AUSTRALIA
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Lewis Blayse
The Charlton Boy’s Home was operated by the Anglican Church. It comprises one of a continuing series on children’s homes deserving of being revisited by the Royal Commission for a variety of reasons. Affected people should contact an organisation such as Broken Rites or CLAN. (A link to a former resident who has indicated a desire to get in touch with others from the Charlton Home is given below).
Peter Watson, the former Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, was a regular visitor to the Home at one stage, but appears not to have noticed anything untoward there.
A fund-raising article for the Home in the 1970s mentions that the boys receive “love and acceptance” which helps them “turn away from crime.”
In February of this year, a former worker at the Home, Albert John Abel, was convicted of sexual assault of a boy at the Home. He had pleaded guilty to similar offences in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, Judge Anthony Blackmore stated that Abel “was rehabilitated” and that he had “spent more than 40 years living in the community as a church-going family man.” He got 3 years.
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