concluded that the slithering, crawling contents of that particular can would be better left unopened.
When my turn came, I determined that the can would be opened and the worms, grubs and maggots therein held up to the light. And in doing so, I lost it all—my career, my pension, my wife, my health and my sanity.
Barritt was a member of the Catholic Mafia in Mildura, though the organisational structure may not have been as complex as the Mafia in the United States. Barritt’s mafia was designed on an equilateral triangular structure, with Day— the spiritual leader of the dark, perverse group—at the top; Barritt on the right-hand vertex below; and opposite Barritt, Joe Kearney. Kearney was the law; Barritt, the order.
Barritt and Kearney were foot soldiers for Day. Barritt was Day’s minder while the opportunist Kearney was his money man. Together they offered Day protection and, within the confines of the Mildura district, almost unfettered power. Barritt had the police stitched up, and Kearney, the courts. Day was free to do as he pleased. It was a dirty, corrupt triumvirate, an unholy trinity with Day at the forefront.
Joe Kearney was the clerk of the courts, a position of no great consequence in Melbourne, but in a country town like Mildura at that time he had greater status and authority. Without a sitting magistrate in the district, Kearney was the most senior officer of the court in Mildura.
Joe Hayes was the circuit magistrate who appeared in Mildura when necessary, but he would preside over matters in the town and then move on to other courts in his district— Ararat, Stawell, Horsham. Then Kearney was left to his own devices. In a country town like Mildura, a man like Kearney could impose himself as a person of almost untold authority—judge and jury all in one.
Kearney was a short, solidly built man with thick, wavy brown hair, parted on the left-hand side. There wasn’t a time where I didn’t see him without a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was a chain smoker and heavy whisky drinker who would help himself to his first glass of the day before the sun was over the yardarm.
Despite the ash that would fleck and speckle his suit pants throughout the day, every morning Kearney could be seen at his desk, neatly dressed, the ash gone as if its presence the previous day had been an apparition, the pleat on his trousers razor sharp. His appearance would degenerate throughout the day, as if his clothes had begun to reflect the stains of his own personal moral decay.
He’d been a good Australian Rules footballer, or so I had been told. He walked with a marked limp, and the story was that he’d done his left knee while chasing a football around the park when he was a young man.
Kearney had a staff of three—two male assistants and a female—and he ruled the court with the air of a tyrant. He was a deviant and a fraud. With a lofty air, he dispensed free legal advice to anyone who sought it and to many who didn’t.
Kearney oversaw all matters relating to the function of the Mildura Court. This included the dispensation of court-ordered family maintenance payments to women in Mildura who were divorced.
It was not easy b
eing a single mother in those days. And the plight of these women was made a good deal more difficult by Kearney. He would make them endure his abhorrent jokes and lewd remarks before he would deign to hand over their cheques. The cheques belonged to the women anyway, but he had them bluffed into believing that he held absolute discretion over how much they would be paid or indeed if they would be paid at all. The women were fearful and intimidated, and would not report him. They believed that Kearney held the key to their financial wellbeing.
If I had known that he was monstering women, I would have been all over him—locked him up, charged him and put him through the courts he purported to represent, but everything was hushed up by his office.
God only knows the dread these poor women suffered at the thought of having to visit Kearney to get the measly amounts of money that was their due anyway. At some point, Kearney’s behaviour towards women took a turn for the worse: he raped a woman in his office. She fled, having fought Kearney off, but would not report the incident to the police. He had control of her maintenance payments and, in her mind, Kearney held the power of her very existence in his hands. She could not challenge him.
Kearney held the keys to the court’s coffers. It wasn’t just maintenance payments. There were also costs awarded in the course of prosecutions and fines imposed by the court to be paid out. Kearney had access to them all. He had deluded himself into believing that the money was his. That delusion is a small step away from fraud, and it appears Kearney made the move effortlessly. By my estimate, he had been rorting court funds for two decades.
Kearney was a Catholic, too, but he was not an overtly pious man like Barritt. He seemed to view the Catholic Church as a kind of social club, a club he wanted to be in the midst of in order to impose himself and reap some personal rewards. That was how Joe Kearney found himself as treasurer of Mildura Catholic Church parish funds and Father John Day’s bagman.
Kearney was also treasurer of the parish council, overseeing all funds for the parish. This included funds paid by the Commonwealth government for the administration and maintenance of the Catholic primary and secondary schools in the parish. These were substantial amounts of money set aside for teaching resources, curriculum development, building maintenance and teachers’ salaries.
Kearney knew a rort when he saw one. Like most rorts, it was all terribly easy. He simply created a non-existent teacher’s position at Sacred Heart School, the Catholic primary school adjacent to the Mildura church. Then he hired a teacher who did not exist. When the Commonwealth government dutifully paid the salary to this ‘teacher’, Kearney was there, sticking the money in his kick.
Some of the money no doubt ended up in Kearney’s back pocket, but the bulk of it was given to Father John Day to keep him in his American cars, fine wines and imported Scotch, and to pay for his prostitutes.
Day was one of the Catholic Church’s builders. That was why he was held in such regard. Every parish he called home—and there were many—would see him badgering parishioners for money to build churches and extend existing ones into vast monoliths. Not for the glorification of God: it was all for the glorification of Father John Day and the Catholic Church. Day considered it his duty to extort funds from anyone prepared to pay up, and he and Kearney oversaw the collection of money and dispersed it as they saw fit.
It wasn’t the only rort they had going. The church building fund was another shakedown that Kearney and Day used as their own personal slush fund.
The notion of sacrificial giving wasn’t new to Mildura’s Catholic parishioners, but Kearney and Day took it to the level of extortion. Every Sunday, Day would bully and berate parishioners to empty their pockets, not just into the collection plates that Barritt would stomp down the aisle with, but also in letters demanding donations for the building fund. They didn’t get a cracker from me but many Catholics in Mildura were swayed by Day’s constant exhortations for more and more money.
Every couple of months Day arranged trips down to Melbourne for some of the wealthier parishioners in Mildura. They would stay at Melbourne’s original four-star hotel, the Southern Cross Hotel, on the Saturday night and return to Mildura the following day. It was all part of the fund-raising drive and Day was up front that the church building fund would receive a cut from the hotel on the bookings.
On one occasion, one of Mildura’s prominent businessmen was startled to be approached by Day as he was checking into the hotel.
‘Let’s have some fun tonight,’ Day said. ‘I know a brothel where we can really go to town.’
‘No, thanks,’ the businessman said, startled and clearly aghast at the idea of hitting a brothel with a priest. ‘I’m not really interested, Father.’ The man’s wife was less than a few steps away.
Day routinely treated women with contempt. He threatened and cajoled the various women’s groups attached to the parish to work harder and harder on their fund raising and hand over more and more money to Kearney.
Day used to dote on an Airedale terrier. Sometimes women visited Day on the front verandah of the presbytery on some church errand or other. He would come out and talk to them while his dog would sniff away at their genitals before becoming excited and clambering up to start humping their legs.
Day regarded this as the height of comedy. Instead of rebuking the dog and ordering it to stop, he would stand back and grin, delighting in the women’s discomfort. Some women played his game, eager to ingratiate themselves to God’s soldier on earth in their local parish, but most of the women despised and distrusted him.
When I arrived in this moral cesspit, Day was raping and assaulting children, in Mildura and elsewhere. He had been doing it before I arrived and he would do it for more than a decade afterwards, until his first victim came forward.
It was his lust for money and his bullying of parishioners that first cast light on his paedophilia. The parishioners eventually tired of Day’s grasping ways and, one by one, his crimes were forced out of the shadows.
My wife Jean converted to Catholicism in 1964. I’d never placed any pressure on her to do this; her religion was her business. It was something of a surprise that she did so.
One evening after I got home from work, she pulled me aside and told me she’d had a number of meetings with Father Laurie Halloran, a priest at the presbytery under John Day. Seven months pregnant with our fourth child, Anthony, she had taken instruction from O’Halloran, the first step in becoming a Catholic.
I had no idea that she had been doing this but I was very pleased. It was a considerable effort on her part—a way of making the most of her new life in Mildura. I took it as a sign that our marriage was stronger than ever.
Shortly afterwards, Jean was confirmed and began attending mass with the boys and me at Mildura Catholic Church. We went to mass as a family every Sunday from that point on. The church would fill before the 10 am service with 200 or so members of the congregation vying for the best seats. We would get there early with the kids and take up our regular spots in a pew alongside the confessionals.
At any time there were as many as four or five priests at Mildura under Day. A roster system was in place for the priests and any one of them might conduct the Sunday morning mass. I wasn’t especially bothered when I’d see Day at the pulpit. I didn’t like him but I didn’t have to. I’d grown up respecting priests, but I didn’t have to enjoy their company. My faith was a private matter and mass was an exercise of that. I regarded the priests, including Day, as a means of achieving my own spiritual ends.
I knew enough about Day not to swallow the line that priests were Christ’s representatives on earth. A lot of other Catholics might have thought differently, but for me a priest was only a conduit for my faith. My faith was a complete democracy and not ruled by the Vatican’s edicts.
One Sunday, his pious fuming concluded for another week, Day invited the congregation to kneel and pray in private meditation.
I sat with Jean to my left, while the children sat next to her. Mich
ael first, followed by Martin and Gavin in age order.
‘Look after Jean and the boys,’ I murmured to myself. ‘Make sure they’re all right.’
I looked up at the altar with its depiction of the crucifixion— a plaster Christ on the wooden cross. The hands and feet of Christ were brushed with red paint to signify the stigmata and the wound on the right side of the chest. I saw blood suddenly gush from the wound on the chest, flowing on to the legs and dripping on the floor in a puddle half a metre wide. I stared at the altar for several moments. It didn’t frighten me. I felt no sense of apprehension either. I just kept looking. Finally I turned to Jean.
‘Did you see that?’
‘What?’ she replied, stirring from her own meditation.
‘On the cross. The blood.’
Jean looked back at me, blinking. ‘No.’
I looked back at the altar and the blood was gone. The puddle had vanished and the blood that streamed down had stopped. No doubt some will say the vision must have some rational explanation. I don’t know. I only know what I saw.
What did it mean? I don’t know that either. I didn’t feel compelled to bear arms in a holy war or to run off and join a monastery. I didn’t feel charged with a supernatural power to go and fight injustice wherever it occurred. I only know what I saw.
What I didn’t appreciate then was that if ever there was a place where Christ was wanted, it was Mildura in 1964. The psychologists might call Day a psychopath and point to his grandiosity, his self-importance, his capacity for manipulation and his heightened arousal in seeing children in pain and trauma. I prefer to think of him as a bastard of the lowest order. How else could I explain a man who would attempt to sodomise a boy in the presbytery, ejaculating all over the boy’s buttocks and thighs on a Friday afternoon, then turn up on Sunday to conduct mass and offer some thumping sermon on the lowering of moral standards, the sin of abortion and the decadence of girls who had taken to wearing miniskirts?