Abuse inquiry into Retta Dixon home

Sky News
September 21, 2014

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/local/darwin/2014/09/21/abuse-inquiry-into-retta-dixon-home.html

From her birthplace at Banka Banka Station in central Australia in 1938 to Darwin's Supreme Court on Monday morning, it has been a long walk to justice for Lorna Cubillo.

Ms Cubillo, 76, will be the first Northern Territory witness to give evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which will focus for the next fortnight on the Retta Dixon home, where Ms Cubillo lived from 1947 to 1956.

The Territory government commissioned the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) to operate the home from 1946 to 1980 inside a building reclaimed from the Army occupation during the Second World War.

Wedged between the Bagot Aboriginal Hospital and the Bagot Aboriginal Reserve, about eight kilometres from Darwin's CBD, the home's residents were primarily part-Aboriginal children and some unmarried mothers and women.

Ms Cubillo took on the Commonwealth government about 15 years ago when a test case in the Federal Court was launched to determine whether the government would have to pay compensation for the brutal policies Aboriginal people were subjected to, including her removal from her family as part of the Stolen Generation.

Although she lost that case, the fight continues, and she will tell the Royal Commission about her time spent at the home from the age of about nine until she was 18.

She will be joined in giving evidence by about eight other former residents, house parent Lola Wall, the general director of AIM Reverend Trevor Leggott, the CEO of the Department of Attorney-General and Justice for the NT, and the NT's Children's Commissioner, among others.

The royal commission will hear the experience of men and women who were sexually abused as children while in care, and examine how the evangelical administrators of the home, the NT and commonwealth governments responded to allegations of abuse against workers who were employed at the home.

The hearing will also look at the response of the NT police force and the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1975 and 2002 to allegations raised by residents of the home against Donald Henderson, who was a house parent from 1964 - 1975.

The commission will also inquire into current NT laws and policies governing children in out-of-home care as well as redress schemes available to the Retta Dixon Home abuse victims.