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Of course, initially I thought all my Christmases had come at once, what kid wouldn’t with all this time to themselves. However, that would soon change as the Enemy marshalled for another attack. In hindsight, I would have been much better off at Chevalier dodging Brother Mamo—better the devil you know—for in the coming months, this teenager would find himself in a place very few return from, at least not without suffering irreparable damage.
The first realisation I had about George was he is a closet-alcoholic. Come nightfall and when in need of company the most, I would find my minder in a drunken stupor or passed out in his shack. Whether it was because of the shame I harboured about Mamo, George’s bad example, fear and loneliness, or a combination of all these that lead me to the bottle I will never know. But what began as a few tentative swigs, soon turned into outright guzzling, for as one can imagine in an hotelier’s home, choice of alcohol is more a problem than availability. I remember one particular time a party had been arranged at a friend’s house and I decided to guzzle on a bottle of Chivas Regal before leaving. Naturally, I never made it to the party, waking up that night in the gutter not far from home. I’d drank three-quarters of the bottle! It was a miracle I didn’t get alcohol poisoning.
It was during a similar state of inebriation that George made his move. I was drinking one afternoon while watching TV, and after many glasses felt quite ill, so I laid up on the lounge and soon fell fast asleep. I remember waking to find George sitting next to me with his pants down.
He had one hand on my genitals, the other on his. I kicked away from him and ran into my room, where after locking the door, curled up on my bed. Naturally, I was still quite woozy, and it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.
The next morning, I of course woke hung-over, the memory of George fondling me a vague blur. I remember thinking something along the lines of ‘did that happen or was it a dream about Mamo?’ Naturally, George didn’t say a word, acting as if everything was hunky dory. And I wasn’t about to say ‘hey, by the way, did you fondle me last night?’ It wasn’t until he tried the same thing on one of my friends a few weeks later, did I realise the memory was no distorted dream of Mamo—George was also a paedophile! Thank God, this was to prove his downfall, for who knows how far he would have went, or what he was capable of?
Armed with the knowledge of my friend’s encounter, and with backup from another friend that was privy to what happened, I confronted my mother one day at home. My mum, Irma, was a strong woman who made her mark in a man’s world. She was also renowned for her temper. Her reaction to hearing the news was swift and furious. Grabbing a tomahawk from the back shed and shouting choice expletives, she chased George from the property.
Surprisingly, no further action was taken, probably because yours truly, due to the shame of it all, neglected to tell mother that George had also molested me. Yet again, the Enemy had done his work well. Another molestation and now alcohol addiction was added to my ever-growing list of infirmaries.
(6) Tainted
“It is possible for you to reach it (the Kingdom), but you will grieve a great deal.” — Jesus, The Gospel of Judas.
As adults, we all walk well-worn paths, products of our childhood environment. Of course, genetics play a role, however, the nuns don’t say: ‘give me a child until they’re six and you’ll never change them’ for nothing. We seek out partners with the qualities of our parents, friends of similar kind. We at times repeat the same mistakes over and over until a particular lesson is learnt. Yet, there was no lesson (for me) to be learnt from what happened at Chevalier College, nothing I could have done would have changed anything. I wasn’t a product of a sexually abusive environment, nor did I seek to be abused. Why then, did I let it happen again?
First, I did not let it happen. Like most victims of abuse, I just thought that way for many years. It wasn’t until I became an adult did I realise that for sexual abuse to occur, three things must be present: a particular set of circumstances, an evil mind, and the victim—who of course has little or no control over the situation. In my particular case, being left at home alone at times for days on end, and a gardener/handyman called George.
It happened one year after my escape from Chevalier. I don’t know or have ever known George’s surname, but I do know he’s been dead for many years. He started work for my parents as a general-hand in the hotel they owned at that time called ‘The Panorama’. Then when the hotel was sold, they retained him to maintain the house and gardens at the family home. To me, George was a seemingly harmless old man who lived in a shack on the vacant block we owned adjacent home. However, at this stage George was on his best behaviour due to my parents being around most of the time. It wasn’t until they purchased another hotel and began spending from Thursday to Sunday there, did George show his true colours.
Either my parents’ thought it was okay to leave a fifteen-year-old teenager in the care of a man they knew virtually nothing about, or like me, were fooled by George’s seemingly innocuous facade. It matters little now, other than for the process of learning—parents need to be very careful in whose care they leave their children. (Cont.)
In hindsight, M’s treatment of me was predictable: smother any ideas the boy has of exposure under a blanket of fear. Then if he does tell his parents, it becomes a matter of revenge, ‘you know how they can get, and the boy feels harshly dealt with so he concocts this ridiculous molestation charge out of spite’. Whatever the reasoning, it worked.
A week or so later I signed on for rugby union, and you wouldn’t want to know whom we get as coach, Brother M. Whenever a tackle needed to be demonstrated, I was called out and used as the tackle-dummy. Until one day, he hit me that hard it burst a blood vessel in my nose. Crying as I clutched my nose, M called me a sissy and told me to get to the infirmary. From then on, as much as I tried to avoid the man, it was like he was omnipresent, seemingly always around when I was up to mischief, just small stuff, like running where you shouldn’t or flicking rubber bands. But the thing was, instead of just giving me the strap and being done with it, he would tell me to wait at the designated ‘strapping-room’ and wait…and wait, until the bell would ring for class or some other place I had to be.
The result of all this was an ever-present anxiety, wound up a notch every time I laid eyes on this so called man of God: ‘Will he strap me now?’
I then embarked on a campaign of parental harassment to get me out of that hellhole that lasted some eighteen months. Ironically, marijuana proved the decisive factor, not molestation, for I had locked that foul incident away, sealed-off behind a wall of fear and shame.
A group of boys were caught smoking pot down behind the chook-pens and when I told my parents about it, Mother asked if I had smoked any. I said ‘no’—which was the truth. But seeing the look of concern on their faces seized the moment: ‘But I’d been offered some,’ I lied. At the end of Third Form, I was out of there, finishing my School Certificate at St Paul’s College, Bellambi, not far from home.
To say that I left Chevalier as damaged-goods would be an understatement. Try disaster looking for a place to happen. There was this ball of anger lodged in my gut, manifesting itself in low self-esteem, depression, and bouts of rage. I rebelled against authority, hated all things religious, and trusted no one. Of course, this caused big problems on the home front.
My parents, unaware of what I had been through, thought their son had turned into an incorrigible brat. At the time, I really didn’t care what they thought; they were the people responsible for sending me to that hellhole in the first place. Instead of having the world at my feet like most my of my friends, it was placed on my shoulders. The Enemy had done his work well. This fifteen-year old was on a collision course with hell. (Cont.)
September 30th 2009 21:18
A wonderful self-defence mechanism allows children to bury bad events, and it wasn’t until I was an adult and underwent hypnotherapy, did the incident return like some replay of a horror movie. M had me sit on his bed. He sat on a chair opposite. He then explained that he had to conduct a health check to make sure nothing was wrong. Relief flooded through me—I wasn’t going to be strapped! This and the fact his demeanour was relaxed, his voice echoing quiet assurance, made me accept the lie. He then told me to stand and take down my pyjama pants. I quickly obeyed, not wanting him to notice my two pairs of underpants.
That’s when he began to fondle my private parts. I remember getting embarrassed and pulled away. M assured me that this was natural, and not to worry. Then for reasons of his own, he told me to pull up my pants, and that we would continue the check tomorrow night. Before leaving his room, he warned me that these health checks were personal and not to mention anything to the other boys or there would be serious trouble.
The following night, I knocked on his door with an uneasy feeling growing in the pit of my stomach. Once inside, he again told me to take down my pants. Then alarm bells started to ring in my mind. Something was wrong; this was no health check! I refused him, saying that I would tell my parents if he touched me again
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September 16th 2009 06:42
My parents were publicans and naturally wanted their son to spend as least amount of time in hotels as possible. Therefore it was my grandmother Gertrude who shouldered the greater load in raising me from about three until the age of six when she died. Just before grandmother’s death, I’d been staying at the hotel for a week owing to her admission in hospital. She passed away on the Friday and for reasons of their own, my parents decided to wait until Monday when we were at home to tell me.
We had left the hotel on Sunday evening. The family home was a weatherboard cottage in a seaside village south of Sydney, and it was about 8.00pm by the time we’d travelled the 80 or so kilometres. As usual, I had fallen asleep in the backseat of the car, and what transpired as we pulled in to the driveway I have put together from memory and what my parents have told me.
Mother reached over from the front and shook my leg to wake me and that’s when I suddenly began to scream and thrash about on the seat. My recollection of this event has grown vague with the passage of time, but apparently, I carried on for a couple of minutes before settling down, then flatly refused to get out of the car. What I do remember, what I’ll never forget, is the all-pervading sense that something was wrong, seriously wrong? Of course, the wrong was my grandmother had died
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The Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia began in NSW around the 1860s (Goodall, 1996, p.173) with the struggle to obtain and then hold on to reserve land. From there, it grew to a nationwide ongoing struggle culminating in the recognition of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ native title in a High Court decision of 1992 (Mabo vs. Queensland). However, as Lisa Strelein points out, trusting in a judicial system to acknowledge and sustain indigenous self-determination is ‘fraught with dilemmas’ (Strelein, 1996, p.36), namely the inherent structures of oppression, and understanding indigenous needs from a European perspective.
In 1991 the Australian Government passed the Reconciliation Act, and a timeline from this point to present day will highlight the contemporary nature of Indigenous disadvantage to non-indigenous advantage, for in reality, nothing much has changed.
For example, the Reconciliation Council was established when the Act passed through Parliament, and was terminated nine years later by a Howard government on the eve of centenary of Federation celebrations. This is the same government who refused to say sorry to the ‘stolen generation’ in 2005, those children of mixed-descent forcibly taken from their parents. Although that blot has now been erased by the Rudd government, and no doubt the Indigenous population are pleased with the Mabo ruling and Wik Legislation, Indigenous disadvantage is alive and well in rural and outback communities, and any Native Title claims have to navigate the beaurocratic minefield of States, Departments, and local Councils that are inherent in federalism
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Into the 21st Century and it is hard to conceive how a government could have been so callous and negligent, that is until one realises the full extent of the Terra Nullius doctrine and its partner in crime, the belief that the Aboriginal people were a dying race. This explains why the Aborigines were herded like sheep onto reserves, and then denied adequate resources to sustain self-sufficiency. Why their mixed-blood children were taken from them, or as adults forbidden from entering the reserves. And why government gave in to white settler pressure and sold-off Reserve land (Barwick, 1972, pp.18-66).
What Terra Nullius and social Darwinism don’t explain is ethnocentricity, the belief in racial superiority and outright prejudice against another because their skin is a different colour. If Terra Nullius and dispossession are the foundation of indigenous disadvantage in this country, then racism is the perpetuating force. To illustrate an example of racism and prejudice at work we need only go back as far as the 1950-60s eras and the cattle industry of Queensland, NT, and northern Western Australia.
Both male and female Aboriginal workers were indispensible to the stock and station industry in these areas due to the difficulty in luring white labour to the harsh and inhospitable climate. The men proved to be more than capable in the saddle and their bush skills stood them in good stead when locating herds and strays across the vast expanses, while the women were employed as domestics in and around the homestead. However, as historian Richard Broome elucidates, ‘overall, the European racist myths in the north claimed that Aboriginal workers were lazy and incapable.’ The reality, Broome qualifies, is that ‘the Aborigines were absolutely essential to the pastoral economy because of their skills and acceptance of low wages’ (Broome, 2002, p.130). Not only did the Aboriginal workers accept lower pay, in some cases they were not paid at all. Many were housed in tin shacks, while white stockmen and managers enjoyed the comforts of homestead and quarters. The myth translated into a reality of racial prejudice, and the walls of Indigenous disadvantage were as unassailable as ever
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This was the colonial mentality: belief in racial superiority and the fire-power to back it up. One has to go no further than the colonisation of the upper Macquarie district of New South Wales between 1822 and 1825 to witness the development of Aboriginal land disadvantage, and conversely, white advantage. From the surveyor’s eye, there were thousands of acres of flat grazing land occupied by nomadic tribes who made little use of it. Waiting were the graziers eager to tame the frontier, establish boundaries and put up fences for thousands of sheep. Both government and grazier lacking the realisation that those nomadic tribes in fact stayed within defined ‘clan territories’ (Pearson, 1984, p.64) and depended on that patch of land for their very existence. A clash of cultures was inevitable. Native warriors fought with skill and bravery; the graziers and settlers, on the other hand, fought a war of attrition. With the arrival of new weapons, growing numbers, and increasing government assistance fuelled by public pressure of white deaths, it took but three years to dispossess the Upper Macquarie native of his land—one of many such incidents across the country.
Obviously dispossession is the first major leg on the road to indigenous disadvantage, a term polarised under a ‘loss of rights’ banner. White settlers applied for and were granted land that government had no right to grant in the first place, the false doctrine of Terra Nullius hard at work appeasing the white conscience—it is alright to take this advantage in land as it belonged to no one in the first place. Here the seeds of Indigenous disadvantage are sown: if the Aboriginal people have no land, then they have no civilisation. This enabled the development of racist policy for well over a century, and denied the Indigenous population citizenship in their country until 1967.
Hindsight and conjecture are useful tools in retrospective analysis, however, to take another’s land is bad enough, then to deny them any recourse in the matter by exclusion from citizenship for sixty-six years, is to systematically strip them of all rights. The obvious scapegoat employed by pre‘67 democratic governments: we only have to uphold the rights of our citizens. These are rights to ‘employment in a reasonable job; ‘quality education’; ‘freely available healthcare’, and ‘affordable housing’ (Theophanous, 1994, p.91). What excuse is there for the forty years that has followed Indigenous citizenship
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on The Secret — What Secret?
Millennium Watch