Channel 7 Today Tonight (Adelaide) 28 June 2004
Allegations of boy's murder by nun

This version of the transcript has been edited by Dr Robert N Moles

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In order of appearance

Leigh McClusky, Presenter
Graham Archer, Producer and Interviewer
Trevor, Former State ward
Maggie, Former State ward
Barbara, Former State ward
Pat, Former State ward
Bridget, Former State ward
Peter Lewis, Speaker of South Australian Parliament
Kevin Foley, Treasurer and Deputy Premier [File tape]

Program

Leigh McClusky

Hello, welcome to the program. First tonight, it's a story so shocking it's hard to believe it's true. Allegations of a young Adelaide boy dying at the hands of a nun and allegations that the police failed to follow up the information they were given about the killing, while the government chose to dismiss it as a dream. Sadly, the brutality suffered by so many youngsters left in institutions have now become common knowledge, and while the government has been scathing about cover-ups of abuse throughout the churches, it appears the ultimate guardian of many of these children is indeed the State.

Tonight Graham Archer reports on the most troubling allegation to date that has victims once again calling for the whole sorry saga to be thrown open to an independent inquiry.

Trevor

The particular nun in question was violent towards most of the children.

Pat

It is criminal behaviour. These days, of course, they would be arrested.

Peter Lewis

[In Parliament] Order! The Deputy Premier will withdraw and apologise without

Kevin Foley

[In Parliament] I apologise and I withdraw.

Graham Archer

Are you saying that the Police Minister knowingly or unwittingly misled Parliament about the circumstances of this event?

Trevor

Either one or the other.

Graham Archer

If you were shocked by what you've seen - you're in for a bigger shock when you hear what's behind it all. And you're saying the death of that child was a real event?

Trevor

Yes.

Graham Archer

This extraordinary claim that a small boy died at the hands of a sadistic nun has returned to haunt a government forty years on. Did you ever reveal what you thought you'd seen to others?

Trevor

Who to? In that age nuns could do no wrong. They were brides of Christ. You couldn't tell anybody because no-one would believe you.

Graham Archer

There have been thousands of children placed under the care and protection of the State and church institutions - little children with no power over their fate.

Maggie

I was ten years old, and had not previously been hurt in any way in my life by anybody, and my flannel was crooked on the hook. I learned to be very quick, very tidy, very neat. I was aware every day, every minute of the day, and girls were bashed, brutalised, locked up.

Graham Archer

For Maggie, Goodwood Orphanage was a place of fear and pain, as it was for Barbara, Pat and Bridget, the former having been shipped across from British orphanages and lied to about the existence of their families.

Pat

- which stopped us from seeing our family; my mother and father died -  

Bridget

That's right -  

Pat

Two years before I found my family.

Bridget

I have no recollection of my life for the first ten years. None whatsoever.

Graham Archer

None at all?

Bridget

None at all.

Graham Archer

Some children will tell happy stories, but many others went through hell.

Trevor

Violence occurred. Violence on behalf of the nuns, fear obviously in the children, and that's how they controlled the boys.

Graham Archer

His mother's death led to his father's alcoholism, and at the tender age of five, Trevor and his sister had become nobody's children, and many terrible memories of his days in St Stanislav’s Orphanage, Royal Park, stayed with him. Now there was one incident which has haunted you all these years - tell me about that.

Trevor

There was a child, and I don't remember his name. I'd been - I was older at that time, I'd been protecting him for about a week against one of the nuns who was targeting him, and on this occasion I was last in line on the way to the toilets, and he was straight in front of me. He got elbowed in the side of the head. As usual, the force of that blow was sufficient to knock him onto the ground, off his feet. He didn't move. His eyes were open. As a child I didn't know what that was. As an adult I do - that child was dead.

Graham Archer

So you saw this child struck and killed right in front of your eyes?

Trevor

Yes.

Graham Archer

As a result of the blow from the nun?

Trevor

Yes.

Graham Archer

Did other children witness that?

Trevor

No. As I said, I was last in line; he was second last in line; the other children were on their way to the bathroom.

Graham Archer

From that moment, according to Trevor, the boy ceased to exist. Officially, they claimed the very next day he was fostered out. Even then, did you think that was odd?

Trevor

Yes, extremely.

Graham Archer

Was there talk amongst the other boys about it?

Trevor

No. Everybody was too frightened to even talk about it.

Graham Archer

It was forty years before Trevor felt able to reveal this terrible secret.

Trevor

We've had the changes to the law. We've had the Senate inquiry, and all of these things gave me a little bit more strength to finally believe that someone may do something about it finally.

Graham Archer

Do you think that people now at last are ready to listen?

Trevor

I thought they were.

Graham Archer

From your experience of reporting it?

Trevor

Yes.

Graham Archer

When he did, in November last year, the initial police response was what he'd hoped for.

Trevor

The police officer took it very seriously. They set out a plan of what they were going to do to investigate it. They supplied me with the e-mail with all of those details in it, and it looked very business-like, very professional.

Graham Archer

As well as two interviews, the police outlined their strategy in a series of e-mails to Trevor, which included 'We will take you to the Royal Park address, we will video the visit and record your responses. We will ascertain from planning / building records what, if any, major reconstruction has been undertaken.' But it was how the police inquiries commenced that really worried Trevor.

Trevor

And then - the first bit they had was to advise the Catholic Church. I questioned that at the time and was told that it was standard procedure.

Graham Archer

So the first thing the police did was to go to the organisation that would have been most threatened by these allegations?

Trevor

Yes.

Premier

[In Parliament] The Church failed those who most deserved support and care.

Graham Archer

So while the Premier and the Police Minister condemned these cover-ups, the police play into their hands.

Trevor

And it is surprising that after they did that, the investigation ceased.

Graham Archer

And it was the subsequent police e-mail, in February, which seemed to finally scuttle the investigation, claiming severe staff shortages. After that February e-mail, what did you hear from the police?

Trevor

Nothing.

Graham Archer

So it was silence?

Trevor

It was dead silence until I went to my local MP and asked him basically to look in to the resource issue of the police department and suggest that more resources be put in to this area.

Graham Archer

And when the Leader of the Opposition, Rob Kerin raised SAPOL's [South Australian Police] staffing predicament in Parliament, Kevin Foley, the Police Minister, aided by the Police Commissioner's statement, took the truncheon to Trevor's trauma of forty years - insisting he dreamt it all.

Kevin Foley

[In Parliament] The account given by the complainant does not leave the sphere of being a nightmare.

Graham Archer

And you're saying the death of that child was a real event?

Trevor

Yes.

Graham Archer

When you reported it to the police, did you make it clear that this was a real event?

Trevor

I was very specific with the police officer to separate the event that I saw - which is a very clear and concise memory - with the possible location of the body which is the subject of recurring nightmares I have.

Graham Archer

It wasn't part of a dream or a nightmare?

Trevor

It was not.

Graham Archer

According to Trevor, an inspection of the police notes and e-mails would have clearly dispelled any doubts. But the Police Minister went further.

Kevin Foley

[In Parliament] The information provided by the Commissioner for Police makes it clear that the police did in fact investigate these allegations.

Trevor

It hadn't. None of those items that they had listed down as parts of their investigation were done, except for the first one and that was to advise the Catholic Church.

Graham Archer

In fact Trevor provided the police with the names and phone numbers of former orphans who could verify the violence the children were subjected to and the police promises to follow up were also committed to e-mail.

Dietmar

No I've never had any contact regarding this matter or any other matters to do with the home by the South Australian Police or any other authority at any time.

Graham Archer

Dietmar, now the manager of a pathology lab of a large hospital was one of those.

Dietmar

All the children that were there were traumatised by what happened there. Certainly I wasn't aware that anybody was killed there. But I feel that it's very possible and highly probable that what [name deleted] is saying is correct and I feel strongly that it should be investigated.

Graham Archer

It appears, despite what the Police Minister told Parliament, almost no investigating took place. So that statement in Parliament by the Police Minister was just plain wrong, are you saying?

Trevor

Yes. Either he was wrong or he was very ill advised by the police department.

Graham Archer

But the Police Minister's information came from the Police Commissioner, was he also wrong?

Trevor

Either he was wrong or he was ill advised.

Graham Archer

So somewhere between the officer who took the call and sent the emails and the Police Minister, the facts got lost?

Trevor

Got lost or deliberately altered.

Graham Archer

So if the Church's sins are absolved so readily, despite the politicians' rhetoric -

Mike Rann

[File tape] The thing that concerned me the most was that there was a climate of cover up within the Anglican Church hierarchy.

Graham Archer

What about those sins committed in the name of us all by the Government and the cover ups there? When Today Tonight first raised the abuse of wards of the State, the silence was predictable and just last week, Mark Brindal's similar concerns received this response from the Premier in the local paper. ‘Refer any such material to the police.' Well, Trevor did, and while the individual police officers have done an excellent job - the nine charged last week is an example - it was a Church inquiry, albeit internal, that brought things to a head and increased the demand to -

Mike Rann

[File tape] Exorcise those demons within the Church, because what they're dealing with is evil in their own ranks.

Graham Archer  

So why wouldn't the government institutions benefit from the same process?

Trevor

The way that the police have not investigated this matter indicates to me the only power that we have available in the State of South Australia to investigate these cases properly is a Royal Commission.

Graham Archer

And we find the cover-ups and secrecy the Premier protests about come much closer to home when we reveal that documents such as this have come to light [vision of file dated 1972].

Barbara

So they've got files there that they don't want us to have.

Graham Archer

Are you aware that for every child put into the orphanage the Church received some allocation of money?

Barbara

Yes.

Pat

They denied it.

Graham Archer

The Churches were paid to look after each child. The sins committed were in the name of us all. But its information we're not supposed to have. So the government was basically paying for the care of you children?

Pat

Yeah.

Graham Archer

The Government's attempt to fob this off as a Church problem is simply not acceptable.

Maggie, Barbara, Pat, Bridget

No it's not ... no.

Graham Archer

Each story would fill a book. Tales of such things as beatings – in Pat's case with a monstrous leather strap.

Pat

She was just out of her mind, I reckon, because she just grabbed me by the nightie and ripped it, and then she pushed me down on the bed and just kept going and going and going.

Graham Archer

Tales of exploitation.

Maggie

I was barely sixteen when I left, had worked from 5 o'clock to nearly 7 o'clock nearly every night, seven days a week. I prayed to leave, but when it came I was just so destroyed I was just too frightened even to leave the place, and that's what it did to me.

Graham Archer

The humiliation of little girls which would now not be tolerated for prisoners of war. As punishment they were forced to display the hair hacked from their heads.

Maggie

Have it in a vase - and they had to parade around the big dining room to show us what can happen to you.

Graham Archer

Your hair in a bowl?

Maggie

Your hair in a bowl. It was chopped. It wasn't cut neat or anything. It was just chopped.

Graham Archer

So when the politicians point the finger at the Churches and, as in Trevor's case, appear to dismiss anything =

Kevin Foley

[In Parliament] Sir, the uninformed and reckless allegations raised by the Leader of the Opposition -  

Peter Lewis Speaker

Order! Order!

Kevin Foley in Parliament

The Shadow Minister

Peter Lewis Speaker

Order!

Graham Archer

If the politicians really want to know what should be in order, they should listen to the people who know.

Trevor

It seems to me that the Government is trying to continually avoid the issue of having a Royal Commission.

Barbara

I'd like to see a Government inquiry. Not just what's happened in the recent events now, but in actual fact what has been going on for many, many years, that people, I'm sure, were aware of but it was just as easy to ignore it.

Leigh McClusky

Graham Archer with that special report.

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