by Denis Ryan
When the memories come, his face will loom up at me, just like it had back when I was a kid. Or I’d be back sitting on the bench seat of his big car, the bastard asking me to grab the wheel while he undid his fly and that bloody ugly dog of his grinned stupidly at us from the back seat.
I live on the pension, having retired a few years ago. I’d been a plumber all my working life. I still keep myself busy, pottering around, fixing things that need some attention.
I’ve been married for forty-four years. We have three boys. They all followed the old man’s trade. They’re all plumbers and doing well for themselves.
I was born in Warrnambool and spent the first few years of my life there. My dad ran a trucking company, carting stock between Mt Gambier and Melbourne. He was doing all right for himself, too. We lived in a big house in Warrnambool, right behind Fletcher Jones. When my dad and mum split, my sister and I took off with Dad and moved up to Mildura. I would have been 8 or 9 at the time. My sister was a year younger.
We stayed with my two aunts, Phyllis and Gwen, who ran a guesthouse in Heron Avenue. I’d never met them before Dad and Mum split up. Old Phyllis and Gwen were devout Catholics, and the walls of the guesthouse were plastered with religious paintings and crucifixes. Phyllis and Gwen would go to mass almost every day, and sometimes twice on Sundays.
It was a bit confusing at first. We hadn’t been a religious family but with Dad away a lot of the time, finding work wherever he could, I got stuck into it through my aunties.
I went to Sacred Heart Primary School in Mildura. I must have started off there in grade five. A few years back I went back to the school to ask for my student records but they clammed up and wouldn’t give them to me.
Back then I loved school. I was into everything at Sacred Heart when I first got there—school plays, sport. I loved the place and loved the kids in my class. We were all pretty close. Big classrooms in those day—fifty or sixty kids in a class. The classrooms were bulging at the seams but we all got on pretty well. There weren’t any blues, or nothing more than you might get anywhere else. Everyone just got stuck in and did the best they could.
Every now and then, we’d see Father Day walk around the playground. Everyone was a bit scared of him. He was the boss, the only adult male at the school. The rest of the teachers were nuns.
I got good reports. I was going pretty well. I enjoyed being there.
When I got to grade six, Sister Mary-Bernadette asked for volunteers to be altar boys. My hand shot straight up in the air. I wasn’t the only one. There would have been fifteen or so boys who wanted to be in it. Sister took our names down and sent them over to Father Day in the presbytery. I’d volunteered because I wanted my aunts to be proud of me; Dad, too, but I didn’t think I stood a chance. I was good at school but I was still a new kid in the town.
When the news came through I was almost as excited as my aunties. I was an altar boy. They stood around me and crowed. Becoming an altar boy was like Phyllis and Gwen making a name for themselves in the parish. They were as proud as punch.
Looking back I realise the game that Day was playing. Here I was from a broken home. My two aunties were my guardians. You wouldn’t find more devoted, manic Catholics in the Vatican than Phyllis and Gwen. Day had taken all that into account. He’d done the calculations in that seedy, dark mind of his. Even if I’d spoken up and told my aunties what he’d done to me, I wouldn’t have been believed. I was the perfect target.
But I didn’t speak up. It took me ten years before I spoke to anyone about it, and only then when Dinny Ryan called me into the cop shop for a chat.
I was always the first into the church, getting the communion wine and wafers out, lighting the candles. The masses mid-week were sparsely attended. Sometimes, I’d look down and see only two men, sitting up the back of the church: Jim Barritt and Joe Kearney, dressed up like pox doctors’ clerks.
It started when Day asked my aunties if I’d like to take a trip with him to Melbourne. ‘Oh, yes, Father,’ they’d gush excitedly. They were so proud that Father was taking such an interest in me.
At first I didn’t know what was going to happen in Melbourne. By the second trip, I knew what to expect but I couldn’t say no. My aunties would have been devastated. I couldn’t tell anyone.
In the end there were four trips. I grew to dread them. Day would often take me to the pictures. There was a cinema in Bourke Street where the ceiling was painted with stars. When the lights went out, the stars would glisten and gleam on the ceiling. I’d look up and stare at them, almost willing the moment to freeze in time or at least delay the end of the movie for as long as possible.
Of course, it didn’t happen. When the movie ended, we’d go to his sister’s house in Williamstown. She’d have a meal ready for us to eat and as soon as the last scrap of food was off my plate, Day would make his excuses.
We were tired from the trip and would be going to bed early, he’d tell his sister. In that little bedroom, I’d scrunch my body up as far as I could against the wall but it was no use. I’d struggle as much as I could but I was just a scrawny kid. He was stronger than me.
Attempted buggery is what Dinny Ryan called it. I call it rape. Four times Day tried to stick his dick inside me. Each time it hurt and I wriggled and writhed so he couldn’t go any further. In the end he grew tired of it. He’d get his dick inside me just a little bit and I’d yell out in pain. He’d pull back. Sometimes he’d masturbate. Other times he’d grab my penis and rub it.
Other times, I’d wake up with him holding me and kissing my head, and he’d try and put it in again.
I have no doubt his sister heard us. She must have known what was going on.
Sometimes during the drive he’d get his penis out and ask me to play with it. Once on a drive down to Melbourne, we were driving one of the nuns down to Ararat. Day made the seating arrangements. Sister would sit at the passenger door, and I’d be in the middle with Day at the wheel.
He had a rug spread over all our laps. And while he drove down to Ararat with Sister sitting next to me, he pulled his penis out and grabbed my hand and guided me towards his dick.
That was what Day was like: brazen, no fear, no consideration of the consequences. I often think some of the sisters knew about him and what he got up to. If they did, they never said boo. He had them under his thumb anyway.
By the end of the school year, I’d had enough. My reports were terrible that year. In that short time, I’d gone from a good student to a poor one. I didn’t want to go to St Joseph’s. I told my dad that. He got two jobs and was making enough money to give me and my sister the best education he could.
I was sent down to St Pat’s in Ballarat as a boarder. I hated it from day one. I didn’t suffer like I did with Day, but the brothers there were real bastards. After finishing first form, I told my dad I’d jump the fence if he sent me back.
‘I’m not going back to no Catholic school,’ I told him. He accepted that and I went to Mildura Tech. I got through it and started my apprenticeship.
And there I was doing my fourth year as an apprentice, doing a big job at the Murray Hotel.
Dinny Ryan walked in and told me he wanted me to come down to the police station for a word. I’d never met Dinny before that. I knew he was a copper, a detective, but I didn’t know much about him. It was Barritt I was terrified of. I’d heard stories where he’d grab young blokes like me off the street and give them a flogging. He was king of the pricks. Bloody good Catholic though, sitting up the back of the church with his mate Kearney. I remember that.
I thought Dinny might have had me for speeding around town. I was pretty toey by the time I got to the police station.
He told me he was investigating Day for sex offences against children. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about it since it happened. I thought, ‘You bloody beauty! Justice at last for that bastard.’
As I started giving my statement to Dinny, I felt like I might not be able to stop. When it was done, I felt t
his enormous sense of relief, like a four-tonne boulder had been lifted off my shoulders.
‘Am I the only one?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Dinny told me. ‘You are one of many and there will be many more.’
I really had thought I was the only one. Why had Day chosen me? It had driven me into a frenzy of guilt, doubt, anger and despair. Any relief I felt was short-lived.
I left the police station thinking Day was going to get arrested, hauled off in front of a judge and sent to jail, not just for what he did to me but for what he’d done to us all in Mildura.
I waited and waited but I didn’t hear a word. Day was never charged. Later, I heard that Dinny had left the force. He’d come off second best, too. At the time, I didn’t understand the forces that were at work and how powerful they were. It doesn’t get any more formidable than the Catholic Church, and when I hear about how some of the coppers might have been involved in the cover up, it makes sense that what happened to me would be swept under the rug. I was just a tiny cog in a giant wheel.
A few years after I gave my statement to Dinny, I noticed an ad in the paper from a local lawyer, calling for anyone who’d been at Sacred Heart during the time I was there. I went in to the lawyer’s office and she asked me a couple of questions. I didn’t hear a peep about it for months until one day I got a letter in the mail.
The letter had a cheque in it for $7000. It was deemed full and final payment from the Roman Catholic Church. I thought, ‘Crikey, is that all my life’s worth?’
I was doing it tough at the time, so I snaffled the cheque.
In the end, it’s not about money or compensation. How do you begin to come up with a number to compensate me for what Day had done to me? To this day, I still have trouble with my emotions. I’m a pretty laidback bloke but I often think that I don’t feel things the way other people do. It might be the death of a pet or even a friend. Other people will open right up, but I just don’t feel the same way. I worry that sometimes I don’t feel anything.
And I run a mile from conflict. I can’t stand it. I’ll always be the one to try and smooth things over. Raised voices, anger. I just can’t deal with them.
Like Popeye, I am what I am, but it’s impossible to avoid the reality that the person I am was forged in the crucible of Day’s abuse, like my emotional development stopped or was placed on hold when I was just 11 years of age.
I’m lucky to have had good people around me—my wife, my kids, good mates, too. I’ve been up front about this with them, told them everything there is. My wife had said I shouldn’t waste time dredging up the past; that no good would come of it. She was only looking after me. But after I got talking to Dinny again a while back, she noticed it was doing me good to talk about it. She and the kids have supported me and that’s a big help.
If the Catholic Church wanted to pay me a big cheque, I’m happy to say I’d take it, no questions asked. God knows, they’ve got more than me. But money is just a part of it. I’d like an apology. And not just the empty apologies that have been made in the past. Not just the ‘We’re sorry Monsignor John Day was a paedophile who abused you’ type of apology but a real apology that acknowledged all of his crimes and the crimes of those who covered up for him. Those people in the Catholic Church who allowed Day to commit his crimes and by their nods and winks made it easier for him to continue raping and abusing children for forty years. The church needs to apologise for that. To date, they have only ummed and ahed their apologies.
They’re not fair dinkum and they won’t get the nod from me until they get fair dinkum.
Terry’s story
Terry (not his real name) grew up in Apollo Bay in the 1950s. He was not a Catholic, and he attended the local state primary school. He was first raped by Day at 11 years of age. At the time, Day was established as the parish priest in Mildura but he regularly returned to his old parish of Apollo Bay to rape and molest a group of boys he referred to as his ‘young friends’.
Over a three-year period Terry was raped by Day on as many as thirty occasions.
Terry could never bring himself to tell his parents about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Day. To this day, he cannot tell his children.
Terry is now in his sixties. He has never forgotten the horrors he was forced to endure.
It was only when he heard of Denis Ryan’s story that Terry decided to come forward and make contact with Denis. Denis and Terry remain friends today.
When I was growing up money was tight. I helped out my mother and father where I could. I’d snare rabbits, fish for trout in the local waterways, gather mushrooms in the inland rainforests and collect golf balls at the local golf course and sell them back to the golfers. The money I got from my hunting and gathering was sufficient to at least assist my parents in buying school uniforms and textbooks.
The golf course is bordered on one side by Bass Strait and on the other by the Catholic church, Our Lady of the Sea.
On one occasion, I was down at the golf course with a mate, Darrin, hunting for golf balls that had sliced and hooked into the rough.
We were used to golfers walking past while they played their games. Sometimes we’d approach them with an offer of a bag of balls for a few bob. But this time, the only man who approached us was a priest in his vestments. He introduced himself to us as Father John Day. He had a telescope on the balcony of the presbytery and asked us if we’d like to come up and have a look.
I’d never used a telescope before and I knew Darrin was keen to give it a go, so off we went with the priest.
We spent a little while looking through the telescope. Day kept his distance while Darrin was there but after we’d both taken a gander through it, Day asked Darrin to go home.
Darrin knew he wasn’t welcome anymore. We both felt a little uneasy but Darrin took off as commanded.
Not long after he left, Day approached me, and stood over me. I remember he told me to relax and not make a sound.
He took off his gown and underwear and exposed his genitals to me. He grabbed my hand and placed it on his penis. I was only 11 years old and I was terrified. I started crying and begged him to let me go home.
His manner changed quickly when he saw I was not going to be compliant.
‘If you don’t do as I tell you, I will ensure that your mother and father lose their jobs and you’ll be sent to Tally-Ho.’
Tally-Ho was a boys’ home in Melbourne. As kids we didn’t know much about it except it was a place to be feared.
I didn’t know much about Catholicism but I knew the power the clergy had in those days. If Day said he could do these things, I believed he could.
I was frightened and I let him do what he wanted.
That was the start of it, two and a half years of sexual abuse, torment, fear, constant nightmares and profound thoughts of suicide which prevail today.
Once a week I would go to the local youth club, a gym that was run by one of the local coppers. On so many occasions on the walk home, Day would turn up in one of his showy cars and tell me to get in. I remember the smell of him to this day. He stank of grog and body odour, of lust and depravity. I can close my eyes today and that smell will return and waft into my nostrils.
Put it down to a cruel trick of memory.
He had an eerie way of knowing wherever I was in Apollo Bay. I don’t know how he did it. Sometimes, he found me in the bush, hunting rabbits, other times while I was just walking down a quiet road. It was as if he had a sixth sense. It added sharply to the fear I felt.
When he ordered me into his car, he’d drive up into the bush around the Barham River Flats. He would undress me and then undress himself and then hug me and the smell of the man would become sharp, leading me to feel ill, sick to the core. He would hug me and hold my buttocks so tightly that he caused bruising, then he would rape me. More often than not he’d bugger me. Sometimes he’d grab my head and force my mouth down on to his penis, choking me with it.
Afterwards he would lea
ve me bleeding while he hurriedly got dressed. I’d be curled into a ball and would weep helplessly. Day didn’t give a damn.
Rather he would tell me that he had boys just like me all over the place—in Lorne, Beech Forest, Mildura, Timboon and around Apollo Bay, too.
I never told a living soul about it, with the exception of my little black and white cocker spaniel, Milo. Milo was my constant companion in those days. After Day raped me and left me in the bush, Milo and I would go to a pool at the bottom of a waterfall, near where I used to trap rabbits. I would try and scrub the bruises from my body with an old scrubbing brush I kept there. I had an old singlet I hid under a rock and I used it to wash my anus and my private parts in the pool while Milo looked on. I’m sure that little dog knew why I was crying and what I was enduring.
Father Day was a cruel, sadistic, cunning and manipulative man. I’m sure that some of the parents in the town knew what he was up to, but out of fear or negligence, they didn’t pipe up to protect the kids. I knew of at least five other boys that Day raped. There would have been many more.
I was raped by this man for almost three years. And every time, he would threaten and bully me into silence.
So at the age of 13, I took off. I could not stand it anymore. I ran away from Father Day, my parents, my family and my friends in Apollo Bay. It was all I could do to stop it.
That morning, Mum gave me a shilling to go to the store and buy some bread. I wandered down past the pier and saw a fishing boat, loading up ready to head out to sea. I spoke to the skipper and he told me that the boat was bound south. He offered me passage to the island if I did a few odd jobs on the boat.
I hid on the boat all day, terrified that Father Day would appear out of nowhere as he had so often done and bring my escape to an abrupt halt. And I’d be back up the bush again with him raping me.