Chapter 6 — Janette

My younger sister, an event in Yea in 1962, the consequences that followed, and the way her childhood story returned decades later.

My Younger Sister

Janette is my younger sister, perhaps six years younger than me.

Her involvement in some of the strangest and most consequential parts of my life began when she was still a child.

I was fourteen.

I believe the day was associated with the St Patrick's Day race meeting in Yea in 1962.

My father was away at the racecourse, working with Robinson's Radio on the public-address system.

I walked out through the gate at home.

What I saw involved Janette.

The Gate

The visiting priest, Des Cameron, had hold of her by her outstretched arms.

She was trying to pull away from him.

When he saw me coming through the gate, he let her go.

Janette ran past me into the house crying.

She went to my mother in the kitchen.

I could hear her trying to explain what had happened.

She was distressed and crying, and I heard enough to understand that she was saying the priest had touched her.

My mother closed the kitchen door and told me to wait outside.

I did not know everything Janette was telling her.

I knew enough to understand that something was badly wrong.

The Stones

I went back onto the street.

The priest was still there.

I began throwing stones at him.

I know that I hit him at least once.

He fled towards the presbytery.

It was the response of an angry fourteen-year-old who had just seen his younger sister run home crying.

I was not analysing institutions or evidence.

I was angry.

Go and Get Herbie

When Mum came back out of the kitchen, she told me to run and get Herbie.

My father was still at the race meeting.

I went for Herbie.

He came quickly.

Once again my mother closed the kitchen door while the adults spoke.

Then Herbie went to the presbytery.

He wanted to speak to the priest about what had happened to Janette.

The door was locked.

Herbie shouted and banged on it.

There was no response.

He came back to speak to my mother.

After a while he went over again.

Inside the Fence

Things had changed.

The gate was locked and several men had arrived inside the fence.

Herbie became angrier.

He pulled down or climbed over the top corner of the fence and got inside the yard.

He told them that he wanted to speak to the priest about what had been done to my sister.

There was arguing.

More men arrived.

Then a fight broke out.

I was nearby, hiding down in the gutter.

I could hear the shouting and the fighting without being able to see everything that was happening.

Then it became quiet.

Under the Window

After a while I crept down the path between the church and the presbytery.

I saw Herbie on the ground beneath one of the windows.

He was lying awkwardly in a pile.

That particular room already carried another terrible association for me from my first weeks at school.

I froze.

For a short time I simply stood there looking at him.

Then somebody saw me and shouted at me.

I ran.

I went down the hill, around the railway line and back towards home through the rear of the property.

Several cars had arrived by then.

My recollection is that Peter Lloyd was involved in getting Herbie to hospital some time later.

Eight Days

Herbie remained in hospital for about eight days.

During that period Janette was questioned more than once.

My recollection is that Bill Allison interviewed her about what had happened.

When she spoke about the priest, and about me having been there, she was told that she was not permitted to say that the priest had been responsible because I had supposedly told her what to say.

That was difficult for me to understand even then.

I had seen her struggling with the priest before she had spoken to me about anything.

My mother also had her own account of what Janette had told her.

Yet somehow my presence became a reason for Janette's account to be treated with suspicion.

Clothes for Herbie

After about eight days we expected Herbie to come home.

My mother washed clothes for him and made up a parcel for him to wear when he left hospital.

I took the clothes to him.

When I entered his room, he was sitting in a chair while a nurse shaved him.

She had shaved a broad area around his neck.

Herbie was a hairy man and the sight looked peculiar enough that I must have stared.

He grinned and laughed.

He told me it would grow back.

I remember bandaging on his legs, arms and chest.

I understood those injuries as resulting from the violence at the presbytery, where I believed an axe and a shovel had been used during the attack on him.

No. No, That's Not Right

Bill Allison appeared behind me.

I remember being struck or forced backwards onto the floor.

He took me out into the foyer and made me sit on a waiting chair.

For a short while things were quiet.

Then I heard Herbie shout.

No. No, that's not right.

I heard what sounded like a struggle.

A nurse ran into the room.

I did not see everything that happened inside.

That distinction matters.

I heard Herbie.

I heard the disturbance.

I saw the nurse run in.

What happened beyond that door was not visible to me.

Through the Glass

Afterwards Allison came back out.

My memory of what happened next is exceptionally strong.

He grabbed me by my shirt.

He pulled and shook me.

Then I went backwards through the glass doors of the hospital.

The woman working behind the counter was shouting.

There was glass everywhere.

Pieces were sticking from my head, neck and shoulders.

The woman put me into her car and drove me home.

I remember Allison saying that they were not to touch me.

Whatever was being said around me, I had glass embedded throughout the upper part of my body.

Removing the Glass

At home my mother began removing pieces.

Pam Borrie helped.

I think one of the Henneberry girls was also there.

They removed dozens and dozens of fragments.

Some pieces were several inches long.

I screamed as some of them were pulled out.

At fourteen, I did not think about litigation, medical documentation or what pieces of glass might remain in my body and no-one else thought that way - it was considered a church matter.

I wanted the pain to stop.

Many decades later the hospital glass would become important again.

That belongs to another part of the story along with how a mobster paid for many glass fragments to be scraped out in Canada..

The Next Morning

The following morning we were told that Herbie had died.

The account surrounding his death has never fitted together comfortably for me.

We were told that a priest had driven him towards Melbourne because of an emergency.

I later understood that a number of hospitals had supposedly been passed before he was taken to a hospital associated with the church.

The cause of death was described to us as involving a twisted bowel.

There were also people associated with the hospital in Yea who, as I later understood it, disputed parts of the account about how Herbie had left.

I also heard an extraordinary account that Herbie's body had then been driven back to Yea.

I cannot resolve those versions simply by writing one of them as fact.

What I can say is that the man I had seen sitting in a chair, joking that his hair would grow back and preparing to come home, was dead the next day.

I have never been able to make easy sense of that transition.

What Janette Was Allowed to Say

Janette was still a child.

She was questioned again.

My recollection is that pressure was placed on what she was permitted to say about the priest.

She was expected to give an account immediately and within boundaries defined by adults around her.

At the same time, people gathered at the church in support of the priest.

I remember vigils being held for the poor priest who had supposedly been falsely accused.

And somehow I became part of the explanation for why those accusations had arisen.

Once again, the problem could become me.

Janette Grew Up

The story did not stop in 1962.

Janette grew up and our relationship continued inside the same family that had carried all of this history.

I formed the impression over the years that Robert could bully or pressure her.

I cannot speak for what Janette herself experienced internally.

That is how the relationship appeared to me.

Robert had always been capable of imposing his version of events on me.

At times I thought I could see something similar operating around Janette.

A Different Kind of Help

There was also genuine contact and assistance between us.

At one period I was working with Janette's husband laying parquetry flooring.

On another occasion I became seriously drunk.

There is no useful way to dress that up.

I became drunk and stupid and ended up in hospital.

Janette came to help.

For reasons I do not fully understand now, she represented herself to the hospital as being my older sister Anne.

Afterwards she tried to keep me at her house.

I believe she was trying to protect or look after me.

I experienced what followed as becoming overly controlling.

Eventually I went home.

That episode does not fit comfortably into a simple description of Janette as supportive or unsupportive.

There was care in it.

There was also unrelenting control.

Like much of our family history, several things could be true at once.

Decades Later

Then Janette's childhood story entered my life again in a completely different form.

By then I was no longer fourteen.

Decades had passed.

I was trying to report and make sense of what had happened through a Melbourne process established to deal with accounts of abuse.

Janette gave a statement at some point during that process.

When I later examined material produced from it, substantial parts were represented as undecipherable.

I had communications with the Melbourne process about what had happened.

I also wrote about it on my blog.

Those contemporary communications matter because they preserve what I was trying to understand at the time, rather than what I remember about it now.

I Don't Remember

At a later point, when I questioned Janette about events, she said that she could not remember a number of things.

There were matters where she remembered little beyond Herbie.

Her lack of knowledge about abuse that happened to me was also used as though it established that the abuse could not have occurred.

That reasoning has always troubled me.

Janette was substantially younger than I was.

There was no obvious reason why adults would have told a younger child everything that had happened to her older brother.

Not knowing about something is not the same thing as knowing that it did not happen.

Her Statement Became Evidence About Me

Years later Robert referred to material associated with Janette when he wrote to John Usher within the church.

Robert argued that I had not been abused and that I was interested only in money.

Janette's inability to confirm parts of my history became useful to that argument.

A frightened child who had once run past me through our gate crying had, decades later, become a source through which other people could assess whether I was telling the truth.

I do not think that burden belongs properly to Janette.

The more important question is what institutions and other adults did with uncertainty.

What I Can Ask of Janette

There is a temptation when reconstructing a life to expect siblings to confirm one another.

That expectation is not always reasonable.

Janette had her childhood.

I had mine.

They overlapped, but they were not identical.

She witnessed some things.

I witnessed some things involving her.

There were things done to each of us that the other may never have known.

There were adults telling us what could be said and what could not.

There were family pressures that continued long after childhood.

And there were institutions that later tried to turn fragments of those memories into records.

From Fourteen to Fifty-Something

When I tell this story aloud, I notice how quickly I jump.

One moment I am fourteen years old, hiding near a presbytery and looking at Herbie lying beneath a window.

The next I am a man in his fifties, reading statements, writing letters and trying to understand what a Melbourne process had done with the stories of children.

There are decades missing between those two moments.

They are not really missing.

They are simply stored elsewhere.

Janette's chapter has exposed one of the difficulties of telling this life in a straight line.

The event in 1962 did not stay in 1962.

It travelled.

It travelled through family memory.

It travelled through police questioning.

It travelled through what Janette remembered and what she did not.

It travelled into a Melbourne process decades later.

And eventually it travelled into records that other people used when deciding whether my own history should be believed.

To understand that part properly, I have to leave Janette for a while and follow the record.