Abuse at the Sisters of Mercy-run Neerkol orphanage has shocked a royal commission

By Michael Madigan
Courier-Mail
April 18, 2015

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/abuse-at-the-sisters-of-mercy-run-neerkol-orphanage-has-shocked-a-royal-commission/story-fnn8dlfs-1227308399664

David Owen outside the Rockhampton Court where the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is conducting hearings.

Toni Guinane, then Nurse Leahy, with the orphan baby boy David Owen aged three months.

The girl’s dormitory at the Sisters of Mercy-run Neerkol orphanage around 1950.

IT WAS Sister Emile who would clean him up and ensure he had a nappy for the bleeding after he would return, yet again, from being raped by the priest after the evening Mass.

The spirit of Sister Emile, whoever she was, flared briefly this week in the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse at Rockhampton.

It was the one point of light amid the medieval darkness that appears to have enveloped St Joseph’s Orphanage at Neerkol for much of the 20th century.

“Sister Regis” and “Sister Marcia’’ were given credence for being “nice’’ to children who were allegedly routinely slapped, flogged, starved, sodomised and ridiculed by nuns who would place dunce caps on their heads in this Christian refuge for orphans west of Rockhampton, now looming in the public mind as a charnel house of depravity.

But it was Sister Emile alone who honoured her vows of service to the poor and vulnerable, even if she wasn’t brave enough to stick her neck out and end the serial rape of young David Owen.

Millions of women have taken those solemn vows since Catherine McAuley, still on the Vatican’s slow track to sainthood, established the holy order of the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin in 1831.

Yet on Thursday morning in a courtroom in Rockhampton as David told his extraordinary story in that slow, methodical monotone of the lifetime illiterate, it was clear that bastardry, not mercy, shaped the life of this man so hardened that when the screws threw him down into the notorious “Black Hole’’ at Brisbane’s Boggo Road jail for a stint of solitary confinement, he liked it.

“I preferred my time in a solitary cell to being in the outside world,’’ he said.

Being alone means safety and a certainty no voice will rap out that hideous command still capable of chilling the marrow in his old bones: “Number 34 Dave Owen, you are wanted at the presbytery.’’

Much of the evidence heard from a dozen witnesses who appeared this week at the Royal Commission appears, on face value, preposterous.

That nuns routinely delivered up 12-year-old boys to flagrantly pedophile priests, that runaway boys were horse-whipped like 19th century Alabama slaves, that the scourge of Australia’s convicts – the cat o’ nine tails – was unleashed on children in the mid 20th century defies belief for anyone living your standard, boiler plate, Australian life.

Yet those claims were aired this week in a forum which, quite rightly, keeps to its charter and doesn’t aggressively challenge allegations.

Some witnesses are, by their own admission, deeply damaged human beings.

The cornerstone of the Christian faith many still profess – “we forgive those who trespass against us’’ – wasn’t gaining much traction on the second floor of the Rockhampton court complex.

Yet David was a little different, recalling the rapes and floggings, sounding like the old tired old prison lag/labourer/rugby league footballer he once was.

David was the result of a policeman’s rape of his 12-year-old mother in a north Queensland mining town and he arrived as a five-month-old baby at Neerkol in January 1939 after attempts by the Cairns District Hospital to find adoptive parents failed.

One day, Father Anderson told the adolescent boy he needed improvement on his Latin, invited him to the presbytery and sodomised him.

That was the day the words – “Number 34 Dave Owen, you are wanted at the presbytery’’ – began to fill him with fear and self-loathing.

David soon accepted the Sisters Of Mercy knew what was happening.

Sister Emile knew, tending his wounds after each attack.

“She started looking after my backside when I was 14 – I could not go to the doctor to be examined.’’

Commissioner Andrew Murray pressed the issue: Were there not any more nuns who offered even a morsel of kindness?

David said newly arrived nuns might object to the brutality, but were soon beaten into submission by the older hands whose sadistic natures appeared to ensure their dominion in the power hierarchy.

There might be room in the Neerkol story for that old adage “different times, different attitudes’’.

One story brings to vivid life the calibre of these tough-as-teak women who ruled over him.

The nuns organised boxing matches and one day David, watching a boy beat up a girl, felt a twinge of sympathy for the vanquished.

He challenged the boy and won, but the nun organising the fight challenged David.

She pulled up her habit, tucked it into her underpants “Bombay bloomers style,” strapped on the gloves and gave David one of the great floggings of his life.

A brutal lesson on the harsh realities awaiting a poor boy beyond the orphanage gates? Perhaps.

But one more anecdote suggest the nuns actually revelled in a strange, sadistic form of emotional cruelty, with no purpose other than to bring the perpetrator some twisted form of pleasure.

Each Christmas the nuns would present the kids with a box brightly wrapped in Christmas paper.

The first time he received his gift David, like any little boy, tore it open eagerly.

The box was empty.

It was always empty, every Christmas at Neerkol.

The inquiry’s hearings in Rockhampton are continuing.