AUSTRALIA
The Age

Michael Short
Journalist

In this column two weeks ago, I wrote about the experience of being painfully hit a few months earlier by flashback visions of a paedophile priest’s genitals.

The memory, which I had suppressed for about 35 years, was triggered by a joint email from the then headmaster (who retired at the end of last year) and the chairman of Ballarat and Queen’s Anglican Grammar School, seeking information about past abuse at the school, which I attended for the final five years of my secondary education.

I was, and remain, critical of that email – which, because of the school’s incomplete database, went only to a limited number of former students – as it seemed designed to keep things quiet, rather than exposing these crimes. Instead of urging victims to contact the police and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual…