Surviving institutional abuse

Bill Simon, Des Montgomerie, Jo Tuscano: Back on the Block: Bill Simon's Story. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009, ISBN 978 0 85575 677 2

It begins with a happy childhood on an uncongenial mission, and some years spent with his family evading the attention of the Aborigines Welfare Board.

The heart of the book, which for him explains all else, began when he was seized with his brothers and consigned to Kinchela Boys Home. He was then ten years old, and spent the next seven years in the home subject to the daily regime of assault and contempt that Kinchela provided for its clients.

He then moved to Sydney, where he had to deal with his anger. He learned to work, drink, gamble, take drugs and beat those he cared for. He lost partners and children. At his lowest, he had a strong religious experience that brought him into a church. After many ups and downs he found his life's work in the Block, the Indigenous area of Redfern. There he is at home with the territory both of the suburb and of the human heart.

At one level this is an inspiring story of a good man rising from inner depths. At another level it is an appalling and saddening story of how every instance of Government intervention diminished Indigenous men. And this is a story of men, who have had their manhood systematically stripped from them.

Reading this in a week when the horrors of Irish orphanages were exposed, when the horrors of asylum seeker detention in Australia are still fresh, one can only ask helplessly how people entrusted with the duty of care can so unerringly detect the points from which they can drain a man's humanity.

Simon's story began on a mission. He recalls the sadness of Aboriginal men who were forbidden to leave the mission or to provide for their families. If they caught fish or kangaroos, their rations of flour were deducted from them. Their male role was taken from them.

The agents of the Aboriginal Welfare Board were all male. The only woman Simon mentions is the frightened wife of the punitive and repressive man who took the children away.

In ten years at Kinchela he mentions not even a fleeting moment of kindness from a member of the staff, most of whom had worked in the prison system. At best they were harsh, at worst sadistic.

If you wished to break a man's spirit, you could not devise a better system. Snatch young boys from their families. Deprive them of female care. Make them work bare-foot in frost. Refer to them by numbers. Call them out for often unexplained punishment. Make them take down their trousers and cane them brutally and publicly. Separate brothers so that the older brother has the torment and guilt of not being able to protect or care for his younger siblings. Tell them at every opportunity that they are lazy, dirty and good for nothing.

Most cruelly, separate them from the culture which might help them understand their experiences, withhold from them letters sent by parents, and turn their anger against their mothers for allowing them to be taken away.

You will produce boys who are terrified into politeness, but who nurture a volcano of grief, anger and self-hatred that will later erupt and burn all it touches.

Apologists will argue that the policies were well-meant and that not all who administered them were bad. But as in Ireland and in detention centres, the lesson taught by this book is simple.

It says that if you put in place an immoral policy that puts large goals above the simple humanity of those who are affected by the policy, you take away the moral compass from those who administer it. And you corrupt everyone whom the policy touches, particularly its apologists.

The policy of assimilation was immoral because it made an inhumane idea more important than human beings. It encouraged the removal of children from their parents, and saw their culture as something to be despised and replaced.

It is no wonder that in the administration of this policy people would try to beat the blackness out of people. They transmuted the darkness into despair and buried it in the heart.

By some miracle Bill Simon uncovered it and lived with it. But it is shameful when a miracle is required if people are to recover from the effects of Government policies.  

Andrena Jamieson is a Melbourne writer.

Source: www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=14204