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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.
I’ll never forget the look on his face, not of fear, but a smile of arrogant assurance, something akin to a crook who’d never been caught. I don’t remember the exact wording, but he said something along the lines of ‘and whom would they believe; a lying little boy or a man of God.’
If it had ended there, I possibly would have been able to finish my schooling at Chevalier, not secure, but relatively safe in the knowledge that I had foiled his evil designs. M, however, had other plans. He never called me back to his room, continuing his health checks on other boys (God only knows how many he molested). No, on this little black duck, he began a campaign of psychological torment. (Cont.)
September 16th 2009 06:42
Under Attack
‘When they find, they will be disturbed—Jesus, The Gospel of Tomas
The two main problems with being the only child of ambitious publicans were loneliness and constant relocation. No sooner would I become settled in a school than the hotel was sold and off we’d go again. By the age of nine, I’d been to five schools and my grades were suffering as a result. That’s when my parents made the unfortunate decision to send me to boarding school. On advice from a family friend, they chose Our Lady of the Sacred Heart at Bowral, on the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, with the intention that when I finished primary levels, I would attend Chevalier Secondary College just down the road.
My two years with the nuns at O.L.S.H. passed in uneventful normality. Anyone that received Catholic schooling during the sixties and seventies will testify that the nuns although firm and not afraid to use the cane, were a cakewalk compared to the priests. The few excursions we had to Chevalier College, coupled with the stories we’d heard, had those in my class destined for enrolment expecting a prison camp run by malevolent priests wielding huge leather straps. That would prove not too far off the mark. Of course, not all the priests were nasty.
The College was a massive complex, a mixture of new brick and original weatherboard buildings. First and second form dormitories were housed in one of the original buildings at the front of the complex. It was there that I first encountered the personification of evil. I shall call him Brother M. He was a paedophile, a cruel, vindictive little man with a heart as dark as his persona. M quickly turned my stay at Chevalier into living torment.
As dormitory master, M’s room was situated in the main dorm-room itself. His modus operandi was deception. He would select his target and tell the unlucky boy that he wanted to see them in his room after ‘lights out’. I was targeted shortly after arrival. At first, I thought I must have done something wrong and was destined for my first strapping. Of course, now I dearly wish that’s all it was. I remember asking one of the boys I’d seen going to his room a few nights prior what it was like, did it hurt? However, my questions met a stoney silence, a shake of the head and running off.
One trick I was told: don two pairs of underpants. Of course, this only works if you were not told to drop your pants, but it was all I had. So henceforth padded and scared, when the lights went out, I made my way to M’s room. (Cont.)
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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It could be argued that Aboriginal disadvantage began when tribesmen first laid eyes on the British invaders in 1788. Developments took a decided turn for the worst however when colonists began to usurp tribal lands for the purposes of grazing and agriculture. By the 1870s with superior weaponry and government sanction, white settlers forced Aboriginals from their traditional lands and hunting grounds. What started out as subjugation with little or no conciliation (Pearson, 1984, p.48), soon turned into decimation. With decreasing food supplies and the spread of disease, Aborigines had little choice but to accept help from the white man and his government—invader now misguided saviour. This in turn led to a century of disastrous welfare protectionist policy, with many indigenous tribes herded onto reserves, and in some cases their children taken (the ‘Stolen Generation’). Robbed of their humanity and their identity it was a slow form of genocide. Dispossession complete, the invaders settled on Aboriginal land comforted by the false notions of Terra Nullius, and all had been done (Broome, 2001, pp.26-56).
This essay will examine important elements in historical and contemporary developments of Aboriginal disadvantage, compared to non-aboriginal advantage. The examination will inevitably lead to a relevant contemporary question: will Reconciliation right the balance, or will it be stymied by ingrained racist attitudes and the behemoth of federalism?
There can be little doubt that the greatest form of Indigenous disadvantage was the loss of tribal lands. Not only were the people robbed of their independence and the ability to sustain life, but their spirituality as well. Aborigines believe that ancestral beings inhabit their particular tribal territory and are responsible for generating life. Sacred sites exist where great events took place, sacred objects were hidden, and initiation ceremonies and burials performed (Broome, 2001, p18). Hence, the very fabric and structure of pre-invasion Aboriginal society was inextricably linked to the land
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In his 2003 book ‘Western Horizon Sydney’s Heartland and the Future of Australian Politics, David Burchell suggests the term 'racist' is used in the Australian public arena like a general panacea for political disagreement on the issue. Is there any evidence to support this view?
Burchell suggests the term racist is used in Australian public discourse as an ‘all purpose description of every strand in popular opinion of which liberals and radicals disapprove’. (p.45) He goes on to qualify that those who do disagree of multiculturalism are imagined as only venting ‘repressed’ racist views, threads of the nation’s dark soul.
In his assessment of Western Sydney, Burchell uses a combination of historical evidence from the post-WWII urban-spread, population demographics, crime statistics, and survey data from the Australian Election Study (2003, p46), to support his claim that the area has racism anxiety. An anxiety, when taken in a global-climate context however, not that ‘out-of-kilter’ (2003, p53) with the country as a whole. The conclusion is yes, that in the literal sense of the term, Western Sydney’s responses to survey questions and views expressed on talkback radio could be branded racist, but first take into account the underlying reasons and catalysts: simmering racial tension/911/Tampa
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Comment by Pete
on The Secret — What Secret?
Millennium Watch