“I cried,
because it hurt,” she grimaces. “I was still crying when I
went to see Sr Imelda.”
It was the worst
decision she could have made. Imelda beat her, savagely,
and locked her under the stairs for three days. Released
from the dark, foul-smelling cupboard where she was given
only a bucket for her excrement, she was again sent to
Ridsdale.
The rape that
followed was so brutal that when she cried out in pain, Sr
Imelda entered the room and dragged Julie to the bathroom,
demanding she take a bath before she was sent to get her
toilet bag. Forcing her to lie on the cold lino, Imelda
inserted Julie’s soapy toothbrush in her vagina and rectum
until she bled. Satisfied that she was clean, Imelda then
pronounced that Julie was a filthy girl who must remain
silent about what had happened.
Julie was seven
and a half years old. Ridsdale would rape her again on at
least two occasions.
A week before her
First Communion, Julie fainted during rehearsals. Enraged,
Ridsdale ordered that she stay behind when the other
students left.
“He slammed me so hard in the face that I fell over the church pew and was very badly bruised,” she says, absently drawing a figure-eight with her fingers on her kitchen table.
“Then he dragged me out of the church and threw me down the steps.”
“Nobody gets away with that!” he screamed. Lying whimpering on the ground, she quivered to see Sr Imelda advance toward her, to pick her up. She knew what she was in for.
Like other orphans, Julie, the sixth child in her family, desperately needed loving care – not abuse. Abandoned by their mother when Julie was one month shy of her second birthday, she and her two siblings – one marginally older than herself, one three months of age - were taken into police custody.
Sent to St Joseph’s Babies Home, run by the Sisters of Nazareth, Julie was placed into the Nazareth House Girls Home at the age of five. It was an unwelcome induction.
“I was shown to my dormitory and told not to wet the bed. The next morning, very early, I was woken and hit on the legs by the nun because I had wet the bed. She rubbed my face into the wet sheet so hard my nose bled. I was then dragged to the bathroom, told to strip in front of the other girls, and beaten along with others who had wet the bed. Later, our names were called out and we had to stand our naked feet in buckets of boiling water.”
The physical abuse was so horrendous, that on occasions Julie would fall unconscious. Sr Imelda was always the most vicious.
“She broke my fingers,” Julie says. “She made me and the other girls eat our own vomit.”
Gabbi and Julie became friends.
“I once tried, with Gabbi, to crawl through a hole in the fence, but a nun kept dragging me back. The wire was embedded in my leg and I needed 11 stitches. I was locked in a cupboard under the stairs for days and nights as punishment. When I was released, I was so ill I had to stay in the sick room for eight days.”
Julie was never told that her real sister, Gail, was at the orphanage, and imagined that Gabbi was her sister.
Julie left the orphanage in 1963 to live with foster parents. But her foster father, too - a pillar of the Polish church and, she believes, part of Ridsdale’s paedophile ring - also abused her; abuse that was so terrible she still can’t speak of it.
In 1968, she became violently ill. Flummoxed as to the cause of her condition, the doctor would later ascertain it was the result of Ridsdale’s abuse and the injuries she sustained at her First Communion rehearsal. Julie’s spleen, one kidney and her appendix were removed.
To escape the hell of life at home, in 1972, aged 16, Julie left home and later married a boy she liked, but didn’t love. The marriage didn’t last, but depression, which has dogged her all her life, did. Four serious suicide attempts ended with hospitalisation, but she eventually found love, married, had seven children and gained a teachers degree. Her beloved husband died in 2005, as did her foster mother, who had left her husband immediately when Julie finally told her of the abuse.
Gabbi left the orphanage in 1968. Moving through a succession of other Catholic homes, including the Winlaton Youth Training Centre - “virtually a prison” - she slept rough on the streets. The terror and trauma she suffered as a child haunted her in her 20s, when her body turned in on itself.
“I was in shock and went down to 30kg,” Gabbi says. “I was dying inside.”
Determined to get stronger, she found work, married and had three children. The marriage didn’t last, but what has lasted is her commitment to ensuring others did not go through what she experienced.
“In my 40s, I started to talk about what had happened at the orphanage,” Gabbi says. “I started to heal and I haven’t stopped talking about it since.”
Now a spokesperson for Forgotten Australians and a relentlessly outspoken critic of the malevolent evil that was allowed to flourish in Ballarat - and elsewhere Ridsdale and his companions lived and worked - Gabbi says she will not rest until these paedophiles and malicious nuns are fully exposed.
“I could move on with my life and put this behind me,” she says, “but I’ve chosen to speak out for vulnerable children who can’t speak for themselves. We need to look out for kids today because no-one looked after the kids of yesterday. We were just open slather.”
The law eventually caught up with Ridsdale and his paedophile cohorts, but too late to save more than 30 boys,
who chose to end their own lives rather than relive the ongoing nightmare of the sadistic sexual, physical and emotional abuses inflicted on them by these so-called men of the cloth.
For Ridsdale, the dominos started falling when, in 1992, one of his male victims contacted a hotline regarding paedophile priests. When the police came calling, he could no longer hide behind his cassock, clerical collar and cross. He went quietly.
Pell welcomed the announcement of the Royal Commission, but his welcome soured in public opinion when he added that priests who hear confessions from people who commit child sex abuse must remain bound by the Seal of Confession (the duty of Catholic priests not to disclose what is heard), which he described as ‘inviolable’.
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