Wa Christian Brothers Victim Fred Crocker Mourned Outisde Royal Commission

By Annette Blackwell
AAP
October 22, 2013

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/wa-christian-brothers-victim-fred-crocker-mourned-outisde-royal-commission/story-fnii5thm-1226744763329

John Hennessey (pictured) will hold a vigil outside the Royal Commission for child sex abuse for his friend Fred Crocker.

IN PERTH on Monday they are burying Fred Crocker, a man who was at Boystown in the 1940s and suffered at the hands of the Christian Brothers who ran the centre where child migrants were sent.

Outside the office of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney, his friend John Hennessey is holding a quiet candlelight vigil.

Mr Hennessey, the former deputy mayor of Campbelltown, has been calling for an inquiry for 20 years into what happened to him and his classmates at the home in Bindoon, north of Perth.

He has a picture of the class of 1947 - 60 per cent of them were abused and six have committed suicide, Mr Hennessey says.

The picture shows sad, ragged boys sitting on the front steps of the now notorious building.

"It has been the judiciary who let a lot of us down,'' Mr Hennessey said.

He takes hope from comments made by Justice Peter McClellan, chair of the royal commission, who has said this inquiry has opened his eyes to the devastating impacts on victims.

Mr Hennessey thinks judges and magistrates around the country should be made familiar with the evidence.

"We were ungrateful children complaining about the rich and powerful - that is how it was seen,'' he says.

He gave evidence at a House of Commons Health Committee in England in 1998 and to an Australian senate committee 1999 but nothing came of it, he says.

He is now NSW spokesman for the Child Migrants Association.

"We contact each other all the time,'' says Mr Hennessey, who was awarded an OAM for his work during the Granville train disaster.

He will keep watch at the commission on Monday as he silently mourns his friend Fred Crocker.

The second public hearing of the commission in Sydney on Monday is looking at the YMCA, which employed Jonathan Lord as a child care worker.

Lord has since been convicted of crimes involving the sexual abuse of children, some of whom were in the care of the YMCA.