As people arrived one by one to put up ribbons at St Mary’s Cathedral over the past week, Ballarat child abuse survivor Paul Auchettl would quietly approach them. Every person had a story about their own experience of abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church, or stories of abuse suffered by someone they loved. Children would emerge from the faces of 60-year-old men and women, and Auchettl would guide them through the release that the tying of a ribbon would bring, like a contemporary shaman.

Every day the fence would be picked “clean” of the presence of abused children that each ribbon represents. It was this removal that most deeply troubled Auchettl and his fellow Ballarat survivor Trevor Coad, who accompanied him to Sydney. Their seven-year ribbon campaign in their hometown, the epicentre of revelations in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, has progressed to some sort…