Eyewitness provides harrowing testimony to UK inquiry into sexual abuse in Australian schools

By Victoria Craw
news.com.au
March 01, 2017

https://goo.gl/EmhazQ

Boys eating breakfast at Fairbridge Farm School, Molong, NSW. Reproduced courtesy National Archives of Australia.

AN EYEWITNESS has told of the horror he experienced at growing up in Western Australia where he was abused by older boys and a priest in a boarding school from age seven.

Speaking to the UK Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the anonymous witness who is now 70 years old, said he was repeatedly raped and molested by older boys and in the church vestry as a child.

“It wasn’t just older boys it was some of the younger ones as well. Because I was small … they seemed to think it was very funny just to pick on the small ones and they did what they wanted to do.”

“Sometimes it wouldn’t just be myself. Sometimes it would be three or four of us. So I mean it wasn’t just me all the time.”

“None of them had permission ... You were just like a lump of meat to them really and that was that.”

Now living in the UK, the man said assaults often took place in the bathroom of the Fairbridge cottages where 12 children would live at once leaving him with a lifelong fear of toilets.

“I’m 70 and I still don’t like going to men’s toilets,” he said of the school he was sent to in 1954 after moving from Cornwall in the UK.

He was also abused by the farmer running the pig and poultry farm and a priest while getting ready for choir and has previously said “nearly every day was rape day.”

“There were supposed to be two altar boys but [the priest] would tell the other one not to come until later. That’s when the attacks would take place, in the vestry.”

The horrific account was one of four during the first full day of eyewitness testimony at the UK inquiry into child sex abuse. Led by Professor Alexis Jay, the wideranging investigation has begun with the experience of child migrants sent to Australia in the post-war decades.

Each of the four witnesses heard on Monday detailed a litany of abuses endured at Fairbridge Farm in the Pinjarra, WA where they were sent from as young as four and sometimes without the knowledge of their parents in the UK.

Those who testified, now in their seventies, described physical abuse and a culture of fear wherein if they reported abuse they were told to stop lying and caned for their efforts.

The eyewitness said he only found out he had a mother at the age of 10, when he was told to write to her

“We used to write a letter every month actually saying that you were happy, that everything was hunky dory that everything was fine. But it wasn’t. You had to write it because that’s what you were told to write,” he said.

At present, the accused perpetrators of the abuse remain anonymous despite the fact many are now likely to have passed away.

However Child Migrants Trust lawyer, Aswini Weereatne QC, said she is calling for the names of the abusers to be made public in the pursuit of “open justice”.

Former ABC Chairman David Hill who was one of the child migrants affected also said “the greater the level of disclosure the better” and urged them to “name the villains”.

The anonymous witness said he is now seeking justice and compensation for what happened to him and others. He described the Western Australian redress scheme as an “insult” and said he wants just enough to be able to visit his grandchildren in Australia and secure a cemetery plot next to his mother.

“As far as I’m concerned my life is worthless. But the only thing that keeps me going is that I made a promise to my mother before she died that I would try whatever way I could to get justice for her,” he said.