Chapter 7 — The Melbourne Process

Decades after childhood, I tried to place what had happened into a formal process. What returned to me was another layer of records, uncertainty and questions about whose account would be believed.

Following the Record

Janette's story did not remain in 1962.

Neither did mine.

Decades later I found myself trying to explain events from childhood through a formal process in Melbourne.

By then I was no longer the fourteen-year-old standing outside a kitchen door or hiding beside a presbytery.

I was a man in his fifties trying to reconstruct events that had remained unresolved for most of my life.

I had memories.

Other people had memories.

There were institutional records.

There were things that had never been recorded.

And there were things that, once recorded, acquired an authority of their own.

Trying to Tell It

One of the difficulties in reporting childhood abuse many years later is that the person making the report is expected to present a coherent story.

Life had not provided me with one.

My memories did not arrive as a neat chronology.

Some incidents were vivid.

Others were disconnected fragments.

Some understanding came only years after the event.

And some memories were affected by what I would later understand as dissociative amnesia.

The process nevertheless required words.

Names.

Events.

Relationships.

Statements.

Things that could be put onto paper.

Janette's Statement

Janette was drawn into that process because some of what had happened involved her.

She had been the little girl I saw struggling to pull away from Des Cameron.

She had run crying to our mother.

Herbie had become involved because of what had happened to her.

But decades had passed.

When Janette was later asked about events, she did not remember everything that I remembered.

Nor would I reasonably expect her to.

She had been a child substantially younger than me.

There were things that happened to me which she may never have known about.

There were also things involving her that I witnessed only in part.

Undecipherable

At some point I obtained material relating to Janette's statement.

What struck me was how much of it appeared to have been reduced to the word:

Undecipherable.

That word has stayed with me.

A child experiences something.

Decades pass.

An adult is asked to remember it.

Her account is recorded.

Then parts of that record become undecipherable.

The resulting document can still be treated as evidence.

What has disappeared is harder to measure.

Absence Became Evidence

There was another difficulty.

Janette did not know about many of the things that had happened to me.

That absence of knowledge was capable of being transformed into something quite different.

It could become an argument that those things had not happened.

I found that reasoning extraordinary.

A younger sister not knowing that her older brother had been abused does not establish that the abuse did not occur.

It establishes that she did not know about it.

Those are different propositions.

Yet once statements enter an institutional process, distinctions like that can disappear surprisingly easily.

The Problem of Confirmation

There seemed to be an expectation that one person's history should be confirmed by another person's memory.

That sounds reasonable until the circumstances of childhood are considered.

Children are not investigators.

They do not keep each other informed about everything adults do to them.

They may be frightened.

They may be told not to speak.

They may not understand what has happened.

They may forget.

They may remember only fragments.

And in our family there were also adults and institutions already controlling what could safely be said.

What Had Happened to Memory

At that stage of my life I did not yet have the understanding of memory that I have now.

I knew that there were periods of my childhood that were difficult to retrieve.

I knew that memories could return unexpectedly.

I knew that some events appeared with extraordinary detail while other parts of the same period remained inaccessible.

What I did not yet fully understand was how much that pattern itself would affect the way institutions evaluated me.

A fragmented account could look unreliable.

For me, fragmentation was part of the history.

I Wrote About It

I did not leave all of this only in private memory.

I wrote about the Melbourne process.

I published parts of the experience on my blog.

I also retained communications relating to what was happening.

Those records are important to me now because they provide something different from present-day recollection.

They show what I was saying then.

They show which questions I was asking then.

They show what information I had available at the time.

When I return to those documents, I may find that some details are different from the way I now remember them.

That does not make one version automatically true and the other false.

It gives me another layer.

A Record of Trying to Understand

This is one reason I have become increasingly reluctant to treat a document simply as a record of what happened.

Sometimes a document is a record of somebody trying to understand what happened.

Sometimes it is a record of what an interviewer thought was important.

Sometimes it is a transcription of something that was difficult to hear.

Sometimes it contains an error.

Sometimes it records only what fitted the questions being asked.

And sometimes what is missing becomes as important as what remains.

What Robert Found Useful

Years later, material connected with Janette became part of another dispute.

Robert wrote to John Usher within the church.

He argued that I had not been abused.

He said that I was interested in money.

Material involving Janette was presented as support for that position.

Her inability to confirm things she had not witnessed became useful in challenging my account.

For me, that was another example of something I had seen repeatedly.

A statement can travel.

As it travels, its original circumstances can become less visible.

The Child Disappears

The Janette in the paperwork was not quite the Janette I remembered.

I remembered a young girl crying and trying to pull away from a priest.

I remembered her running to our mother.

I remembered being sent to get Herbie.

Decades later, she existed within files as a person whose recollection could be examined for what it did or did not confirm.

Somewhere between those two versions, the child could disappear.

What Was the Process Supposed to Do?

I had entered the Melbourne process because I thought that telling what had happened mattered.

I expected that somebody would try to understand it.

I expected that the circumstances surrounding the events would matter.

I expected that uncertainty could be investigated rather than simply used against the person reporting.

Over time I became much less certain about those expectations.

The process produced records.

It produced statements.

It produced correspondence.

But producing a record is not necessarily the same thing as discovering what happened.

A Failure Larger Than Mine

My concern eventually became broader than my own experience.

If I was struggling to place a complicated childhood history into a process decades later, I could not have been the only person confronting that difficulty.

Others would also have arrived with fragmented memories.

Others would have had siblings who remembered different things.

Others would have encountered missing records.

Others would have found that institutions possessed documents about their lives which they themselves had never seen.

Others would have discovered that uncertainty was treated as weakness rather than as something requiring careful investigation.

That is why, when I think about the Melbourne process now, I do not think only about what happened to me.

I wonder how many other people were failed by the same assumptions.

The Difference Between a Statement and a Life

A statement has a beginning and an end.

A life does not behave so conveniently.

In my life, an event in 1962 could reappear decades later in a statement.

That statement could then be copied.

Parts of it could become undecipherable.

Another family member could rely upon it.

A church official could read it.

And eventually I could find myself trying to reconstruct the journey of the information itself.

By then I was no longer simply asking:

What happened?

I was also asking:

What happened to the story after somebody told it?

Coming Back to the Documents

I still have communications from that period.

I also have what I published on my blog.

Those records will allow me to return to this chapter later and test my present recollection against what I was actually writing at the time.

I expect that exercise to change parts of this account.

I hope it does.

The purpose of this book is not to defend the first version I manage to write.

It is to see what becomes visible when the layers are put beside one another.

Another Process

The Melbourne experience did not end my attempts to report what had happened.

Eventually Australia established a Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse.

That process was larger.

It was national.

It was established in part because so many institutions had failed to respond properly to people who tried to speak.

I entered that process carrying the same history.

I also carried what I had learned from trying to tell it before.

There I encountered Patrick Smith.

That is another chapter.