Beaten Raped Starved by the Church - an Australian Story
By Candace Sutton
BEATEN till they bled. Starved. Sexually abused. Locked in cupboards. Their faces rubbed in their own faeces and urine. And then the ministers came over from the neighbouring church and the sexual abuse began. This was not some overseas house of horrors, but Australia; the lush green hills and subtropical rainforest of northern NSW, where the Anglican Church of Australia carried out the abuse of hundreds of children. This is the story of how the Church of England North Coast Children's Home held a dark secret for decades. And how the high-ranking clergy of the church covered up the deplorable truth. Richard "Tommy" Campion is a successful press photographer who lives on the Gold Coast and has just welcomed his grandson into the world. But for more than four decades Tommy - whose many friends know him as a gentle man and a jokester who wears bright-coloured clothes and makes people laugh - harboured a secret about what he endured in that children's home. Tommy was a two-year-old and his sister, Susanne, four, growing up in the tiny town of Broadwater on the northern NSW coast when misfortune struck. Their mother, Betty, ran away and their father, Peter, could not manage. He took the children on the drive north to the regional city of Lismore, where the Church of England ran its home, and abandoned them. Around 36 to 38 children lived in that home at any given time over the 11 years Tommy endured there. "It was cruel and humiliating and kids were beaten with sticks and belts and whips," Tommy said. The home's matron was a violent drunk who would grab Tommy by the scruff of his neck "and flog me with a belt," leaving him alone, bleeding on the floor in his pyjamas, which were virtually rags. "Why were we flogged? "You didn't eat your dinner, you didn't make your bed, you didn't read the part of the Bible you were meant to." Tommy remembers an occasion when the matron was making him recite a section of the Bible. "I was frightened of her," he said. "Everyone was frightened of her. "I couldn't remember [the Bible passage]. "She pushed me and I gave her a bit of lip. "So she turned me, grabbed me by the shoulder and she flogged me with a pony whip till I fell to the floor. "Blood was coming out of my back. "I was nine or 10 years old. She only stopped because she was exhausted. "I was left on the floor and none of the kids were allowed to help, or they would have been flogged too. "So you'd lie there in agony and, after a while, when the matron had left, the other kids could help you." The kids were often fed very little, close to nothing. "We were starved. Kids were locked in cupboards for up to an hour." Again, no comfort, for fear of being flogged. "We were made to stand on one leg," he said. "When children soiled their beds, they had their faces rubbed in their faeces and urine and then they were told to go and wash their sheets. "Some of them were so small they couldn't reach the tub." And then the clergymen would come visiting from the neighbouring church, St Andrews, and take the children aside for touching, grooming, masturbation. "I was sexually abused by a minister," Tommy said. "Lots of kids were." When he was in his early teens, a new matron replaced the sadistic matron. Tommy's abuse ceased. "I was getting older," he said, "but the new matron abused other kids." The governing system was still the Anglican Church and the abuse, Tommy said, "was systematic". School offered little opportunity to seek help. "There was a hell of a lot of bullying," Tommy said. "Kids did tell teachers about what went on in the home. "People saw scars. But what could you really do?" At the age of 16, the church found him a job at a hardware store. Tommy, meanwhile, applied for a job as a photographer on the Northern Star newspaper in Lismore. He got the job and found a room at a boarding house. He had made his escape, but it was only a physical respite. The abuse would haunt him for years. Working as a photographer, he would be out on a job, smiling, laughing, charming his subjects and playing the clown, but dark thoughts still clouded his day. "When I heard a child cry, or I'd see people hitting their children, as they do, it would affect me," he said. "I suffered a lot over the years and no-one would know what was going on." At nights, sometimes the past would close in on Tommy. But he was a success. He photographed models and celebrities, rock stars visiting the Gold Coast and his work won him an award for best news photograph at the Australian Press Photographer of the Year awards. His old classmates weren't so lucky. Some of them ended up alcoholics, in jail or dead, having committed suicide. In 2005, Tommy decided to do something about their shared nightmares of the past. "I decided to write to the church and let them know I wanted an apology and recognition of what happened." The church sent Tommy his apology and offered him what they called a care package. "It was a substantial amount of money, which I decided not to take," he said. "There were other children who deserved to know they could receive a form of reimbursement." The church offered Tommy and his sister around $80,000. Perhaps following Tommy's example, more children came forward and the money being offered by the church was diluted, so that victims were then offered a sum of $20,000 each. Tommy hasn't taken a cent. Instead, he left his Gold Coast home on the weekend to fly to Sydney and this morning he will appear at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to tell his story about the home run by the Anglican Church. "It was a house of hell," Tommy said.
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