AUSTRALIA
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Bexley Salvation Army Boys’ Home will be one of the institutions examined at the next hearings of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, due to commence on 28th January. One of its former residents, Kevin Marshall, was interviewed for the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation Television’s “Four Corners” investigative journalism program in 2003 (see link below). Two other former residents of that Home were also interviewed, but not named, and were filmed in “shadows”.
Bexley commenced as a Probationary Home for Boys in 1915, taking boys referred from the courts. It became a boys’ home in 1931. It was renamed Kolling Memorial Boys’ Home in 1967 and closed in 1979. When Bexley Boys’ Home was closed, the remaining boys were transferred to the Marrickville Children’s Residence. It is now renovated and used as the Salvation Army’s officer training facility and museum.
The enquiry will find certain things common to all Salvation Army Boys’ Homes. It will find that boys were given a number and not a name. [The author was no.32]. Extreme violence, for trivial transgressions, such as talking at the dinner table, not standing straight enough in line etc., was the norm.
Being put down psychologically also was routine, such as “we pulled you out of the gutter” or “your mother was a prostitute.” For boys with English as a second language, speaking in their native language was severely punished. This was in an era when there had been large scale European migration to Australia for the first time, and the official government policy was “assimilation”. That meant, in practice, become British. Now it is “multiculturalism.” A large proportion of inmates were there because, as children of migrants, there was usually no close relatives to care for them when their own parents were unable to do so.
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