Chapter 17 — Following the Records

Following the records meant discovering not only what institutions had written about me, but how omissions, assumptions and disputed claims could travel from one file to another until repetition gave them the appearance of fact.

Once the connections began to form, I wanted to know what had survived outside my own memory. I looked for reports, letters, emails, medical files, police material, legal correspondence and anything else which could establish what was known at a particular time.

I did not expect every record to agree with me. I did expect records made by professionals and institutions to distinguish observation from opinion, allegation from finding, and information copied from elsewhere from information they had independently established.

Too often, they did not.

A Record Has a Point of View

A professional record can appear neutral because it has a date, a letterhead and the name of a qualified person beneath it. Those features establish who made the document and when. They do not make every statement within it true.

Each record was created for a purpose. A counsellor recorded what seemed relevant to counselling. Police recorded what fitted an investigation. A doctor wrote what mattered to the immediate clinical encounter. A lawyer selected material connected with a legal pathway. A religious institution responded within its own procedures and interests.

The result was not one complete institutional account of my life. It was a collection of partial views, produced at different times by people who had different information, duties and willingness to act.

Following the records therefore required two questions. What does this document say? And what was the position of the person or institution which created it?

The Collins Report

The counselling report prepared by Sandy Collins on 4 April 2005 became an important starting point. It drew upon counselling sessions, Toowoomba police material, outside resources and correspondence concerning my complaint of sexual abuse.

Its date matters. It records that significant disclosure and distress existed before the crisis of 2006 and 2007 and before some of the later explanations imposed upon me. It makes it impossible to treat all later disclosure as something suddenly invented after that crisis.

The report did not contain everything. At that time, I could not tell everything. Sandy could only record what I was able to approach with her and what she understood from it.

I later became angry about what I thought she had excluded, particularly material involving women. Much later again, I recalled the difficulty I had experienced when trying to speak about those events and understood her position differently. She had been considering not merely what I believed should be included, but what I could safely and coherently discuss with her and how different that might be in a court or before other people.

That reconsideration did not make the report complete. It made its limits more understandable. A missing detail could reflect the limits of disclosure at that time rather than evidence that the event had never been raised or had never occurred.

The Date of a Disclosure

Dates became vital. An email could show that I was asking a particular question by a particular day. A report could establish that a name or allegation had been discussed before a later crisis. A website archive could preserve material which I might otherwise have been unable to reproduce.

This did not mean that writing something down proved the event described. It proved something narrower but still important: the account, concern or recollection existed at that time.

That distinction became essential when later professionals treated the date on which they first encountered a disclosure as though it were the date on which the disclosure began. Their lack of access to an earlier record did not make the earlier record disappear.

Correspondence from late 2006 and early 2007, including exchanges involving Father Lucas and others, formed part of this trail. Material placed on my website after a letter dated 12 February 2007 provided another dated layer. The internet had become both a means of speaking publicly and a way of preserving what I could reach at the time.

The Disputed Psychiatric Account

Psychiatric records had particular power because later readers could treat a diagnostic label as an explanation for everything else. Once that happened, evidence of trauma could be read as evidence of illness, disagreement as lack of insight, and persistence as fixation.

I regard the report associated with Dr Georgiana Antoce as disputed. My understanding is that approximately the first forty pages reflect her work, while the provenance and accuracy of later portions require separate examination. The assessment had been expected to take about three months but extended to approximately five months. Dr Antoce removed restrictions which would otherwise have prevented me from obtaining the report.

The report itself contains material relevant to trauma, including intrusive recollections, avoidance, anxiety and other trauma-linked effects. Yet an impression of dissociative identity disorder also emerged from a process in which I often reenacted fragments rather than providing a continuous verbal narrative.

Dr Julian Lim later diagnosed dissociative amnesia, not dissociative identity disorder. I consider that distinction fundamental. Dissociative amnesia helps explain why access to names, people, periods and events could change without requiring separate identities.

The label “paranoid schizophrenia” was subsequently carried within records and repeatedly used against me. Eventually, the evidence I obtained showed that there had never been an actual diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. What had travelled through the systems was a label which some people found convenient when they wanted to disallow my account of abuse by figures from their own religion.

This produced some of the most unprofessional, biased and damaging conduct I encountered. It heavily affected my experience with the Royal Commission and brought ignorance and prejudice into my dealings with multiple lawyers. It achieved what the Church most needed: it assassinated my character and presented me as something I was not. In practice, it helped defend and protect alleged abusers, and it damaged relationships which should never have been drawn into the process.

A question mark can be enough to begin this kind of destruction. A clinician may write “? diagnosis” to indicate that a possibility has been mentioned or requires consideration—not that it has been diagnosed. When the wording is copied, summarised or entered into another system, the question mark can easily disappear. A queried possibility then becomes “the diagnosis,” and later readers may never return to the source to discover that no diagnosis was actually made.

The loss of one punctuation mark can therefore alter a life. A tentative question becomes an institutional fact; the false fact shapes care, law and credibility; and the person burdened by it must prove a negative across every system to which it has spread.

When Repetition Becomes Authority

One of the most damaging features of record systems is that a statement can acquire authority without acquiring evidence.

A person writes an opinion. Another service receives the file and repeats it. A later clinician sees the repetition and assumes that the matter has already been established. The same claim then appears in a discharge summary, referral or police interaction. Eventually, the number of places in which it appears is mistaken for the number of times it was independently confirmed.

But copying is not corroboration. Ten records derived from one unsupported source remain one unsupported source repeated ten times.

The labels in my records affected how later disclosures were heard. Once a reader approached me through a disputed psychiatric account, an allegation of institutional abuse could be classified as a symptom before its evidence was examined. The record did not merely describe the encounter. It shaped the encounter which followed.

What Was Missing

Following the records also meant noticing silence.

There were events I remembered for which I had not yet located a contemporary institutional record. There were complaints which seemed to produce administrative activity without a clear account of the final decision. There were clinical encounters in which what mattered most to me was absent from the summary later supplied.

Absence is not proof that an event occurred. Neither is it proof that nothing happened. A missing record may mean that no record was made, that it was made elsewhere, that it was lost, withheld, destroyed, misfiled or never transferred with the rest of the material.

That is why gaps had to be marked as gaps. I could not honestly fill them with certainty. Institutions should not honestly use them as certainty against me.

Records About the Body

Medical records created another layer. They could document an injury, procedure, scar, foreign body, symptom or clinical observation. They could also omit the history which gave that finding meaning.

The retained glass illustrates the difficulty. The physical fragments and the history of their removal or attempted removal existed across different places and years. A later image which failed to identify a fragment did not erase an earlier removal, a palpable area or the fact that the relevant part of the body might not have been fully captured.

The correct task was not to demand that one scan prove my complete history. It was to identify precisely what area had been examined, what method had been used, what the report actually found and what remained outside its scope.

The same principle applied more broadly. A medical record could support part of an account without proving all of it. A normal or incomplete examination could narrow a question without resolving every possible cause.

Legal Records and Vanishing Pathways

Legal files did not simply contain evidence. They recorded what happened to the attempt to obtain justice.

Within weeks of the long psychiatric assessment being completed, the law firm's entire personal injury department was sold. My requests for contact were not answered as I expected. A process which had already required enormous effort became fragmented again, this time through professional and organisational change rather than through memory.

Something similar happened after I challenged Hassan Ehsan about what I believed was the vicarious trauma being placed upon Johl. Within a few days, Hassan had moved to another firm. His former firm would not meaningfully engage with me, and emails went unanswered.

Institutional survivors tell this story often enough that it needs a name. I call it procedural abandonment, or the moving-lawyer pattern. A lawyer moves, a department is sold or a firm refuses to engage; responsibility dissolves between the old arrangement and the new one; and the survivor client is left to begin again—or is left with nowhere to go.

From the survivor's side, this can operate as an obstruction of justice. The client experiences another abandonment while the lawyers and firms may retain control of files, costs, liens or other financial interests arising from the relationship. Where the departure follows challenged conduct, the institution's silence can also protect the professional from scrutiny. I regarded aspects of what happened to me as immoral, unethical and potentially unlawful, but those conclusions must be tested against the files, professional duties and applicable law in each matter.

At other times, I encountered pressure connected with what I had published. When I lodged a claim through the Melbourne Response, the demand communicated to me was that I remove the tfyqa.biz website or my claim would be blocked. It was transmitted by my wife. The path described to me began with the Bishop of Toowoomba, passed to his close relative—my wife's mother—and then came through my wife to me.

I refused and said so. My claim subsequently collapsed on grounds I regarded as spurious and weak. I cannot treat the sequence alone as proof of who caused that outcome, but neither can the demand, its described route and the later collapse be removed from the history of the claim.

The Royal Commission later examined the Melbourne Response and found that it was not sufficiently independent of the Archdiocese of Melbourne. It identified clear potential for conflicts and confidentiality difficulties arising from the roles of the Archdiocese's legal advisers, and found that advice given through the process had discouraged two complainants from going to police. Those findings did not determine my individual claim, but they placed my experience within a documented system whose independence and treatment of survivors had been seriously criticised.

The record of a legal process must therefore include more than its formal outcome. It must include unanswered letters, changes of representation, requests to remove material, procedural delays and the moments when no decision-maker accepted responsibility for resolving a disputed fact.

Provenance Before Conclusion

I began asking of every important item: where did this come from? Who created it? When was it created? Was it based on direct observation, something I said, something another person said or material copied from an earlier file? Had it been changed, summarised or separated from its attachments?

These questions became especially important as I obtained different bundles of medical records. Labels such as correspondence in and correspondence out could reveal that material had moved between services even where the receiving file gave little explanation of its origin.

Provenance allowed apparently identical statements to be traced back towards their source. It also allowed genuinely independent records to be recognised as independent rather than lost within a pile of repeated text.

Where provenance remained uncertain, I marked it as uncertain. That was not a concession that the material was unimportant. It was a refusal to claim more than I could presently establish.

The Record Could Be Corrected

For a long time, an institutional file seemed final simply because somebody else controlled it. Following the trail taught me that records could be challenged, amended and placed beside contrary evidence.

Correction was rarely simple. An error copied across several systems could require separate requests to every holder. One organisation's amendment did not automatically repair another organisation's copy. Even where a correction was accepted, the original language might remain visible and continue shaping how a hurried reader understood me.

Nevertheless, the act of seeking correction mattered. It converted disagreement from something said in a room into a dated part of the documentary history. It established that a label, conclusion or account had been contested and that the institution had been asked to examine its basis.

Following the Trail Forward

The documentary trail did not provide one final answer. It showed early disclosure, later crisis, changing clinical interpretations, institutional copying, missing material and repeated efforts to correct what had been written.

It also showed an imbalance of power. A professional could place a sentence in a file within minutes. I could spend years trying to discover where that sentence had travelled and persuading each recipient to look again.

That imbalance was not merely administrative. Records influenced care, police responses, legal advice and whether later testimony was approached as evidence or as pathology.

Following the records taught me that being disbelieved was not a single painful encounter. Once disbelief entered the documentary system, it could continue acting long after the person who first recorded it had left the room.