Ron Green and his fellow orphanage kids revisit their childhood hell

From left: Eric Barnes, Ron Green and Keith Grosser. Pictures: Brendan Read.

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The Duke snarls on the round face of Ron Green’s living room wall clock, which tells the 72-year-old former champion boxer that it’s 10.15am and time to revisit one of the most brutal episodes of institutional child abuse in Australian history. The Round 12 bell has rung and the ghost of a long-dead housemaster named Albert “Sarge” Holloway – the brooding sadist with the blade scar across his neck – waits for Ron and eight lifelong friends in a former Anglican Church boys’ home 65km south of Armidale, northern NSW.

Ron walks to his small bathroom to wash his hands. In the bathroom is a small mirror that he stares into every morning. He stares at his face, hard and angular like he was formed not inside the mother he never knew but inside a wall of granite rock. He stares at the small scar running from his bottom lip, given to him by housemaster Holloway in a bashing so malicious it made Ron wet his pants. And to his mirror every morning he spits these words: “I’d like to run into you now, you bastard.”

Across from Ron’s bathroom is a small office with a clear plastic storage box resting on a swivel chair. “Help me lift this, will you?” he says. The box is filled with legal texts, Senate committee reports, binders of letters, statements, affidavits and Ron’s 2002 statutory declaration, verified by the Victims Compensation Tribunal of NSW, detailing the gross physical and emotional abuse he endured as a boy aged five to 12 in Holloway’s care. He’s scrawled a rough-hand title on the declaration in thick permanent marker: “8 Years of Hell”.

For 60 years Ron stayed silent about the sins of Holloway. Silent for family. Silent for himself. Gagged for a time by the church and by lawyers. But in January, Ron dialled an 1800 number and, like more than 5000 Australians, made contact with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Three months later, representatives from the Royal Commission phoned Ron. They wanted to discuss the 34-page report he submitted to the Commission, his own damning insight into Australia’s responses to institutional abuse.

Now he needs his fellow home kids. He needs them to come with him to a place they vowed never to return to, a home to at least 83 orphaned and abandoned boys aged between three and 14, from 1950 to 1965. He needs his old friend Keith Grosser and he needs Mal Hines and Mal’s two older brothers, John and Peter. He needs little Eric Barnes and big John Singleton; Ron Morris and his old mate Kev Scanlon. He needs their support now, in his twilight years, like he needed it as a boy. He’s not sure how many will answer the call, who will be strong enough to face the housemaster’s ghost. But he needs them because he has a plan, a rough-edged plan that he sums up in four words that could be scrawled in permanent marker on every legal document stuffing his plastic storage box: “No More F..king Silence”.

“You fellas ready?” asks Ron, preparing to lock the front door to his modest home on the New England Highway on the outskirts of Glen Innes. Mal Hines and Keith Grosser, both 64, heard Ron’s call. They have been driving from Logan, south of Brisbane, since 4am. Keith slept most of the journey, lying sideways across the back seat of a rented Kia Carnival, his head resting on a rolled-up black beanie. His bowel and liver are laced with cancer. He was recently in a medical ward recovering from his latest round of chemotherapy, thinking deeply on things, like how life comes full circle on a bloke, giving him a bastard of an ending to match the beginning. Keith’s adult life has featured decades of hard labour jobs across the country, a brief sortie into petty crime and prison time, then two decades in a Logan caravan park and now the Big C. But things have always been up since he left the boys’ home. There’s only one direction a kid can climb out of hell.

Keith and Mal are by the dining table discussing the merits of the corned beef and tomato sandwiches Ron fixed this morning. White bread versus multigrain. Triangular versus square. Ratios of salt and pepper. Margarine versus butter. There’s a recipe Mal does with corned beef where he boils it in 1.25 litres of ginger ale. “Falls apart in your mouth,” he says. Mal is a retired truck driver. He smokes upwards of 50 cigarettes a day. When he travels he carries with him a medical box filled with 39 pills that he must swallow through breakfast, lunch and dinner daily for a range of physical – heart, kidneys, lungs – and emotional health issues. Always have a few packets of French onion soup mix in the cupboard, he is saying. There’s no meat dish that can’t be salvaged with a sprinkle of French onion soup mix. And there’s no trauma that can’t be buried beneath idle chat.

Ron loads the box of legal documents into the boot of his royal blue 1996 Mercedes. His friends slide slowly into their seats, hands forcing old knee joints into action. The Mercedes pulls out of a thin dirt driveway, turns left onto the New England Highway, heading to a place of such misery that it wakes each of the car’s passengers from their sleep at night, makes them writhe in their beds so vigorously that they sometimes fall heavily to their bedroom floors.

The road to Armidale brings up the past. The men look out their windows to old railway crossings and farms. The roadside gold poplar trees never end. They line the New England Highway for an hour, majestic and trembling towers of sun-coloured leaf, signposts to cool autumns and winters. For the men, these beautiful trees are also signposts to misery. When they were kids, these trees meant only one thing: the way in and out of the hands of Albert Holloway.

This place of horror is more beautiful than Keith remembers. He steps out of the car, stretches his legs and assesses the homestead. “Well,” he says. “Let’s go see the ghost.”

The old boys’ home is a private residence today. The family who owns it has restored the homestead inside and out. Two female members of the family are doing today what few have ever done for Keith and the home kids. They are opening their doors. For privacy, they ask that the homestead not be named. Young children live here. Their music posters and pink decorations line the walls of rooms that are settings for Keith’s nightmares. But the family intends to acknowledge the past and it’s a gesture that brings tears to Keith’s eyes.

Every man answers Ron’s call. They come from Tamworth, Uralla and Port Macquarie. Some bring their wives. Some bring their sons. They close their car doors and amble warily along the side of the homestead, on guard, as though Holloway still watches from his kitchen window, tapping his razor strap against his thigh.

Ron stands by a thick hedge nodding to each of his friends, a quiet gesture as powerful as placing a sword on their shoulders. “Come on over here you old bugger,” Keith says, embracing his old friend Kev Scanlon. Some of the men, like Keith and Ron, were under Holloway’s care in the Anglican Church’s Coventry Boys’ Home at Armidale before being transferred with Holloway, when Coventry became a home for girls, to the church’s new home for boys in July 1950. There were 23 in the home then. Some were orphans. Some were the sons of violent men, removed for their apparent safety by the state’s Department of Child Welfare. Many, like Ron and Keith, were sent by single post-World War II parents ill-financed and ill-equipped to raise yet another child.

A few have been back here, stopped briefly at its gates. Most haven’t seen this place for 60 years. Mal Hines turns to a vast overgrown space behind the homestead. “They got rid of the tennis court,” he says. He holds a bottle of Diet Coke that shakes in his trembling right hand. Puffy bags under his eyes turn a bright red as tears stream down his face.

Mal was the youngest child under Holloway’s care, from ages three to seven. He was sent to the home when his mother, Amy, who suffered from deafness and couldn’t read or write, was forced to move into a Salvation Army home. His father went to prison for assault shortly after he was born. Mal spoke of the tennis court in his declaration to the Victims Compensation Tribunal: “I was placed in a wooden box on the tennis court. Heavy weight was then put on top so you couldn’t get out. I tried and I couldn’t even lift it. On a number of occasions I was in this box all night. I was not given a blanket, food or water. I was terrified and freezing.”

Mal lumbers to the front of the homestead in tracksuit pants and a blue flannelette shirt. He has to sit down, take a few breaths. Across a field he can see the store room where Holloway gave boys electric shocks for reasons none can fully understand. “Have you seen the old magnetos?” Mal says. “Like a generator thing in the old cars. He used to set that up, hook it up to you. Hook it up to your genitals and give you an electric charge. Just to see how loud you could scream.”

Kev Scanlon and his wife, Lyn, stand together in a paddock. Lyn grips her husband’s hand tight, tucks her head into his shoulder. He’s a proud, loving husband in a neat black jumper, stylish slacks and spectacles. “A stray dog walked in once,” he recalls. “A poor old dog, beautiful dog.” Tears flood his eyes. Nerves, the cold New England air and this bitter place make him stumble over his words. “Sarge, he gave me a hammer and he said, ‘I want you to kill that dog’. And I had to go down and hit that dog with this hammer. The hammer went that deep between the dog’s eyes.” He shudders. “But he was still alive and I went back to Sarge and I said, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, he’s still alive’. And he got a gun and he shot it right in front of everyone. I was eight years old.”

Keith walks to the back of the home. He was six, the son of a single mum, when he was dropped at the doors of Coventry Boys’ Home by his grandfather; aged 10 when he was shifted to this home, 65km south. He stops at a courtyard near a creeping vine and a large outdoor bell. “My first encounter was right here,” he whispers. “There was a tank stand. The kids would be away, down the paddock somewhere. And he gets on his knees and I sucked his dick.” He breathes deep and casts his eyes around these still grounds. “I did it 16 times. I could go to most of them places now. You don’t forget these things.”

Keith speaks matter-of-factly, the way bystanders recount traffic accidents. Sarge held his head down in a bath and ejaculated in his mouth. Sarge flogged him with a leather strap fixed with sandpaper. Sarge woke him from his sleep and pulled him around the dormitory by his penis. Sarge made him eat the excrement caused in beatings. Sarge rubbed licorice allsorts in boys’ faeces and forced them to eat them. Sarge’s wife, Martha “Matron” Holloway, shoved a lit cigarette down his throat. Sarge inserted a tube into Keith’s anus and pump-flushed the soft drink he was not supposed to drink.

One of the home’s current owners emerges from the main living area, offers to take the group on a tour inside the main house. Ron refuses. “Thank you,” he says, softly. “But I’ll stay right here.” He has his reasons for staying put and they will be voiced down the phone to me a week later. Mal stays behind with his old friend. The rest of the men shuffle tentatively through the living room, climb a staircase to the upstairs dormitories, places of bed wetting and beatings.

Kev Scanlon points to the very space he slept. “Right here,” he says. He walks to an alcove window, stares outside. The boys did this at night when they were kids: stared outside their windows toward a graveyard beyond the home’s front paddock. And in the graveyard they would see the ghost, a floating white apparition moving through the resting places of the dead. It was Holloway. Something in his fractured psyche made him scurry in the middle of the night into the graveyard hills and drape himself in a white bed sheet, illuminate himself with a torch. The ghost was born.

“That’s how he got away with it,” Keith says. “Fear. He frightened the hell out of us. Every day. Every night. There was too big a fear to run away. Too big a fear to tell anyone about it down the street. But the town was pathetic to us, anyway, when you think about it. Nobody talked to us. We were convicts. We were slaves.”

In June 1950, a public newsletter from Coventry Boys’ Home in Armidale was published under the title The Haven. It featured a formal photograph of the boys in three rows, in shoes and suits. Eric Barnes, Keith Grosser, Ron Green and Ron Morris smile wide in the photograph. It also featured a testimonial column, “By a Visitor”, written by a Mr R.D.R. Pogson: “If I may do as much as half the good in my life as [Sarge and Matron Holloway] have done for the home I should be extremely happy. Not once during my visit did I hear a word of cheek or defamation, which puts beyond doubt the respect these boys hold for Sarge and the Matron. I share it with them.

“In conclusion, I should like to commend Sarge and the Matron on a hard job well done, although they say they are far from finished yet.”

Far from finished, Holloway abused his boys for four more years until, in 1954, a 12-year-old ran away and told a mercifully compassionate woman, Mrs W.M. Borthwick, who picked him up miles from the home, that he had been sexually assaulted by Holloway. “The police took him away right here,” says John Singleton, standing on a patch of lawn by the store rooms. “It was the happiest day of my life.”

On June 9, 1955, a New England newspaper reported Holloway’s conviction by an Armidale jury on seven counts of assault, including “four offences of aiding and abetting in an indecency in March, 1954, and three similar offences in July, 1953”. The Armidale jury declared “the prisoner is not a fit and proper person to be in charge of boys”. Holloway collapsed in the hearing, “falling heavily upon the floor by the barrister’s table”. But, in a bizarre decision that would bring lasting pain to the home kids, the NSW attorney-general refused to file bills against Holloway, essentially having his convictions voided for reasons no one, including the NSW Police, can explain. The boys never saw Holloway again. He and his wife disappeared from the New England Tableland. The home ran for 10 more years under reportedly compassionate housemasters until the church sold it into private hands in 1965. But Holloway’s final, sickening assault on his home kids would last 60 years. He became the ghost he pretended to be. He became a phantom in their minds, his spectre an ugly face not veiled by any bed sheet.

Most of the men break down at some point throughout this afternoon. Everybody has their tipping point: a word, a gesture, an anecdote. By the side garden, John Hine, a nuggety 70-year-old horse trainer, staggers away from the group. The stagger turns to a short run, an aimless run to no destination that exists because he’s running from the thoughts in his head. He bends down like he’s going to vomit but he gags and spits, shakes off a rush of tears.

His younger brother Peter watches from afar. “You get very lonely,” Peter says, arms folded tight across his chest. “Very lonely. I used to make some friends. They’d find out how you were brought up and they’d just move away or they’d start blueing with you and, bang, you’d get into it.” He sighs, looks around the homestead. “Awww, God. You’d just move on. Forget that town, move on. Get another one, move on. I’ve had two broken marriages. I’m still on my own. Got no one.” He nods at his brother, now sitting on a step, head down, elbows on his knees, sucking in breaths like he’s been sidelined in a brutal football game. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” Peter says. “Nothing will bring the childhood back again.” He shrugs. “Or the life.”

Ron calls his friends to a large outdoor table on the homestead veranda. A few men sit, most stand, pacing back and forth, smoking, absorbing, processing, fighting the urge to burn this beautiful homestead to ash. “Listen,” Ron says. “We need to talk about where this is going.”

For the crimes they endured between 1946 and 1954 these nine men each received payments from the NSW Victims Compensation Tribunal of between $40,000 and $50,000. In 2003, a Sydney lawyer facilitated a mediation with the Anglican Church that resulted in additional payments of up to $40,000 for the men. To receive payment, however, the men were forced to sign a Deed of Release in which claimants agreed “not to discuss with, reveal to, relate to, write to, report to any other person these terms or any of the facts alleged to have taken place at the Coventry Boys’ Home at Armidale or the [name withheld] Boys’ Home during the years 1945 to 1955, except in private and confidential counselling sessions”. The Deed of Release, signed by Armidale’s then Anglican Bishop Peter Brain, ensured the silence of the home kids. Days later, the men were informed that, because they had been compensated by the church, they were legally obliged to pay back the initial compensation received from the Victims Compensation Tribunal. After a harrowing, bloodletting church mediation where they shared their most private nightmares, the home kids found themselves back at the place where they started without the one thing that might help them heal: the ability to speak freely about their trauma. The compensation journey only compounded their agony, magnified it and prolonged it, before reducing their darkest moments to little more than dollar signs.

“They paid us out and shut us up and they did it because they knew we didn’t know any better,” Mal says, crystallising the thoughts of countless victims of institutional abuse across Australia whose church mediations have resulted in clandestine gag orders.

In 2004, after Ron made the NSW Victims Compensation Tribunal aware of the church mediation’s Deed of Release, Bishop Brain released the home kids from the confidentiality clause. They could speak about their abuse but not details of payments. Bishop Brain says silence was never the church’s intention. The bishop, who retired last year, was acting on his own legal advice and, in an act of goodwill, made efforts to reach a financial agreement with Victims Services NSW that absorbed the repayment costs of the victims.

On February 13 last year, Bishop Brain wrote a letter to Ron: “Like you our understanding at the mediated settlement was that the amount agreed upon was on the basis that no repayment to the VCT would be required. This was entered into in good faith.”

An August 20, 2003, tax invoice from the men’s legal representatives shows $168,938 was allotted by the Anglican Church for the law firm’s “costs, disbursements and outlays”. Ten years on, Ron Green estimates the whole sorry compensation affair left him more than $18,000 in debt, factoring in legal costs to have his case re-mediated, to no avail, and travel costs accumulated tracking down his fellow home kids, enlisting them in what he calls “the fiasco”.

Compensation didn’t kill the ghost; nor did silence. So Ron initiates his latest plan: speaking up; breaking silence. He tells the men about momentum, that the Royal Commission will be calling and when they do they must be ready to speak. They must be ready to tell their stories, for better or worse, because he believes the only thing that matters is their story, the power of telling it and the power of having it heard.

In the late afternoon, Keith rises from the outdoor table, his bones aching with age and illness. “Righto,” he says. He walks toward a camera fixed to a tripod and, one by one, his boyhood friends follow. The home kids stand before a camera so people can see their faces, see the stories in their eyes and in their scars. See the boy in the bathtub. See the wife and kids who couldn’t take it anymore. See the blade-scarred ghost of Holloway. One by one, they stare into the probing lens. I was here. I’m still here. This happened. And then they depart, because that’s as far as Ron’s plan goes. They thank the cottage owners, shake hands and hug, and make their way back to the New England Highway and their lives.

Mal and Keith bunk down overnight in a motel in the centre of Armidale. “I think I’m gonna have a bath,” Keith announces. He hasn’t enjoyed a warm bath in maybe a decade, he says. He stays in that warm water so long, his weary bones stiffen and he struggles to pull himself out.

Seven days later, Ron reflects on the journey, assesses its usefulness. His voice softens on the phone. He talks through tears, telling me why he didn’t go on that homestead tour, telling me how deep Holloway’s scars go. He was sexually assaulted by Holloway. In an old sulky shed the man employed under God to be his guardian told him to place his head in a benchtop vice. “He told me he was going to get a measurement of my head because he wanted to buy me a hat,” the former boxing champion says through tears. “He stuck my f..kin’ head in this wooden vice.” Ron did as his housemaster asked because he believed he was to be the recipient of a rare act of tenderness. “I was walking around afterwards with two big welts in my head and he told me if I told anybody he would put my head back in the vice and squeeze it until my brains caved in.” There’s a long pause. Ron wonders if anyone will care about that memory.

It’s hard to say what makes someone embark on a journey they know will lead to pain. Mal Hines does it for his friends. Two months later, at 1.30pm on July 5, he takes a cab from his home in Logan to the Traders Hotel on Roma Street, in Brisbane city. He’s the first of the boys to be interviewed by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. (Ron has also been phoned, asked to fly to Sydney to share his story.)

Mal is greeted on Roma Street by two Royal Commission representatives. They pay for his cab and walk him to the hotel’s elevators that take him to the 11th floor. He sits at a round table in a quiet room, too nervous to make a cup of tea or open the biscuits left for him. In 30 minutes’ time he will be interviewed by two commissioners, former Queensland police commissioner Bob Atkinson and former Democrats senator Andrew Murray. They will listen to his story for two hours without breaking. They will gasp in shock at sins of the past and present and request to speak to his fellow home kids. Mal will phone Ron afterwards and tell him that Bob Atkinson says it could be the worst case of abuse he’s heard to date. “I think the shit is about to hit the fan,” he will say, “but I don’t know where it’s gonna land.”

But for now, as he waits in the hotel room to tell his story, he sits in silence. “I didn’t get much sleep last night,” he says. “I thought about downing a bottle of scotch but that’d probably make a bloke worse.” He weeps for a moment in his chair, wipes his puffy eyes with a handkerchief, shakes off his tears. He watches the television. Then a thought comes to him. “You tried that corned beef in ginger ale yet?”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/to-hell-and-back/story-e6frg8h6-1226686299901