AUSTRALIA
SBS
AAP
A royal commission has heard how one man turned a Salvation Army boys’ home in Sydney into a hell that has left an indelible mark on a generation of men.
A man, now a miner, was so distraught by memories of what had happened to him at a Salvation Army boys home in Sydney that he could not read his evidence at a royal commission inquiry.
When he took the stand at a public hearing into child sexual abuse on Thursday, the man identified as FV, faltered as he told about hearing his younger brother was raped.
They had been sent to the Bexley Boys Home in Sydney south in 1974 when Captain Lawrence Wilson was in charge and placed in different dormitories.
In evidence read on his behalf by Simeon Beckett counsel assisting the commission, FV said he was raped by Cpt Wilson and a few weeks later was collected by a man and woman and taken to a house in Punchbowl, Sydney.
The couple were in Salvation Army uniforms and the big woman “had short blond hair and looked to be in her 30s”.
At Punchbowl the couple tried to force him to have sex. He ran away and got a train back to Bexley where Captain Wilson was waiting and gave him 18 stripes with a cane and told him “they were good people I sent you to”.
Twice more during his time at Bexley he was sent to people’s homes, once to a property in Blacktown, and another time to the house of two women.
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