From: Bruce Grundy's Inside Queensland, March 1998
The Order of the Sisters of Mercy owes its existence to an Irish Catholic nun, Sr. Catherine McAuley, who was born in County Dublin in 1778. Both parents died when she was young. She lived for many years with other families and eventually was the beneficiary of the estate of one of them.
"Meteor Park" was a station property at Neerkol outside Rockhampton, Queensland, acquired by the Bishop of Rockhampton, Dr Cani, in the early 1880s. It was to become an orphanage run by the Sisters of Mercy.
The first group of children is said to have moved there from the state orphanage in May 1885.
Over the years "Meteor Park" or "Neerkol" was "home" to more than 4000 children.
It closed as an orphange in 1978.
MADNESS, ruthless and sadistic madness on the part of at least some of the nuns and a depthless depravity on the part of some of the men who inhabited the place are the defining characteristics of those who ran the orphanage at Neerkol, just beyond the whistlestop of Gracemere and just off the main road and the main railway line heading west from Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia.
It was all about power, of course. Power over the very lives of little kids.
And to their undying discredit, not just any little kids, although that would have been bad enough -- but little orphan kids. Some had no relatives to check on what was happening. Their relatives were dead. Some, in fact, did have relatives -- some even living mothers and fathers, but, as part of the sadistic madness of the place, they were told their parents were dead, or alcoholic, and certainly none came to visit. Some were children from the other side of the world so they would never have anyone calling on them.
Here then was a place where those in control were in total control. These were people who had real power. Absolute power. Power bulwarked by the mighty authority of the Roman Catholic Church and supported by the mighty authority of the State exercised through a variety of public servants who were supposed to oversee the operation of the orphanage.
Here was a place with no near neighbours. Here was place that few cared about. Here was a place awash with respectability -- the Sisters of Mercy and Saint Joseph caring for and nurturing the victims of all kinds of family tragedies. Above all, here was a place of fear -- palpable, terrifying, constant, fear.
Here was a place, then, where you could do as you liked. And they did.
There was, it seems, no obvious torment or torture some of the nuns were incapable of administering.
There was no limit to the sexual deviance that could be engaged in with those who were unlucky enough to find themselves singled out as the "chosen" ones.
Year after year. And as the years passed, the power, the control, the authority was simply handed on. Fear did the rest.
For various reasons not all the stories of Neerkol can yet be told. They must wait. In the meantime we may tell only some of the stories. And there are scores of them to tell. Which ones to choose? Perhaps it doesn't matter. All of them are devastating.
No doubt there are good stories. And we have been asked to tell them. We would be happy to.
One former resident wrote to us: "So, yes, by all means tell the story. But tell it with the good as well as the bad. For many of the children of Neerkol this was the only home they knew and if you don't tell it with the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth, then don't bother to tell it at all. Remember, for some the glass will always be half empty, while for some it will be half full. And some won't remember having a glass at all".
So far we have not heard the good stories. We have been swamped with the bad.
The same former resident summed them up: "Many people ask 'Why have you waited 40 years to speak up?'
"They have no idea of the way one's mind closed off those things and refused to look at them. It is only from the safety of years that the lid has been lifted off the pressure cooker of the mind and all that has boiled and churned in the subcons cious for so long is free to come out.
"Unless you have experienced this kind of inhuman treatment yourself you cannot understand. Children are very good at keeping secrets. Especially secrets pertaining to adults who wield total power over their lives. To have re-vealed these punishments while still a child would have been to confess a wrongdoing by your-self. And fear is a great si-lencer. So, most of us just got on with our lives.
"What happened at Neerkol, in retrospect, seems to be the insanity of the order of Hitler's concentration camps - where absolute power corrupted absolutely - and so it did with Neerkol. There were no neighbours to hear or act as a safety break. Sadistic cruelty went unchecked and was accepted as the norm of life.
"The fifties and earlier years were years of hard physical punishment right across society, but even by the standards that were normal for that time the treatment of Neerkol children was cruelty of the highest order. It would have been looked at with horror even then, if it had been common knowledge, but from the distance of the nineties it is much worse.
"We now have an understanding of the damage done on a child's mind by such cruelty. Damage with mental, physical and spiritual repercussions. Mental - how many are alcoholics? Depressives? Incapable of throwing off the burden of pain to bloom and achieve their full potential? Physical - sickness and disease that are rooted deep in the past. And Spiritual - how can God be a loving father when such cruelty was meted out to helpless children in His name?
"People might want to deny the punishment ever happened. But it did.
"Children were whipped, caned, dehumanised, and humiliated on a regular scale by heartless nuns who were acting in the name of God.
"The two faces they showed to the world were as opposite as they could be. Outsiders saw smiles - the Neerkol children saw evil. And that evil claimed them in the silence of fear for years and years. In some it was buried so deep that only in later life has it surfaced. In others it has stayed forgotten.
"But some never stopped feeling the humiliation and pain of the whip or the cane. These were the ones who stayed until their childhood was irretrievably finished. But they never stopped silently crying out in their minds and hearts for someone to take the pain away; for someone to give them justice; for someone to listen and believe them.
"They have silently cried for years but the heavens have been as brass. Who can now remove the suffering?
"Did God care? If He didn't then his word cannot be true for He states through His Son: "Better a millstone be tied around their neck and they be thrown into the depths of the sea if anyone give scandal to one of these my little ones".
To date many have escaped the millstone. It is time for them to answer those they treated with such inhumanity.
Much of this first edition of Inside Queensland is devoted to that end.
The victims of Neerkol are entitled to see the story told - in all its detail. In all its horror. In all its unfathomable inhumanity.
Neerkol was a crime against humanity and the crime must be recorded.
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