AUSTRALIA
The Age
May 27, 2015
Tony Wright
National affairs editor of The Age
He doesn’t look like a monster, this old man peering through spectacles, bald but for a few wisps of greyed hair above his ears.
Looks deceive. It’s all in the perspective.
He was a monster, sure enough, to little boys awed by this man in the robes of a priest who offered himself as a friend and molested them, again and again. Boys who, according to senior counsel, afterwards couldn’t bear anyone touching them or their fathers coming near.
The child in a Ballarat primary school showing the priest his toys, only to find a hand shoved down his pants. The bedwetter in an English boarding school, the Australian priest as housemaster bathing him and putting him into fresh pyjamas and taking him into his bed. The boys welcomed to the country house of the parish priest to play pool, and who accepted holiday invitations to his underground dug-out in the NSW opal-mining town of White Cliffs, only to discover themselves trapped.
No one knows how many children Gerald Ridsdale molested from the 1950s when he was a seminarian in Werribee and on through the decades of his priesthood as he was moved from parish to parish around Victoria’s western district for several decades.
He did not even inform his god, apparently, at least through the normal priestly channels – he left his child-abusing out of his religious confessions, he says, and never told his monstrous secret to anyone until the game was up. When the game finally was up, he was convicted of abusing scores of children.
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