Eatock v Bolt :The stories of the nine plaintiffs – Part 1

The stories of the nine plaintiffs has been lost in the outpouring of emotion for and against the racial discrimination judgement against fact-free columnist Andrew Bolt.

One of the nine, Graham Atkinson, said in court Bolt’s articles reduced Aborigines “to that invisible group of people that government policies or government authorities tried to create in the past”. It is not just Bolt who makes them invisible. The Aboriginal plaintiffs continue to be written out of the argument following the controversial case. Eatock v Bolt offered the chance for nine Aboriginal people to tell their stories and they are the most haunting and illuminating part of Judge Bromberg‘s 149-page judgement.

Anita Heiss
According to Bolt, the choices made by Anita Heiss were “lucky, given how it’s helped her career”. Heiss is a NSW author whose maternal grandmother and great aunt were part of the Stolen Generation. Her mother was Aboriginal (not part-Aboriginal as claimed by Bolt) and her father was an Austrian who became a part of the Aboriginal community. Their marriage produced six children, three fair-skinned including Anita and three darker-skinned. Her colour didn’t stop the racial abuse. At school she was called an “Abo”, a “Boong” and a “Coon”. Others reacted badly when she told them she was Aboriginal. At university she became conscious of injustice to Aborigines and did a PhD on indigenous literature and publishing in Australia. Heiss served on numerous boards and committees involved with indigenous issues. Heiss told the court about the irony of having been discriminated against for being dark and now being discriminated against because she is not dark enough. She was also offended by Bolt’s “blood quantum” approach to racial identity and its focus on how people look.

Bindi Cole
Bolt said Bindi Cole “rarely saw her part-Aboriginal father” and chose “the one identity open to her that has political and career clout.” Cole is a Victorian artist who lived with her single English mother till she was seven, when she became unfit to be a parent. Her mother always told her that she was Aboriginal. She then went to live with her Aboriginal father’s family for four years, living with her grandmother and her large family who were all Aboriginal. Cole kept close ties with the family even after she moved back with her mother, aged 13. Cole studied to become an artist and photographer in 2001 and is recognised within the Koori community and the broader Australian art community as an Aboriginal artist. In 2008 she and exhibited a series of photographs called “Not Really Aboriginal” misunderstood by Bolt. The series questioned the perception of the stereotypical look of an Aboriginal person based on her personal experience of being fairer skinned. Cole said she was intimidated by Bolt’s articles and insulted by his phrase “distressingly white face.” The article affected the whole Aboriginal community and her aunt rang to ask her “why are they saying that about us?”

Geoff Clark
Victorian man Geoff Clark is the former chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. His mother is Aboriginal and his father is Scottish-Australian. His parents never lived together. Clark and his two sisters were raised by his Aboriginal grandmother at Framlingham, near Warrnambool. Framlingham is one of the longest established Aboriginal communities in Victoria established in 1861 and Clark has lived there most of his life. Here he watched his grandmother making traditional medicines, baskets and food and he went hunting and fishing with his uncles. Relatives and elders passed on traditional knowledge of sacred sites and stories and he is now a custodian of this knowledge and an elder of the Tjapwhuurrung people. Clark was exposed to prejudice at high school in Warrnambool. His classmates talked about their grandfathers shooting and poisoning Aboriginal people and told him he was too white to be Aboriginal. This casual racism motivated his involvement in Aboriginal issues. He was a delegate to the Convention of the International Labour Organisation dealing with the rights of indigenous people. He was elected Victorian ATSIC representative in 1999 before becoming national chair. Clark said Bolt’s articles were the essence of prejudice and racism in Australia.

Wayne Atkinson
Wayne Atkinson is a Victorian academic whose parents are from the Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung Peoples. One great-grandfather was born in Mauritius of Indian heritage. Atkinson was raised by his maternal grandmother in an Aboriginal fringe camp on the riverbanks of Mooroopna. He spoke English and Aboriginal languages at home and experienced racism at school. He dropped out at year eight to work in unskilled jobs. After a decade, he began studying his history and culture and worked for his community. He is now a senior elder of the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation, a principal claimant for their native title claim and teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. Atkinson told the court the idea he was not sufficiently Aboriginal was extremely offensive and he was frustrated after 30 years of teaching about his culture, people do not accept who he is. He said Bolt affected a huge number of people in the Aboriginal community with the content of his articles.

Graham Atkinson
Graham is Wayne Atkinson’s brother and a member of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council and chair of the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation. Being Aboriginal was not something Graham had to think about growing up until he and a cousin were the only Aboriginals at a technical school. Students taunted him with “Blackie”, “Abo”, “Boong” and “Nigger”. His parents and siblings strengthened his self-esteem and pride in his identity. He also experienced racism in the army in Vietnam. In 1977 he was one of only three Aboriginal students at Melbourne University and he graduated with a degree in Social Work and later he gained an MBA. He told the court he was offended Bolt said he identified as Aboriginal only because Thomas James had married his (and Wayne’s) great-grandmother. He said the attribution of identity based on skin colour as making no sense.

Part 2 looks at the stories of the other four plaintiffs.

Arse over Titanic

In the final scene of A Night to Remember, the 1953 film about the Titanic, second mate Charles Herbert Lightoller (Kenneth More) ruminates on the cause of the sinking. “There were quite a lot of ifs about it,” he said. “If we’d be steaming a few knots slower, or if we’d sighted that berg a few seconds earlier…if we carried enough lifeboats for the size of the ship…” This sinking was different, he concludes. “Because we were so sure, because even though it has happened it is still unbelievable.” The reluctance of many passengers to leave the ship, believing it was unsinkable meant nearly all the lifeboats were lowered without a full complement of passengers. The sinking of the Titanic was the shattering of the belief in the human harnessing of technology for good. It was the beginning of the end for modernism.

Expect a deluge of commemoration in April next year for the 100th anniversary of the sinking. On April 15, 1912, 1502 people died in the North Atlantic when Titanic sunk on its maiden voyage. It was the worst disaster at sea ever and it remains among the top peacetime sinking today behind only the Filipino Dona Paz (1987) and the Senegalese La Joola (2002) disasters, neither of which have inspired Hollywood movies. Similarly unknown is the worst marine disaster ever the Nazi ship Wilhelm Gustloff torpedoed by a Russian submarine in 1945 with 7000 lives lost. Another 3000 died when the British Troopship Lancastria sunk in 1940 but its official record has been classified until 2040, possibly because the captain ignored maximum loading capacity instructions.

The Lancastria is a mystery but the Titanic is a myth. Titanic sank for reasons familiar today: the law not keeping up with communication, technology and corporate greed. Wireless was available but unregulated and rival companies could jam each other. The Merchant Shipping Act 1894 had a section about the number of life-boats, life-jackets, life-rafts and life-buoys on British ships which delegated to the Board of Trade “according to the class in which they are arranged”.

The Board, guided by ship owners, judged the number of lifeboats to be a function of tonnage not of total passengers. Titanic exceeded its legal lifeboat capacity of boats for 1060 people carrying 20 lifeboats (enough for 1178 people including all of first class). But she could carry three times that many people.

When the Board last regulated the matter in 1896, the largest ship afloat was Cunard’s 12,950 ton vessel RMS Lucania. The Germans outstripped it with the 14,400 ton Norddeutsche Lloyd vessel Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1897, and further ruffled British feathers by winning the Blue Riband for the record speed in an Atlantic crossing averaging 22.3 knots, half a knot faster than Lucania.

White Star line upped the ante with the Oceanic (1899), Celtic (1901), Baltic (1905) and Olympic (1911) trebling the tonnage. A year later their Titanic weighed in at a new record 46,329 tons, almost four times heavier than the law allowed for Lucania. White Star’s ships were built for comfort and style not speed. Cunard continued to dominate the Blue Riband, despite their smaller ships. White Star was cutting corners of a different kind.

In 1912 White Star was part of the International Mercantile Marine company owned by monopolist J.P. Morgan. IMM was overleveraged and suffered from inadequate cash flow that caused it to default on bond interest payments in 1914. At the British Inquiry into the Titanic disaster Sir Alfred Chalmers of the Board of Trade was asked about the lifeboat regulations. Sir Alfred made a strange claim. He said if there were fewer lifeboats on Titanic more people would have been saved. He said more people would have realised the danger and rushed to the boats filling more to capacity. This claim has superficial validity as the lifeboats could have saved 1187 people but only 710 survived. But then he gave the real reasons: Newer ships were stronger than ever with watertight compartments making them unlikely to require any lifeboats, sea routes were well-travelled meaning a collision was minimal. Other issues were the availability of wireless technology and the difficulties of loading more than 16 boats. Ultimately, said Chambers, it was a matter for ship owners.

Those owners were well served by the highest ranking surviving officer Second Mate Lightoller – the hero of the 1953 film. Lightoller guided his upturned boat through four hours of choppy seas to safety. In Inquiry testimony he said it was “necessary to keep one’s hand on the whitewash brush”. That meant giving careful answers to sharp questions “if one was to avoid a pitfall, carefully and subtly dug, leading to a pinning down of blame on to someone’s luckless shoulders.” His job was to defend the Board of Trade and White Star Lines and he succeeded admirably.

But his testimony did force a change of the rules. Lightoller admitted the pendulum had swung “to the other extreme and the margin of safety reached the ridiculous.” But then he would remember the “long drawn out battle of wits, where it seemed that I must hold that unenviable position of whipping boy to the whole lot of them.” The only thing that bothered him was that White Star never thanked the whipping boy. They had others things on their mind. Although the Line survived the tragedy, both IMM and Morgan went under – just like their most famous ship.

9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in either late August or early September 1991, roughly ten years before 9/11. The photo was taken by my then wife when we were on a trip around the world a year after we married. I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I remember the fantastic views and looking out to the Statue of Liberty.

I don’t remember the minute-long lift ride to the 107th floor which was as uneventful as this one in September 2000 a year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center was seriously bombed. While I was there, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That failed but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from across the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay (and why Obama broke his election promise to close it). His terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who heard it from the CIA. Khalid Mohammed proposed the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Suicide attacks are an extreme but effective staple of warfare and are difficult to defend against. In 1881 Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: “Alexander II must die…He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too…How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

This conflation of honour and purpose inspired wartime Japanese kamikazes and later Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. The 9/11 ringleader was Mohammed Atta, one of just four of the 19 hijackers who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, Atta graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists from 1998. Atta and other cell members met Bin Laden in Afghanistan and agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 Atta sent an e-mail to 60 companies about flight training, “Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” he wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His five-year US visa was approved and he flew to America in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida. Sheik Khalid bankrolled his activities. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who led the South Tower attack). With daily training, Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. He had money so no one asked questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline plane types including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another Hamburg cell member. Ramzi was to be an attacker but could not secure a US visa. Immigration officials believed he would illegally overstay their visit because he was a Yemeni. Ramzi passed on Bin Laden’s instructions on the targets – four “symbols of America” – Congress, the Pentagon, and the two World Trade Center towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash. Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm. Atta’s driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, Atta drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. The following morning he was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed eight of the attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in luggage and then leaving the airport. It did not take into account people who wanted to use planes as the poor man’s air force.

At Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about – but got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact eight other Middle Eastern men were leaving from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta was arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He had two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. Eighty-one passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach class). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to reaching cruising altitude after 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked eight more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

Atta’s team stabbed and slashed their way to the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the North Carolina reservations office to say there was something wrong. That was a common number to help passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

A few minutes later a hijacker’s voice was heard by air traffic control. “We have some planes,” came the chilling message. “Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard them say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” By 8.25am Boston knew there was a hijack situation. As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline set up an emergency response centre. Ong reported a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: “Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

At 8.38am Ong told the operator the flight was descending rapidly. Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command‘s Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was “real-world” and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call was abruptly ended. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent… we are all over the place.” The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, “We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low.” Seconds later she said, “Oh my God we are way too low” and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center North Tower. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the building. The full horror of the day would take two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. No effort was made to punish Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt’s Mubarak for providing Atta.

The PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither war was a success. Instead, they crippled America in a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

La Gillard enchaîné

The merry-go-round of Australian politics is revolving at sickening speed. Society’s craving for instant gratification has led to demands of perfection immediately and inevitable failure makes us repeat past errors. Today’s talk is of replacing Julia Gillard with Kevin Rudd. This way madness lies – Rudd’s knifing was wrong but there is no reason to believe he will become Lazarus of Queensland.

Leaving aside media hype, and despite the High Court and Craig Thomson there is no imminent threat to the government. Its coalition with the Greens and independents is predicated on the leadership of Julia Gillard and all bets are off with anyone else at the helm. Coalitions are common in Europe but considered the devil’s work in Anglo-Saxon countries (apart from Ireland where amoral politics will tolerate any governing arrangement as long as it can turn a quick buck.)

Here power-sharing arouses fear and suspicion in both major parties. Keating called the Senate “unrepresentative swill” where tiny Tasmania has as many seats as NSW with 14 times less population. But the Senate also has a wonderfully complex system of proportional representation and plethora of candidates that made the ballot paper the size of tiny Tasmania. What Keating was really complaining about was the Senate did not agree with him. There is a perception today the country is anarchic when all that is really happening is a government in power whose policies some people don’t agree with.The fact “the Coalition” does not like coalitions is particularly funny as it tries to combine the neoliberals of dry neo-con bent with the agrarian socialists of the Nationals. The US Government was worried Barnaby Joyce had become a lightning rod for the resistance, particularly over climate change. His implacable opposition to action on climate change led to the unseating of Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader and Tony Abbott taking the party to the right.

I was at a meeting in Roma on Monday where Joyce spoke to the local business community. His ability to communicate is impressive. But there was little new I hadn’t heard him say before except the admission he was the only accountant in parliament which “scared the hell out of him”. His audience was sympathetic and anger was directed at the government. There was a question from a lady still annoyed the political system allowed Gillard to knife Rudd in the first place. This lady was personally affronted a leader not elected by the people was now running the country. “How can Labor get away with this?” she asked Joyce.

Joyce explained that the Westminster system allowed this. “You as voters chose your MP and the MPs come together to decide who leads them.” Joyce conceded it could happen on both sides of politics but declined to talk about the last time it happened in Australia (The Libs McMahon ousting Gorton in 1971). He put the boot into Labor saying Rudd’s overthrow was the first time in has happened to a first-time prime minister.

Politicians should not be surprised when voters see it as a failing in the system. Rudd’s overthrow was a very Australian coup. There was no rioting nor did the stock exchange collapse. The voters stored away their unease and anger and took it out at the ballot box where Labor was badly mauled in 2010.

The Government scraped over the line thanks to Julia Gillard’s negotiating skills and willingness to compromise with a variety of political perspectives. There were more conservatives than non-conservatives in the parliament so the Liberals played their cards poorly. Tony Abbott’s treacherous nature put off Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. The pair knew any arrangement would be jettisoned as soon as Abbott had the numbers. Instead Gillard offered a power sharing arrangement guaranteed to 2013. Despite the ideological contortions Oakeshott took 17 agonising minutes to talk through, he knew Gillard made the better offer.

Falling just one seat short of Government left the Coalition with a strong sense of injustice it has nursed since the election. The party has attacked the “legitimacy” of the government though there is no sign of the police arresting Gillard any time soon.

Gillard chose the high road for her administration when she did an about turn on carbon taxation. It was an enormous gamble which she knew would excite opposition on two fronts. Firstly it opened up the breach of trust. Keating and Howard survived similar breaches though neither suffered a nickname from Alan Jones like Juliar.

Secondly it galvanised an Australian tea party movement convinced climate change is the work of a cabal of communists. Personified by the recent “convoy of no confidence” (run by the Australian truckies, who will be hit hard by the tax) it sought to magnify the illegitimacy of the government with a massive people movement.

The Convoy failed. It attracted poor responses from most towns it visited (except Bob Katter’s Charters Towers). But it had a sympathetic run in the media as it fed the “government in crisis” narrative. The convoy supporters’ angry attack on Anthony Albanese yesterday showed what it was really about. They were not there to listen but to jeer. None were likely to vote Labor in any case.

This is a confected crisis. The parliament has two years to go and Labor can govern their way through it. Barring a by-election or a more serious charge for Craig Thomson, Gillard should survive to the next election. That will give the electorate enough time to look carefully at achievements as well as promises. By 2013, the carbon tax and the NBN will be realities too hard for Abbott to overturn and this week’s High Court result may actually make refugee processing easier for the Government to sell morally because it forces them to do it in Australia. Tony Abbott’s glib glass jaw has not yet been fully tested. Despite all the noise and fury, Gillard could still win in 2013, if given the chance.

Australia’s own Oranges and Sunshine victims remain forgotten

I saw the Jim Loach film Oranges and Sunshine last week. The film tells the moving story of the forced migration of children from the UK, a paternalistic government program from the 1940s to the 1960s that saw 130,000 children removed to Commonwealth countries, mostly to Australia. The British Government kept the program hidden for years as did the Australian Government. The Forgotten Generation was almost half a million children from the UK and Australia taken from their families and brought up in religious institutional environments where they were abused and treated as slave labour.

The film was poignant because I had met a member of that generation and told his story in our newspaper. The man’s name is John Walsh born in Perth, WA on 27 March 1931. John was the eldest of seven children born in the 1930s all forcibly taken away from their parents.

When war broke out in 1939, John’s father joined the WA 2/11th battalion and embarked for service overseas in 1940, arriving in the Middle East on May 18. The 2/11th trained in Palestine and Egypt. They were mostly captured by the Germans in Crete and sent to Germany as prisoners of war from April 1941 to November 1945. While John’s father and others were serving their country, the WA government destroyed their families and sent the mothers into a life of hell and an early grave. John said the politicians in power from 1939 accused working class and Aboriginal mothers of neglecting their children.

The all-powerful Child Welfare department took control of the children and told mothers they could not see them until they turned 21. In March 1940 the Walsh family was split up. Four brothers John, Billy, Terry and George were sent to Castledare while sisters Theresa, Anne and baby brother Barry were sent to St Josephs Subiaco. After four days, a Mr Young from Child Welfare came to Castledare and asked John to collect his young sister and brother who were in a bad way.

“I had to look after my young sister and brother for about six months. It wasn’t easy with me being about eight and a half years old,” John said. Both had to sleep with John on a veranda and the mattress was soaked every day so John had to put it out in the sun every morning. After six months Mr Young returned to take the two youngest back to St Josephs Subiaco. Life was tough in Castledare. John said they never got much to eat. “People would see the bruises on us but you never did say anything for there were a lot of abuses going on and no one would believe you anyway,” he said. “This Christian Brother Murphy whose nickname was Spud was bad. Of course the people wouldn’t believe you, Catholics could do no wrong. You just had to shut your mouth and hope the truth would someday come out.”

In December 1941 eldest boys John and Billy were sent to Clontarf orphanage. They had to move again in February 1942 when the Air Force took over Clontarf and 238 children (200 Australian and 38 English) were sent by train to Tardun St Mary’s College in three groups. Tardun was in the northern wheatbelt of WA, one and a half hours east of Geraldton. As John remembers, “we were sent into a life of hell from 1942 to 1945.”

There was nowhere to sleep so farm machinery was pulled from the shed to make living quarters. They washed in horse troughs and worked from daylight to dark to build a new wing on the old building. “The food they gave you was full of maggots and no way could we eat it,” John said. “We would steal the molasses and boil it up with wheat. We also caught a lot of galahs and other wildlife. We picked up a lot of quondongs off the trees in the bush and also ate a lot of bush fruit. I found out later they were like antibiotics and probably saved us from getting sick.”

Tardun children were out of sight and out of mind. An English boy Charles Brunard, 13, was killed by a truck running over him. John was one of those boys on that truck and said Brother Thomas was the driver. “The radiator was boiling over and Brunard was copping all the boiling water as he sat on the left-hand guard”. But a normal death certificate was issued. A boy called Kevin Glasheen also died of a fractured skull. Other boys were told to shut their mouths or they would get the same treatment.

The boys had no warm clothes for the winter. John remembers Brother Beedon, a short baldy red-faced bespectacled man who was never happy unless he was belting someone with a strap. “It was a long strap always on the bare bum,” John said. “He was always sexually abusing someone”.

In 1945 the Air Force gave Clontarf back to the Christian Brothers and John returned. “Those Christian Brothers were paedophiles so we found out; the life of hell was starting out all over again,” he said. No one dared speak out about what was going on. Sexual abuse, floggings, red siphon hose wrapped around the waist, a special strap made for cutting down on leg muscles. The life of hell went on until the children turned 14 and were sent to work on farms.

On 1 August 1947, John was put on a train at Perth to get off at the Serpentine railway station. He waited at Serpentine for the farmer to pick him up but he was four hours late. When the farmer turned up in a horse and buggy, he went into town to go to a dance. The horse took them home as the boss was drunk. John got five shillings a week with Child Welfare claiming the other two pounds a week. He worked seven days a week between 12 and 15 hours a day and stayed there for six months.

The milk truck helped get him away. John found one of his mother’s friends and her son got him a job at Plaistowes sweet factory in West Perth. “I was there for three weeks before the Child Welfare found me,” John said. “But the Plaistowes brothers and three foremen would not let them touch me. I was 17 years old at the time and still a ward of state until I turned 21.”

John never saw his father again. When the men returned home from war in 1946 they could not find their families and got no help from the WA Government. John spent most of the rest of his life seeking his family as well as justice. On 1 January 1975 the WA Government destroyed the files of the forgotten children. In the 1980s, as Oranges and Sunshine testifies, the UK children came under the spotlight and there were several Senate investigations. But Australian-born victims were ignored. After years of contacting politicians without success, the WA Government finally offered John $45,000 last year, a figure he reluctantly accepted as the best deal he would ever get. He remains bitter about the treatment the Government meted out to the families.

“If the politicians and Child Welfare had paid assistance money these abuses would never have happened,” he said.“They abandoned us and turned a blind eye. It was their responsibility to what went on in these orphanages.” John said the politicians at the time thought the religious institutions could do no wrong, so they never went looking for it. “The politicians who were in the Senate calling us the forgotten Australians were wrong – we were the hidden Australians,” John said.