Abuse Survivors Still Haunted Decades on
By Eoin Blackwell
For the past 70 years, Gordon Grant has rarely slept more than two hours a night. It isn’t the memories of his two tours of Vietnam that keeps the former soldier awake in the dark. It’s the nightmare he lived while in the care of the Christian Brothers at St Joseph’s Farm and Trade School, in Bindoon, Western Australia, that won’t let him rest. When he was 13 years old, the principal of the school, Brother Paul Francis Keaney, asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. ‘He was a huge man, and I said, “I don’t know yet, brother”, and without warning, he slammed his clenched fist into my face and I was knocked backwards along the cement floor,’ Mr Grant told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Perth last week. ‘He had broken my nose and it started to bleed before I got up from the floor.’ When Keaney asked him again, he replied he wanted to be a poultry farmer. Keaney hit him with a leather strap, cutting him behind the ear and told him to ‘f*** off’ to a nearby farm. ‘I rarely get two hours of sleep at night-time, because I get all these flashbacks coming from my childhood, the orphanage in Wales, and Bindoon,’ he said. The commission over the past two weeks has heard from 10 other men with similar stories to Mr Grant. The men were residents at schools run by the Christian Brothers in Bindoon, Clontarf, Castledare and Tardun between 1947 and 1968. As their tales of horror unfolded, the bitter irony of the congregation’s history rose like bile. The man who founded the order in Ireland in 1802, Edmund Rice, expressly forbade physical punishment against children, a decision considered radical in the Georgian era. By 1920, just over 50 years after the order arrived in Australia, strict physical punishment was the norm. Just prior to World War II, Australia entered a migration scheme with the UK, where boys as young as three were housed in institutions around the country – including with the Christian Brothers. Promises of fruit and horse rides gave way to sexual and physical torture, and slave labour. ‘We were forced to build our own institution,’ said John Hennessey, a former resident of Bindoon. ‘We worked without shoes and without sufficient food, many hours a day when we should have been at school. ‘The educational deprivation left me and others barely able to read and write. I am self-taught now.’ The royal commission this week established the order’s leadership was fully aware of physical and sexual abuse in its Australian ranks as far back as 1919, even as it fought compensation claims from men in the 1990s. The order documented allegations against 70 brothers from 1919 to 1969. Throughout this, boys who complained of abuse – ranging from beatings to rape – were disbelieved or told to shut up, even as brothers were transferred interstate in response to the allegations. The abuse also filtered down, leading to older students abusing younger ones. One resident of Bindoon in 1959, known by the commission as VV, told of how the superior brother at the school, Bruno Doyle, interrogated him about boys having sex with other boys. ‘Shortly after he arrived at Bindoon he gave me a brutal beating and while we were in his office he questioned me on what I knew about the boys having sex with the other boys and wanted to know the names of the main ones,’ he said. ‘Brother Doyle hit me and punched me until I told him.’ The men have been let down by a series of compensation schemes set up over the past 20 years. Redress WA – a 2008 government scheme set up to acknowledge and address victims of abuse in state schools – initially offered up to $80,000 to survivors. A change of government in WA saw that money cut almost in half, to $45,000. VV found the process of applying to Redress traumatising. ‘I later felt betrayed by the Western Australian government when it changed the payment level part way through,’ he said. In the mid-1990s, law firm Slater & Gordon launched litigation against the order, which led to a three year court battle resulting in a $3.5 million trust to compensate survivors in WA. Slater & Gordon at first wanted $30 million, but the order wouldn’t budge. The case was kicked between NSW and Victoria before coming to WA, where a strict six-year time limit on claims existed (it’s now three, but can be extended with a judge’s discretion). ‘To be blunt, the trustees of the Christian Brothers had their knee on our clients’ throats,’ Slater & Gordon partner Hayden Stephens told the royal commission. The Christian Brothers apologised for the abuse in 1993, even as it fought the litigation. The order’s former provincial leader for WA and SA, Brother Anthony Shanahan, said their were two reasons they fought so hard in the settlement negotiations. ‘One was, well, what is a sum that is appropriate in view of who these men were and what’s happened, and so on,’ he said. ‘The other one, I think, was to do with a fear of the future … a fear that not so much that this settlement was going to do serious damage to us as an organisation, but it could then lead to other ways of litigation.’ In 2011, more than a decade after the WA litigation, the US chapter of the Christian Brothers filed for bankruptcy following years of rising legal costs and payouts to survivors of abuse. After the Perth hearings ended on Wednesday, the Australian arm of the Christian Brothers announced life-long counselling services for people abused in their care. The order also pledged to revisit what it termed ‘unjust’ compensation for past abuses. But for Gordon Grant, who was promised land and an education when he came to WA from Wales, it’s unlikely to be enough. ‘We are owed more than just an apology from the Christian Brothers,’ he told the commission. ‘We are owed a fair compensation.’
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