BishopAccountability.org

‘Don’t let the bastards get away with it’

By Greg Bearup
Weekend Australian Magazine
November 22, 2019

https://bit.ly/2OPMOwX

[with video]

A long-lost school friend calls out of the blue with a shocking revelation. Has nothing changed since the royal commission?

I know the broad outline of Mick’s story. I’ve followed what happened to him, and others. Mick was sexually abused by a teacher at the boarding school in northern NSW we both attended and I know his life has been a mess ever since. The teacher pleaded guilty to crimes against Mick and a dozen other boys; the saga has been going on so long that this teacher has since died in jail. I know the order that ran the school, the Marist Fathers, has dragged its feet over compensating Mick for the damage he has suffered.

He has come to me because I am a journalist – but as I stand on the outskirts of the paintball field, I’m thinking: “I don’t even know if I can get his story into the paper. Will my editor even be interested? What’s new? What’s different? We’ve heard this all before.” I promise to get back to him during the week. What I don’t know is just how close to the edge Mick was when he made that call.

The next night my phone buzzes with this text message: “Gidday Greg mate. I’m over all this bullshit with the Marists/Catholic church. No one is prepared to take ownership of what’s happened to me… I plan to kill myself and join…” He mentions two of at least 10 boys who attended our school in the 1980s who killed themselves not long after leaving. “You probably won’t hear from me again, I’m sorry.

I see the message and call him immediately. There is no answer. I don’t even know where he lives – I haven’t seen him for 34 years, and have spoken to him only a couple of times. Old classmates I phone don’t know his address either so I call Detective Mark Banfield, who investigated Mick’s case. He immediately calls Lismore police, who establish that Mick’s last known address is in Moree. A squad car is dispatched.

I’ll come to learn that this is not an isolated case and that things haven’t suddenly changed ­following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. A number of lawyers who act for victims tell me the Church is fighting claims harder than ever. “They’ve unleashed their lawyers,” says one.

Victims’ advocate Chrissie ­Foster says that delaying is still a standard ­tactic. “They just ruin people,” she says, adding: “What you’ve got to understand, Greg, is that money is their God.”

Back in 2012 I sat down with the intention of writing a humorous magazine article about the weirdness of my time at St John’s College, ­Woodlawn, a boys’ boarding school located on an old dairy farm outside Lismore on the NSW north coast. There were some funny yarns in the article, but when I began to think about what had happened there in the 1980s, I grew angry. I also made reference to the school’s sinister underbelly.

I knew one of my classmates had been abused by a lay teacher, Jim Doran, an English teacher and a boarding master. I’d had an encounter with another teacher, Richard O’Connor, who taught art and English. O’Connor was the discipline master – if you got in trouble for talking during evening study, he would cane you after breakfast the next morning. I was a talker. On a couple of occasions when O’Connor gave me the cane, and I was sobbing in pain, he followed up with a cuddle, ­pressing his erection against me. I suspected O’Connor had committed far more serious crimes than this.

While I didn’t name either of the teachers or the school in the article, everyone who’d been to Woodlawn knew exactly who they were. As soon as it was published my phone started ringing and at the end of the line were grown men sobbing. I became the registrar for abuse at my old school as these men I’d known as boys described their ­traumas at the hands of Doran and O’Connor. “Did you know so and so killed himself?” someone would relay. One man, from the year below, told me Doran had abused him. He believed his brother, from my year, had also been abused. A few years after we left school he found his brother dead in the flat they were sharing. He cradled his brother’s body in his arms and called the police. He then had to phone his parents. One of the victims went to the police. Then the police came to me for the names of people who’d contacted me.

Meanwhile, completely unaware that my ­article had been published and that a case was brewing against his abuser, Mick McCudden was working as a bus driver in the Hunter Valley. It was 2013 and his life was in turmoil, yet again. His partner had taken their three kids – his third failed relationship involving children. He was moping around at the bus depot when one of his colleagues asked if he was OK. Unexpectedly, this thing he’d kept caged since his teens, this deep shame, exploded. “You know what is really going on, I was raped and f..ked and abused as a kid.” He’d blurted out his deepest, ­darkest secret, which he’d kept inside him for decades.

His employer took him to see a counsellor and he eventually went to the police. Detective Mark Banfield, the diligent and caring policeman who headed the task force that investigated the two Woodlawn teachers, said O’Connor’s offending against Mick was “among the worst that I have ever heard of in my policing experience… the application of violence during sexual assault is particularly disturbing”. Banfield says that during the course of his investigation he began compiling a list of boys who others thought may have been victims. “We were unable to make contact with a number of those people because we were informed they were deceased,” he says. Suicide? “Yes.’’

Mick has sent two text messages – one to me, and another to his brother, Anthony, who calls Moree police and tells them Mick has a new address, 16km out of town. The police car is diverted to this address and two officers knock on the door. When they peer through the window and see him, they force the door off its hinges. Mick is in the advanced stages of killing himself – he’s losing consciousness.

Mick McCudden grew up in Gurley, population 28 – a railway siding in the wheat fields, 25km south of Moree. His old man, Trevor, had worked for BHP in Wollongong and moved his family to Gurley to run the general store, which contained the post office, the bank and the gun and grog shop. Mick was the eldest of their four kids and describes an idyllic childhood, riding bikes, playing footy and swimming in the concrete tank behind the giant wheat silos.

His family wanted the best for him and he remembers the earnest conversations around the kitchen table about how he’d get a better education if they sent him to boarding school rather than to school in Moree. It was a six-hour drive across the vast plains and over the Great Divide to Lismore. He was terrified. He was 12. “I remember the silence on the drive up there with Dad,” he says.

Woodlawn had the reputation of being ­Australia’s cheapest boarding school – it was no Melbourne Grammar or Cranbrook, Sydney. In Year 7, 80 boys were crammed into one big ­dormitory in double steel bunks stacked side-by-side. Mick’s bunkmate was a sweet, painfully shy kid we’ll call Garry Smith*. (I have contacted his parents – they are happy for his story to be told but do not want his name revealed.) Both boys were desperately homesick and became close mates. Mick was in my year and I remember him as this knockabout kid with flaming red hair and freckles, an incarnation of the comic book character Ginger Meggs. Garry, on the other hand, was like a possum sitting on a rafter in a shed desperately hoping he wouldn’t be seen.

O’Connor sensed Mick was homesick and would invite him into his room, which was just off the dormitory. I remember at the time thinking it odd that the teacher would spend so much time at the school when he had a wife and family in ­Lismore. O’Connor played a long game and would comfort Mick and help him compose letters to his family. “When I was homesick, I’d have a bit of a cry and he’d put his hand on my shoulder, or he’d put his hand on my leg. I didn’t know that he was ­grooming me, but apparently that was the start of it.” Over the months it progressed and O’Connor would brush against Mick’s penis with his hand. It then moved on to fondling. “It was so confusing,” Mick says. “I was going through all these changes but I knew I wasn’t gay.” He was 13.

One day he saw his mate, Garry Smith, come out of O’Connor’s room. “He was crying and blowing his nose and I just knew.” The pair went out onto the landing and Mick confided in him. Garry confirmed that he too was being abused. The pair made a pact to look after each other, but the abuse continued. O’Connor started threatening Mick with the cane if he didn’t ­comply. When they saw each other around the school the teacher would put his finger to his mouth to signal shush. There was no escape.

The following account is from Mick’s police statement. O’Connor ordered him to remove his pants. “ ‘Touch and rub your penis,’ O’Connor ordered. He was standing there holding the cane. I could see the bulge in his pants.” It moved on to O’Connor forcing his penis into his mouth. “I don’t want to do it,” the boy would say. “You’ll bloody well do what you’re told,” said O’Connor, standing over him with a cane. On a number of occasions, Mick was ordered to get on his hands and knees. The statement reads: “As it entered my anus it hurt and it made me scream. He grabbed his cane and started hitting me across the back. Don’t yell like that again… don’t you never do that again.”

At the end of each term, when he went home to Gurley, Mick would plead with his parents not to be sent back but never revealed why. His mother was insistent – she desperately wanted him to get a good education and she would pack him onto the bus for the miserable journey. The worst of the abuse continued throughout years 8 and 9 until one day, early in Year 10. “You know what you are here for – get your clothes off,” O’Connor ordered. Mick defied him. “He went for his cane and I lunged forward with my left hand around his throat and pushed him into a wall and punched him in the head. He buckled at his knees. ‘How do you feel now being on the receiving end, mate… if you ever hurt Garry Smith again I’ll kill you’.” He stormed out.

Mick left for home soon after, for the Easter break. He pleaded with his parents not to send him back. They put him on the bus. When it stopped halfway, at Glen Innes, he grabbed his laundry bag, stuffed it full of his possessions and hitched a ride down the New England Highway to an aunt who lived in Wollongong. He never returned to the school.

One day, towards the end of year 10, Garry Smith’s parents received a phone call asking them to come to the school. Garry was in the principal’s office and was having some sort of breakdown. “He was an absolute mess,” his mother says. It was obvious he had serious mental health issues and they took him to specialists in Brisbane. He left school and went to work on the family farm. A few years later, at the age of 19, he took his own life. It would be decades before his family would find out why.

“I’ve never forgiven myself,” Mick tells me, on the verge of tears. “I broke the pact. I should have stayed and looked after him. I f..kin’ abandoned him, my little mate.” His police statement reads: “In 1988 when I was about 19 years of age, I heard from a friend that Garry Smith* committed ­suicide. That night I tried to take my own life.”

Back in Moree, in July this year, the two officers rush to Mick. He’s alive, but only just. They do what they need to do to save him, then carry him to the veranda and wait for the ambulance. Mick is angry – his attempt has been foiled. One of the officers says to him, “Mate, you’re lucky we got here when we did. Another minute and it would’ve been all over for you.”

In 2014, following a long investigation, ­O’Connor, then aged 75, was arrested at his home in Lismore and taken into custody. In October 2015 he pleaded guilty to 40 charges of child rape and indecent assault involving 12 boys from Woodlawn during the 1980s. He was sentenced to 12 years’ jail. During the hearing, one of the boys described how he still carried the scars after being caned across the back and legs for screaming while being sexually assaulted. Pictures of these scars were submitted as evidence to the court. They were photographs of Mick McCudden.

In April 2017, after a long trial, Doran, then aged 83, was found guilty of 41 charges of child rape and indecent assault against 10 boys. He was sentenced to 13 years in jail.

July 16, 2019

To the Marist Fathers,

I was a student at St John’s College, Woodlawn, from 1982-87 when Jim Doran and Richard O’Connor abused dozens of boys. One of those was Mick McCudden… Mick’s life has been a mess ever since… He has told me he is currently in protracted legal negotiations with the Marist Fathers for just compensation. The Marist Fathers had a duty of care to him, and all the other boys who were abused by these predators, and you failed. And now, by hiding behind your lawyers protecting your property, you are abusing him further. So, I am just writing to ask: if he does manage to kill himself, will anyone from the Marist Fathers front up to his kids at the funeral and explain what happened to their dad?

Greg Bearup

Dear Greg,

Thanks for your email… The news in your email about Mick McCudden is distressing. Mick first contacted us in 2013, and we provided counselling support and financial assistance to Mick for several years, which is the least we could do given what happened to him at Woodlawn. In August, 2015, we were contacted by his lawyers… The claim against the school had insurance cover, and the insurance company, Catholic Church Insurance (CCI), appointed its own legal firm… to take over carriage of the claim. Since that time we have not been directly involved in the settlement. At that time CCI also took over provision for counselling support, although we advanced Mick $15,000 early in 2017 when the insurance company declined to do that and his solicitor approached us.

We were unaware that Mick was experiencing such serious frustration in getting the claim settled, though we have wondered why it was taking so long to resolve. We will ask our own solicitors … to follow up with his lawyers… to try and find out what is happening. We are prepared to assist in any way open to us to help sort this out.

Best wishes,

Peter McMurrich sm

Vicar Provincial

You’d reckon that after the five-year royal ­commission into child sexual abuse, during which the Catholic Church was exposed for protecting paedophiles, and the bishops conceded their ­handling of the crisis was negligent and hopelessly inadequate, its leaders would be keen to make amends. You’d reckon they’d be on top of all this, rather than wondering why it was taking so long to resolve. Francis Sullivan, the former head of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council – the man the Australian Catholic bishops and religious orders chose to represent them at the royal commission – is scathing of the church’s legalistic approach to victims. He says the response from bishops and the heads of religious orders to paying just compensation has been “miserable, absolutely miserable”.

“The royal commission finding was that the church leaders failed in their moral leadership,” Sullivan tells me. “What that now means is that the bishops and religious leaders need to step aside from all the technical advice they receive – whether it be legal or insurance or whatever – and take decisions that are not just in the spirit of ­compassion, but in the spirit of justice.” Witheringly, he adds: “They are finding this difficult.”

In a recent case in Victoria involving a victim, JCB, who’d been raped at the age of nine by the notorious Father Gerald Ridsdale, the church’s lawyers played hardball. They sought to downplay what the church knew about Ridsdale’s offending prior to the rape of JCB, thus reducing its liability. The trial judge pointed out this contradicted the church’s own submission to the royal ­commission about what it knew about Ridsdale’s crimes. JCB’s lawyer, Judy Courtin, says the church “put my ­client through trauma after trauma after trauma” in his fight for compensation.

In a landmark settlement in the JCB case, the church is expected to pay more than $1 million in compensation. And since the abolition of the Ellis Defence, which protected church assets, ­victims are coming forward in droves. Many have shunned the National Redress Scheme that followed the royal commission because it puts a cap on ­compensation. Courtin describes it as a “National f..king Disgrace Scheme… it’s based on a hierarchy of abuse; if a child was penetrated they might get $95,000 to $100,000. If they were in an orphanage and couldn’t escape, they might get the maximum $150,000”. And so victims are turning to the courts.

Courtin knows of about 200 such cases now before the Victorian Supreme Court. A recent report in The Age claimed the Christian Brothers had spent more than $213 million in the past six years on compensation and was expected to pay out at least $134 million in the future. ­Sullivan says there is currently a “great panic” in the Catholic Church among people responsible for its assets who believe the church’s capacity to do its work is being put at risk. “But this is just a consequence, it is the inevitable next stage,” he says. “The church is going to be forced to atone for its past.”

And, finally, it will be forced to atone for what happened to Mick McCudden.

A couple of months after he very nearly died, Imeet up with Mick, 50, at his brother’s apartment in North Sydney. I haven’t seen him since he ran away in 1985. He looks the same but there’s an emptiness in his eyes. He’s come to Sydney for ­settlement discussions, but the Marist Fathers have offered only a tiny fraction of what he and his ­lawyers believe is fair. The figures are confidential but he says it was “f..king insulting”.

The Marists are not denying the abuse – this is a quibble over money. Mick is frustrated and angry. “I just want the case to be over so I can get on with my life,” he says. We go through the train wreck of that life since I last saw him, the drugs, the drinking, the “fighting, breaking shop windows, damage to car, assaults – I was just in and out of trouble with the coppers; I’d spend a Friday night in the cells to sleep it off and when they let me out they’d say, ‘We‘ll see you next week.’ ”

He’s been in and out of relationships. He was married at the age of 23 and this broke down a few years later. He has a daughter, born in 1992, and a son who died at birth due to a heart condition. He’s got four more kids from two other women. “I’d love to be part of their lives,” he says. “I just don’t have any relationship with any of them at all… I’m becoming a distant memory to my three youngest kids now.” He gave up the booze and drugs at the age of 27, and while it helped, he still carries a deep anger. It was only in later years, after time with a ­psychologist who he still sees (we’ve consulted her for this article), that Mick was able to forgive his mother, Rosemary. “I hated Mum,” he says. His father would have been happy for him to leave the school but Rosemary was insistent on a good education and had the final say. “I detested her. There was a time I wouldn’t have pissed on her if she was on fire for sending me back to that c..t after I’d begged her not to.” She only discovered her son had been abused when the police investigation began. “Is there a stronger word than devastated?” his brother Anthony says of his mother’s reaction. “She sent him back to a monster.”

In 2017, Mick’s mother and his sister, Sandra, were killed in a car accident. “About a month before she died I had a conversation with her. We talked for an hour and 36 minutes. It was the first time I felt like I was a son to my mum, and she felt like a mum to me since before all this shit started… before I went to Woodlawn.” Proper restitution, he says, is not only about the money but a recognition of the immense damage caused to him and everyone around him. He wants to make amends with his own kids. And he wants to do right for his little mate, Garry. Prior to O’Connor’s court case, Mick made contact with Garry’s elderly parents. “It was one of the hardest things to do, but I needed them to know.” Mrs Smith says when she discovered what had happened to her son she wanted to take a baseball bat to O’Connor. She is a deeply religious Catholic woman and says her only ­consolation was that, despite everything that ­happened to Garry, “he never lost his faith”.

In 2016, Mrs Smith wrote a savage letter to the former rector, Fr John Worthington, asking: “Did you know what was happening to Garry* [at the hands of O’Connor] at any time he was at ­Woodlawn?” Worthington replied: “From time to time some senior students and several staff ­members expressed general concerns to me about the way Richard O’Connor related to and treated ­students, but there was nothing ever reported to me regarding the possibility of sexual abuse. I acknowledge that I may have been too dismissive… and thought the negative comments about ­O’Connor had their basis in jealousy or resentment.”

Negotiations between Mick’s lawyers, who are also representing Garry’s family, and the Marist Fathers have broken down. They are among a number of cases involving former Woodlawn boys that are yet to be resolved. For decades the church has dealt with these issues in-house. Now the courts will judge how diligent the Marist Fathers were in their duty of care to Mick ­McCudden and Garry Smith.




.


Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.