The Interview with the Royal Commission — A Parramatta Girls Story
The treatment of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal inmates of Parramatta Girls Home highlights a powerful convergence of a shared history. The recollections of both groups of inmates tell a similar story of humiliation, abuse, violence and neglect.
My full name is Marli Torres and I am 57 years old and Aboriginal Australian. I grew up in Naremburn with my mother and father, 3 sisters and 2 younger brothers. I was the eldest daughter. I went to primary school in Naremburn. I went to High School in Willoughby. I left school at 15 years old and started working as a grocery store bagger. Admission to Parramatta Girls Training School In 1970, I was sent to Parramatta Girls because I had breached an 14-month good behaviour bond.
Q. Can I just stop you there. Can you tell the Commission how you came to be on an 14-month good behaviour bond?
A. Yes. I had run away from home and been picked up by the police and taken to Glebe Shelter and been charged with being exposed to moral danger and uncontrollable, because I had run away from home. I spent some time at Glebe and then at Minda. Then I was put on an 14-month good behaviour bond. I went back home to my parents, but because I was the oldest child — both of my parents worked. I had 5 siblings, one of them a baby. I didn’t have any friends. I wasn’t allowed to socialise, go to a movie, have a life. I basically just had to look after the younger ones. My 11 parents were incredibly strict. My father were older parents. I wasn’t sure why they were so strict and harsh to me although I understood later my mother had a rough childhood and it was her way of being protective, so to speak. Very strict, and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or make plans with friends. I left home. After that situation of running away from home and being picked up, I was taken to the Manly Shelter again and then to court. I had gone with a friend. I was sentenced almost two years in Parramatta Girls Home. I was accounted to being a troubled teenager and exposed to moral danger again.
Q. Towards the end of paragraph 3 of your statement, “They said I was ‘uncontrollable’”, was that referring to your parents-
A. No.
Q. Or the court?
A. The court and the welfare officer.
Q. Did your parents show in the court hearing?
A. My mother came, yes.
Q. Was she asked what her view was?
A. She said she wanted me to come home. The court overruled that and said that some time in an institution would do me good. On the trip to Parramatta Girls Home by two police officers, I tried to jump out of the car into traffic. I was almost successful, but one of them grabbed me. They were very upset at me and very angry, but I just didn’t want to be put into an institution. They knocked my teeth out then eventually took me to Parramatta girls.
Both groups have had to fight hard to get their stories heard, known and acknowledged. The Bringing them home report (HREOC 1997), the Forgotten Australians report (Australian Senate 2004) and the 2014 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have brought the experiences of former inmates of Parramatta Girls Home to the fore of public acknowledgment.
Q. What was your first encounter with Parramatta Girls like?
A. It wasn’t no warm welcome…I’ll never forget it.
Q. Could elaborate for us Marli? What happened when you first arrived?
A. Well when we got there, I was put into a room with probably a dozen girls. Similar to a waiting room at the hospital. Only much more grey and gloomy. I wasn’t sure what to expect or what we were waiting for. The girls were deathly quiet. Not too approachable. I was curious enough to initiate a conversation with one of em.
Well tried, she didn’t respond.
Another girl glanced our way, seemingly unfazed, she introduced herself to me, ‘Where abouts you from freshie?’. Angie her name was. She’d been there for 3 years.
She told me to brace myself for the ‘gates of hell’.
We were moved into another room, this time there were 30 of us crammed into one room, just enough room to crowd 30 stuffed chairs. Many of us were put on major tranquillisers and just want to sleep, but we got out of bed at 6:30am, marched to the wards room, then ordered to stand in lines. 2 girls had been called to leave the room and enter another, while the rest of us waited. During the 20 minute wait, you couldn’t help but hear what sounded like forty mallets hitting a drum all at once in the far distance. When the girls returned with wet faces and unkempt hair everything suddenly got much more eery.
I was terribly anxious for my turn.
*Silence*
It is estimated that more than 30,000 girls were incarcerated in the Home between 1887 and 1974. At any given time the Home held between 160 and 200 inmates. The girls were generally incarcerated for between six months and three years, and were eligible for release when they were 18 years of age (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse 2014c).
Q. What happened when it got to your turn Marli?
A. The Doctor’s visit…was tortuous.
Later it became familiar to me as the examination. It was set up in a small room by a physician, involving a vaginal check for venereal diseases to determine whether we were virgins or not. It wasn’t like the check up’s at the nurses office I tell you.
I was instructed to strip all my clothes and lay on the backrest table with my knees bent, heels together, legs spread apart…the physician shoved my legs wider apart, in his hand…a large metal instrument…he forced it in my vagina, gashing my skin and I remember screaming in pain…I felt humiliated and frightened…I’d never had an internal examination and didn’t know what was happening…I glanced over at the female officer standing at the door but she had turned her back on me…later, I found out the girls’ name for him was ‘Doctor Fingers’.
That was only the start…
‘’For many girls having this examination was essentially their first sexual experience, if you can call it that,’’ Ms Bonney Djuric who was sent to the Parramatta home in 1970 and founded a support network for former inmates, Parramatta girls, in 2006 commented, ’Being raped by having a metal object inserted is something you never forget.’’
Q. Can you briefly explain your experience in the ‘Isolation room’, In your statement 4 paragraph you identify it as the dungeon?
A. If us girls ever complained about the treatment we’d get, they took us down to what they called isolation cells. I called it the dungeon, dark and filthy they were. We’d sit in a cell for however long, could be hours, days or weeks. Our meals would be bread and water, sometimes bread and milk…
First time they kicked the crap out of me. I was thrown over a bag of potatoes.
Booted me and punched my ears in…bounced me off every wall… just kept laying the boot in…
till the sounds of my own screams became deafening.
And when it wasn’t physical it was sexual.
After the officers left, us girls just held each other and sobbed.
Happened every night.
The Inmates in Parramatta Girls Home were subject to strict discipline, punishment and intrusive sexual abuse. Contributing to their feelings of disempowerment, shame and mortification.
Parramatta Girls — The Aftermath
Almost all of the women deal with some form of mental illness as a result of their trauma.
Most are struggling financially and trying to get by on the aged pension or disability pension. They’re renting from public housing.
The lucky ones are in long term relationships. Many are single because of the trauma they suffered in their youth.
Histories of depression and severe anxiety are common.
The failure to recognise and respect cultural differences consequently placed Aboriginal girls within a regime of practices and procedures that callously denied their sense of self, their culture and their indignity, the significance of which is the lessons that can be taken beyond the walls of PGH, issues of racism, structural violence, and cultural violence, the consequences of colonialism today. It is time PGH inmates receive justice for the treatment they endured…
However to date there has been no real recourse to repair or account for the cultural violence that Aboriginal people endured during their incarceration in homes like PGH.
‘We could’ve validated each other’s, all our stories, but nobody got to validate their stories. None of us had a court case…we were all just told that we deserved it…and we believed it. So all these years nothing was ever said, and all these people just walked around never forgiven themselves and always feeling ashamed and different from everybody else. Look at all the division [it has] caused in families…It’s just been hideous and so wrong, so bloody wrong…so this is it… the last few years this has all been coming out and the apology, the Stolen Generation apology, that was just fantastic to think that we had a Prime Minister that had the guts to say, yes this did happen and yes this was wrong. And then for the Forgotten Australians…I really commend Kevin Rudd…he has opened doors…some people say the apology meant nothing…If that never happened nobody would be out of the closet talking about it today…it had to happen, and it’s happened… you can’t expect all that pain is gonna go away, just because there was a Sorry…that doesn’t happen, but it has opened the door for change…so many people lost it because they’re so emotionally damaged…they haven’t moved forward. Emotionally they’re still traumatised by what’s happened. It’s so sad twenty, thirty, forty years on to have carried that for so long. Tragic, just absolutely tragic.’ (Christine, 2 April 2011)
Violence against Indigenous Women today
Mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians has not ceased.
Indigenous women are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence. According to Better Health, Indigenous women are 5 times more likely to die from homicide than non-Indigenous women.
When Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women seek help from authorities, they are often met with negligence or further violence. Munanjahli-Yugambeh-South Sea Islander scholar Chelsea Watego draws attention to a multitude of examples where authorities have failed Indigenous women or further subjected them to violence.
Violence against Indigenous women and their families is also extended to government-mandated acts, such as:
- the high rates of removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families
- the high rates of incarceration of Indigenous women
- the lack of public care or concern when Indigenous women have been subject to violent assault, sexual assault and even death.
The government’s fourth action plan to reduce violence against women and their children 2010–2022 claims one of its priorities is to “support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and their children”.
Sadly, such prioritising has not led to real change.
Indigenous women are exhausted by the efforts required to ensure the safety of our communities. We need the support of our government and for the public to speak out against gendered violence, instead of leaving us out of the conversation.
Have their stories told.
Keep their voices heard.