Abuse Claims at Darwin’s Retta Dixon Home Go Back 50 Years

By Amos Aikman
The Australian
September 26, 2014

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AUTHORITIES were alerted to missionaries sexually abusing ­Stolen Generation children at a Darwin home as early as 1966, when a carer was convicted of ­indecently assaulting three boys aged between 10 and 13.

Documents before the Royal Commission into Institutional ­Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ­reveal a litany of problems with the Retta Dixon Home inside Darwin’s Bagot Aboriginal reserve, ­beginning soon after it opened in 1946.

A “complete inquiry” commissioned in 1953 prompted the acting director of native affairs, R.K. McCaffery, to warn the NT administrator that missionaries at the RDH were “fanatical”, untrustworthy and that, in one case, boys had been indiscriminately beaten by a carer “gone berserk”.

In 1957, an NT bureaucrat told the federal Treasury secretary that the RDH was an unsuitable institution crippled by social problems. Another document, dated 1959, described girls expressing overt hostility and “repulsion” towards a superintendent who had a habit of touching them.

More documents from the early 1960s warned that staff lacked training and supervision, and their attitudes were “woefully lacking”. One describes children being beaten for “sex play”, and teachers from a nearby school reporting RDH kids with “far too much” sexual knowledge.