Chapter 15 — When the Past Began Returning

The past did not return as a finished account. It emerged progressively through fragments, names, physical responses, documents and connections, while the effort to speak was repeatedly mistaken for inconsistency or invention.

The past did not return as a finished account. It came in pieces.

A name could connect with a place. A physical sensation could bring back an event for which I had previously had no words. A document could establish that something existed outside my own recollection. What first appeared to be separate incidents began to reveal relationships between people, institutions, injuries and later records.

Remembering was therefore not simply a matter of looking backwards. Each returned piece changed the shape of what I thought I knew. It also raised a more difficult question: how could I create a reliable account when the records made by institutions and the record carried within me had been formed under such different conditions?

That question would eventually lead to evidence maps, complaints, corrections and this book.

No Single Beginning

It would be convenient to identify one day on which the past began returning. The surviving record does not support that kind of simplicity.

There were recollections which had remained available for years, experiences I could approach only indirectly, and periods which seemed not to belong to any usable narrative. Some material appeared through conversation. Some arrived as a physical response before I could explain what had produced it. A name could be present without the event around it, while an event could be felt before I could name the person involved.

The process was progressive because disclosure depended upon safety, language and what I could tolerate at a particular time. It was also progressive because memory itself did not offer the material in chronological order.

The Record Before the Crisis

A counselling report prepared by Sandy Collins on 4 April 2005 provides an important marker. By then I had already spoken about abuse connected with the Yea Catholic Church and convent, family exclusion, being labelled a liar by nuns, difficulty functioning and working, and the effects on my relationship with my son Johl.

That report matters because it exists before the most visible crisis of 2006 and 2007. It demonstrates that disclosure did not suddenly appear after those events. The process was already under way.

It also shows why a later summary cannot be treated as the beginning simply because it was the first document seen by a particular lawyer, clinician or institution. A record begins when somebody writes something down. A life does not.

Fragments Under Pressure

An email I sent to Sandy on 27 May 2006 described days of losing focus and being unable to stop and re-evaluate what I was doing. I had written at length about the Catholic Church. At the time I did not possess the later diagnosis which could help explain the combination of intense focus, disrupted awareness and the pressure to put emerging material into words.

Other correspondence provides fixed points. There was contact following a meeting with Sue Sharkey on 1 August 2006. Emails from Peter O'Callaghan on 7 and 9 August concerned the Melbourne Response, Carelink, a compensation panel and the reports which were required from Sandy Collins and Carelink.

These documents do not produce a complete internal account of what I was experiencing. They establish that I was actively seeking a process in which the material could be heard and assessed. They also show how quickly the recovery of memory became entangled with institutional requirements, reports and decisions made by other people.

Called Fabrication

Progressive disclosure met an old response. On 1 November 2006, my brother Bob described my allegations in an email as “complete fabrication” and “fantasyland stuff.”

Those words did not test the evidence. They dismissed the person speaking.

I had been called a liar as a child. Now, when material from that childhood was becoming more accessible, the same mechanism returned in adult language. The fact that I could not disclose everything at once became a reason to reject what I was able to disclose.

This is one of the cruellest features of trauma-related memory loss. Silence is taken to mean that nothing happened. Later disclosure is treated as invention because it came later. Variation in detail is called inconsistency. The survivor is placed in a structure where every possible form of memory can be used against them.

Names That Would Not Come Easily

The returning material did not arrive evenly. Ursula, Vincent, Germaine and Genevieve were not simply four names waiting to be read from a list. Each was connected in my memory with different places, sensations, events and degrees of access.

Ursula was associated with the convent bedroom, the woodshed and the old school in the churchyard. Vincent was the one I remembered pulling my head and face into her groin. Speaking about Vincent in a later session produced an intense physical response: gasping, my head thrown backwards, crying and an inability to complete what I was trying to say.

Germaine was the elderly nun associated in my memory with being “taught piano.” I remembered being made to sit at the piano without pants while she fondled me and banged at the keys. The difficulty was not limited to recalling her name. Approaching the name meant approaching what the name contained.

Genevieve belonged to a different but connected memory: the presbytery where the exorcisms were held. I remembered being made to stand and watch what I understood as Genevieve being aborted. She was beaten across the breasts and between her legs while people shouted at her and prayers were made loudly.

Earlier, I had been made to get a long, thin cane from a briar or bramble bush and peel it. It was about as long as a billiard cue. In the violence that followed, it was I—not Genevieve—who was kicked, punched and struck with a thick, heavily carved stick or staff. These are descriptions of what returned to me and how I understood it; they are not details I can reconstruct as one continuous scene.

These were not polished allegations assembled for an audience. They were examples of the cost of attempting to bring separated experience into language.

Hidden From Myself

I later read—possibly in Psychology Today—a description of complex post-traumatic stress and dissociative amnesia as disorders which can remain hidden. I have not yet relocated the exact article or wording, but the idea helped me consider what “hidden” had meant within my own experience.

In working through this with Dr Julian Lim, I came to understand that the concealment could reach deeper than losing access to an event. I could hide from myself the people within it: their names, faces and overall description.

That protective process could then place me in a circumstance where it was genuinely impossible to name or describe a person with whom I had spoken. It was not a conscious refusal to answer. The identifying information itself was unavailable to me.

This was a large part of what happened during the early “trials”—the exorcism experiences. The questioning focused intensely upon who I had spoken to and what I had told them. When my own brain or protective system concealed the names, faces and descriptions, there was no answer I could produce for the people trying to force it from me. I could endure whatever they did in their attempt to make me answer or cry out because the information they demanded was no longer accessible.

That understanding came much later. As a child, I did not know that my mind was protecting information. I knew only the questioning, the demand and the fact that I could not provide what they wanted.

Stories Made Safe

I also learned to think about constructed narratives. There could be three or more forms of an account: a safe story fitted to the environment in which I found myself; the real story, which could be too horrible or dangerous to tell directly; and a reduced or altered form through which I tried to make the experience tellable. The central elements always remained, if not in what I managed to say then in what was present within my own mind. What could change was the setting, the surrounding explanation or the form in which those elements were presented. This was very strongly about trying to turn something horrible into an account that the person listening would not immediately dismiss—and which would not cause them to start beating me for having told it.

The changes were therefore not changes to the underlying experience. They were attempts to survive the act of disclosure. What might appear from outside to be inconsistency could be the protective work involved in finding a version which was safe enough to say while the unaltered central elements remained inside me.

I believe this contributed to Dr Georgiana Antoce's impression that I had dissociative identity disorder. When I tried to speak, I often moved into reenactment rather than a coherent verbal account. Even now, some of that material returns as disconnected actions, sensations and fragments. Dr Julian Lim's later diagnosis was dissociative amnesia, not dissociative identity disorder, and I regard that distinction as important.

Changing a person's name could itself be protective. If I could not identify somebody I had spoken to, I could not disclose them under pressure. The depth of this became unmistakable in experiences involving Andrea, Sandy, someone called Michael and Dr Lim. In the middle of a conversation, I could suddenly become unable to retrieve the familiar person's name even though I was in the room with them or speaking to them on the telephone.

This was not an inability to recognise that a person was present. It was a sudden loss of access to identifying information. The mechanism which had once protected other people—and protected me from being forced to betray them—could continue operating long after the original danger had passed.

A Voice at the Springs

The other side of that experience was how rapidly recognition could occur when a person was not hidden from me.

I had read that human beings can recognise a familiar voice and attach a name to it within a tiny fraction of a second. I remember the figure as three-hundredths of a second, although I have not yet confirmed that exact measurement.

I experienced something which felt that fast one day at the Springs in Alice Springs. I was conducting one of the comparatively few accommodated tours I drove. It was a rescue job, taking over a tour after something had gone wrong for another driver or with the company's arrangements.

I completed four or five rescue tours of that kind. Each was interesting. I would often be flown in to take over somebody else's passengers and had to placate a coachload of people who could be extremely angry. Sometimes the company supplied almost no explanation. With perhaps forty-five passengers offering a dozen different versions, almost any account of what had happened seemed possible.

At the Springs I was standing at the coach door, helping mostly retired passengers down the steps. Another coach was unloading nearby. I heard a voice from that direction.

Recognition was immediate. The voice was one of the most distinctive from my hometown, and the name arrived with it: Noel Moore.

There was no searching through memory and no deliberate comparison of sound. Voice, person and name joined before I had time to reason my way towards them.

That experience helped me see the contrast. My capacity to recognise people had not simply disappeared or become generally defective. Under ordinary conditions it could be extraordinarily fast. In experiences connected with overwhelming danger, however, the identity of a person could be placed beyond conscious reach. What looked from outside like inconsistency belonged to two very different conditions of access.

Writing Before I Could Hold It All

Correspondence continued through late 2006 and early 2007, including exchanges with Father Lucas and others. After a letter dated 12 February 2007, material alleging abuse by priests and nuns appeared on my website.

Publication did not mean that the account was complete or that I had mastered the memories. Writing was one of the ways I tried to preserve what was available before it moved beyond reach again.

The website therefore became more than public argument. It was an external memory structure. A page could retain a name, an association or a question when I could not rely upon continuous access to it within myself.

Emails served a similar purpose. Their dates established that a thought, recollection or concern existed at a particular time. Later, recordings, journals, voice notes and other external aids became increasingly important. They allowed fragments to survive even when I could not yet place them into a complete story.

The Effect on Johl

My concern was never confined to understanding my own childhood. I was a father. What had happened to me affected the way I understood danger, protection and the rights of my son.

The Collins report already recorded anxiety and overprotectiveness in my parenting. Later accounts describe the distress within the family as more childhood material emerged. Those later descriptions must be kept in their proper dates and not projected backwards as though every consequence was visible in 2005 or 2006.

In my opinion, Johl also suffered vicarious trauma. Hassan Ehsan had arranged communication through Johl in a way which, as I understood it, protected Hassan and his staff from direct exposure to my trauma while placing much of that exposure upon my son. I believe that arrangement had serious consequences for him.

I also understood that Johl had been prescribed sertraline, sold as Zoloft, following Bennet's death in Canada. I cannot establish from my own observation what part medication, grief, accumulated trauma or other factors played in his behaviour. At times, however, his aggression became unregulated, threatening and physical, and neither I nor others could break through it. On some occasions I resorted to involving police because I was frightened by what was happening.

At the time, I interpreted some of his behaviour as following the example of his mother because that was how I remembered her responses. That remains my interpretation of events, not a clinical judgment about Johl or a simple claim that any one factor caused his actions.

What remained constant was my belief that Johl had a right to the truth of his own life and to protection from the secrecy, fear and inherited patterns which had shaped mine. Seeking understanding was therefore not an indulgence in the past. It was an attempt to prevent the past from becoming another child's unspoken inheritance.

Return and Evidence

As memories returned, they did not automatically explain one another. The work was to identify relationships between names, places, physical injuries, family responses, institutional records and things written years apart.

Some connections proved mistaken and needed correction. Some names changed as better information emerged. Some recollections remained uncertain. Accuracy required the freedom to revise without having every revision treated as evidence that the whole account was false.

This is why provenance became central to my work. It matters whether something was remembered directly, told to me by another person, recorded contemporaneously, inferred later or supported by an independent document. Those categories do not weaken an account. They allow it to be tested honestly.

The past began returning long before I understood what dissociative amnesia was. The documentary trail shows not a story invented at one moment, but a person struggling across years to recover, record and make sense of experience which had never been available as one continuous narrative.

The next task was to follow that trail through the records other people had made.