AUSTRALIA
The Australian
TRENT DALTON From: The Australian September 14, 2013
WHEN doctors warned Keith Grosser that the cancer marching through his liver and bowel meant he might not see another Christmas, the widowed 73-year-old Brisbane retiree made urgent and ruthless cuts to his bucket list.
He refined his “things to do before I die” to a single line: tell the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about one of the most brutal episodes of child abuse in Australian history.
Last Tuesday, at precisely 3.32pm, Grosser exited the rear right-side passenger seat of a Yellow Cab in the driveway of Brisbane’s Traders Hotel on Roma Street and shuffled gingerly towards the hotel elevator that would take him to the room where he would empty his bucket.
Aware of his health problems, the royal commission, which will spend the next two years laboriously interviewing more than 5000 Australians who registered with the historic commission, fast-tracked Grosser’s interview to ensure details of the sickening sexual abuse he endured in two Anglican Church boys’ homes on the New England Tablelands in northern NSW between 1946 and 1954, would not die with him.
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