AUSTRALIA
Echo Netdaily
Eoin Blackwell, AAP
For the past 70 years, Gordon Grant has rarely slept more than two hours a night.
It isn’t the memories of his two tours of Vietnam that keeps the former soldier awake in the dark.
It’s the nightmare he lived while in the care of the Christian Brothers at St Joseph’s Farm and Trade School, in Bindoon, Western Australia, that won’t let him rest.
When he was 13 years old, the principal of the school, Brother Paul Francis Keaney, asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
‘He was a huge man, and I said, “I don’t know yet, brother”, and without warning, he slammed his clenched fist into my face and I was knocked backwards along the cement floor,’ Mr Grant told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Perth last week.
‘He had broken my nose and it started to bleed before I got up from the floor.’
When Keaney asked him again, he replied he wanted to be a poultry farmer.
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