AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Charlotte King
Updated February 25, 2016
They call themselves “Nazzie girls” — children who ended up in the care of the Sisters of Nazareth girls home in Ballarat in the 1950s and 1960s.
Gabrielle Short does not hesitate when she is asked to summarise her childhood here.
“Ninety-five per cent hell, torture, abuse, fear, terror,” she says.
Sisters say they accept residents of the now-nursing home “based on their current needs”.
In the early 1960s, paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale was their chaplain.
“Up there, in the middle floor there, one of the girls actually tried to jump out the window because she reported the abuse to the nuns, and one of the nuns belted the life out of her until she was lifeless,” Ms Short says.
A group of the girls, now women, are back to confront the order of nuns who run the facility as a nursing home to, Ms Short said, “ask why they’re giving sanctuary to an enabler of this man who ran amok”.
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