Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1494707
15 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 MARCH 2023 and I'll never forget it... I was told, 'You are going to Australia to get a better ed- ucation and to get a better life'." When they arrived in Australia, Tu- mus and his brothers were sent to an orphanage in rural Western Australia, run by the Christian Brothers, where he was sexually abused by Brother Weldon. Brother Weldon "had a habit of com- ing along and when you had a shower. You had these curtains... He'd pull 'em open and just... just stare at ya... not all the boys, because there would have been maybe eight of us as working boys." "He used to... take me up to his room... What he used to do... go to his room, when the picture shows were on a Sun- day, "Lift up your shirt, pull your pants down, face the wall" and I could hear the bed going squeak, squeak, squeak, but I didn't know what it was... but of course, when I got older and well out of there, then I could work out what it was.' When he was 15, Tumus ran away and walked 25 miles to the nearest police sta- tion to report the abuse. "I explained the situation to 'em that Brother Weldon was interfering with me. Well, I think I said something like, you know, he was touching me... And all I got was a smack in the mouth and told... 'Don't tell lies about these good Christian men'." Tumus told the Commissioner that his first marriage was a disaster. "It was because I had no... I'll be straight, I had no sexual experience. I was hopeless. I didn't know anything about sex because, you know, in the orphanage, 'If you look at women you go to Hell'… simple as that. So I just kept my head down... sim- ple as that." 'Nikolai' When Nikolai's mother was hospital- ised in the mid-1950s, he and his sister were sent from Malta to Australia to start new lives. "My father was dead, so we came here to live in Victoria with our older brother when I was 14. About a year later I went into a Christian Broth- ers boys' home where I was physically and sexually abused by Brother Lucien and another Brother. My mother died while I was in there." At 17, he reported the abuse to a priest. "When I asked if I should see the police, he said to wait until he'd done his in- quiries. I went back to them frequent- ly and was always told it was ongoing. Then I went away with my job and never went back." Nikolai was devastated when he later learnt that two friends he knew from the boys' home had killed themselves. "I know they were abused by the same Brothers as me; I'd spoken to one of them about it, he was a very good friend of mine. He was a terrific sportsman, someone I admired... It got that bad when I found out the two of them were dead, I tried to commit suicide myself." Over the years Nikolai said he's tak- en tablets to ease bouts of depression, and said he's found intimacy difficult within his long marriage. "We have two girls born 20 years apart. I regarded sex as a bad thing, so that's why there's the gap. I've told my wife a bit about it, but I don't want my daughters to know, I don't want them to suffer." The impact of his childhood abuse con- tinues to affect Nikolai. "It's very hard to explain what goes through your head and how hard it is to forget these things that have happened to you – and how hard it is to go to sleep. You lie there for hours and hours, and all you want to do is just sleep, and you can't." 'Domenica' As a child in Malta in the 1950s, Do- menica never knew exactly why her mother gave her and most of her sib- lings up for care. She suspected it was because her father was a violent alcohol- ic and she spent most of her early child- hood in an orphanage. "My mum kept having children but none of us were home with her… I think she did it all in good faith, you know. But she wouldn't have known we were gon- na get treated like we did." At 11 in the mid-1960s, she and sev- eral of her siblings were taken to West- ern Australia, and sent to live in a girls' home run by a Catholic order of nuns, while her brothers went to a different orphanage. Life at her new home was harsh, particularly because the nuns were physically violent towards the chil- dren. "They used to hit us across the knees with baseball bats… I used to go to bed and I'd be so sore. And the next morning I'd get up and I'd be so sore I couldn't walk. I was only a young girl. And you'd think I was an old woman, the way I walked 'cause I used to be sore all over the place. And then they used to pick you up by the ears or twist your nip- ples… They even used to kick you in the vagina. "Every time I used to hear footsteps I'd be shaking… I don't think Hitler would have thought half of the punishment they gave us. You know, they were so cruel. They used to get a bucket of wa- ter, stick your head under. I got it so many times, I learned to hold my breath … She said to me 'One of these days I'll kill you'. She said that to me 'I'll kill you with your head under water'." When performing chores assisting the priest to set up the church for a service, Domenica was encouraged by the nuns to sit on the priest's lap. "He used to get me sitting on his knee and then part my legs with his knee like that, and pull my pants across and he used to finger me… And I couldn't understand it. Here's this nun telling me to go sit on his lap. And I couldn't go and talk to her about it because she'd think I'm a liar and then I'd get the biggest belting around. And every time I was on church duties the same thing happened." Domenica was regularly abused by the priest for approximately two years, as well as by a group of older girls who would molest her in the showers and toilet cubicles. At 15, Domenica ran away from the home but was found by the police and taken to a remand centre before being made a ward of the state. At 18, after her wardship was terminated, Domenica met and married Tobias, but the mar- riage only lasted five years. When she was 40, Domenica returned to Malta to visit her mother. Her father had already died. "I was pleased I did it. But my mum, she didn't feel like my mum because she gave me up. Oh you know, I came to Australia when I was young. I didn't feel anything for her." Her mother has since passed away. "They used to hit us across the knees with baseball bats… I used to go to bed and I'd be so sore. And the next morning I'd get up and I'd be so sore I couldn't walk" "I thought he was going to get me to pray or something. He made me kneel down and he put my pyjamas and he tied them around my head, around my eyes. And I felt somebody grabbing my two arms like that. And then he lift my shirt up..." After WWII, Tardun Farm School housed British and Maltese child migrants aged 12-16 until 1967. It was later turned into a farm school. Originally it was run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a worldwide religious community within the Catholic Church, founded by Blessed Edmund Rice in the 1800s. The sexual abuse scandal in the Congregation of Christian Brothers is a major chapter in the series of Catholic sex abuse cases in various Western jurisdictions. During the 2016 Royal Australian Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse it was found that 853 children were sexually abused by one or more Christian Brothers with the average age of 13. 281 Christian Brothers have had abuse complaints substantiated, and the Christian Brothers have paid $37.3 million in compensation.