Hard As, My Life as an Orphan Boy, by Bryan Hartas

For people of my generation, corporal punishment was part of the school experience, but I never witnessed any savagery.  In my school experience, it was mild and sporadic.  So I did not realise the true significance of the 1985 Cain government legislation that banned corporal punishment in Victorian state schools, not long after I started my career in teaching.  In Queensland, however, this reform wasn’t achieved until 1994, and — alone among the Australian states and territories — corporal punishment is still allowed in non-government Queensland schools.

Bryan Hartas’ slim autobiography shows us a vivid picture of the brutality of corporal punishment that was dished out to children who had no parents to protect them from it. After his mother’s sudden death after a domestic violence incident, Bryan and his brothers were charged with being “neglected children” and ended up in state care. He was seven.

So began a life of cruelty and abuse that blighted his entire life. Born in 1944, Bryan at seven was sent to Neerkol, an infamous Queensland orphanage west of Rockhampton.  He became one of the Forgotten Australians who were the subject of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s National Apology in 2009.  But reading this book, so painstakingly crafted, makes it clear that while the Apology was an important acknowledgement of the great wrong done to these children, it could not ever redress the harm that was caused.

The Wikipedia page for the Forgotten Australians tells us that the 2003–2004 Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care reported on common outcomes for these children:

Common experiences

Common feelings reported by care leavers include feelings of abandonment and loss because of separation from parents and siblings; a sense of isolation; feelings of guilt and self-blame; lack of confidence and low self-esteem.

Forgotten Australians reported to the Senate Inquiry that as adults they had suffered depression, social anxieties, phobias, recurring nightmares, anger, shame, and were fearful and distrustful of others leading to an inability to form and maintain relationships. Many detailed drug and alcohol dependence, homelessness, unemployment and imprisonment.

Loss of identity

The most common outcome of a childhood spent in out-of-home care reported to the Senate inquiry was a loss of identity.

[…]

Siblings taken into care together were often separated and contact between siblings was discouraged. Boys and girls were usually separated in institutions so brothers and sisters rarely had close contact. Family ties were cut when one sibling ended up in care while others remained at home with their parents or were sent elsewhere. The result is that many people never knew they had siblings or only found out much later in life. Children’s names were often changed and poor and incomplete records kept of children in care. This makes it difficult for older care leavers to find out why and how they ended up in care, and to trace parents, siblings or other living relatives.

Poor education outcomes

Education for children in institutions was often of a poor standard and by the age of 15 most children had left school. Many children left institutions with low levels of literacy and numeracy that may have affected their ability to find work or meant they could only get low paying jobs. It also affected their ability to further their education.

Impact on partners and children

Most care leavers left the care system without any preparation for adulthood or parenthood. Many have carried the trauma of neglect and abuse into their adult lives and relationships but have found it difficult to tell anyone about their experiences, even partners and children.

Some reported finding it difficult to sustain relationships and many have had several partners or only transient relationships. Many care leavers found they were unable to be good parents or have chosen not to have children.

This autobiography is remarkable in many ways, not least because the neglect of his education was of the many harms done to Bryan.  Edwina Shaw, who edited the book, explains that she runs creative writing classes at Lotus Place, a resource and support centre for Forgotten Australians.  Through the latter pages of the book we see that some of that support included helping Bryan to access his own files, to learn the truth about his circumstances, and to track down what happened to the brothers that he never saw again.  But the support also included helping Bryan to realise his dream of wanting to record his whole life story, despite having difficulty with literacy like many Forgotten Australians.  This project took a period of years, with Edwina writing down Bryan’s words and then shaping them into a chronological narrative.  The result is a triumph for Bryan whose story is now told, and for the people involved in helping with the healing process.

His memories of his mother are vivid:

Thinking of my mother makes me smile. “Love” — that’s the word I remember her saying most. “Yes love.  No love. Not yet love.” I used to love sitting on the back steps with Mum and my brothers, with her arms around us, holding us close, telling us she loved us.

[…]

Every night after dinner we used to sit with Mum and look at the stars.  Quite often I’d see a flash and Mum would explain that it was a shooting star.  Once I saw two in one night.  We’d sit there for hours, my mum and me and my brothers, looking up at the stars sparkling like diamonds in the sky.  Beautiful.  Mum would have a little one on her lap, but it didn’t matter.  We all felt loved.  It was great to listen to her stories and watch the full moon come. (p.8-9)

It is not easy to read his vivid descriptions of life at Neerkol.  Names, as it says in the Editor’s Note, have been changed to protect the innocent, but not the guilty. 

…Sister Amelia knocked me over into a urinal and held me down with her foot on my neck as urinal water stinking of hundreds of kids piss went all over my face.  When she finally let me up, she ordered me into the showers, screaming at me, “get that soap on you!” But we used big chunks of kerosene soap which was a horrible greeny-yellow colour and it never lathered.  So I said, “I’m trying, I’m trying but it won’t…”. I could hardly talk, I was crying so hard.  Then she grabbed my head, shoved the soap in my mouth, and made me eat it.  I was sick as a dog.

She was a very cruel woman.  A big woman, and strong.  Solid she was, with a face like a bulldog and a smell like mothballs, camphor and another type of poison.  I was terrified of her.  Her long fingernails cut into my earlobes whenever she dragged me somewhere.  As soon after breakfast as I could, I ran down past the recreation sheds and stayed right out of her way. (p.45)

Things went from bad to worse when he was farmed out to work.  With the exception of his first posting with the Stewart family, he was dumped on isolated farms with no supervision from Children’s Services, where he was brutally beaten, given work to do that was unsafe for a puny underfed boy of his age, and had his meagre pay stolen by one employer after another.  And he was always, always hungry. No wonder that when he was wrongly sent to Boggo Road gaol at the age of sixteen he loved it.  For the first time in years he was well-fed and well-clothed and was able to do meaningful work and make friends.  When he was released with nowhere to go, he soon realised that his best chance of any kind of security was to reoffend, and he made a point of breaching the rules in order to reduce any remissions and stretch out his sentence.

That afternoon I had tea, and it was the first proper meal I’d had since the Stewarts’ place. T-bone steak with cooked potato and beans and mashed pumpkin and plenty of gravy with onion in it.  I licked my plate clean.  And then I got dessert! Custard and jelly! I couldn’t believe it.  I was really rapt.  You had to go and collect your meal, then take it into your cell.  It came out in a big container, aluminium plates full of food, with the dessert plates under the main meal.  We got cottage pie, rice pudding.  It was beautiful!  Every Sunday we got Plum Duff with custard. Wow! We had roast meat, roast potatoes and pumpkin, onion, peas, beans with plenty of gravy.  For the first time in such a very long time, I was well fed.  I was a skinny little short fella when I was put in.  Then I started to grow. (p.105)

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Bryan’s story.

Do take time to visit the Alliance for Forgotten Australians and view their Monument Map. which shows the monuments erected in all the states and territories.  They are all poignant in different ways, the Queensland sculpture capturing the heartbreak of a barefoot boy carrying a small suitcase, while — as the artist explains — the Victorian one represents the scale of the tragedy in a powerful way:

World within, world without (2010) by Helen Bodycomb
This artwork reflects the constellations above Victoria at 11am on 16 November 2009, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his national apology to the ’Forgotten Australians’. Wattle blossoms represent the one thousand most visible stars and planets, one for every one hundred children who were in Victorian state care. Here we remember those thousands of children who were separated from their families and grew up or spent time in Victorian orphanages, children’s homes and foster homes last century. Many were frightened, abused and neglected. We acknowledge the many shattered lives and the courage and strength of those who survived. Unveiled 25th October 2010 and developed with the support of the Australian and Victorian Governments and the City of Melbourne.”

Author: Bryan Hartas
Title: Hard As, My Life as an Orphan Boy
Publisher: AndAlso Books, 2021
ISBN: 9780648905127, pbk.,149 pages
Source: Personal library, available from AndAlso Books.