DOVETON
Cold-blooded old times. Cold-blooded old times. Cold-blooded old, times. The type of memories that turn your bones to glass. Turn your bones to glass.
Lyrics by Bill Callahan of Smog, ‘Cold Blooded Old Times’
However many times it’s said he turned a blind eye in Ballarat, however many child abuse problems it’s alleged he mopped up after, George Pell remained at that time a reasonably junior priest. But the questions about his conduct in relation to the handling of child abuse in Melbourne happened when he was an auxiliary bishop. Talk to people in the know in the Church and they will tell you Melbourne is Pell’s real problem. The Melbourne problem was forensically prosecuted on the third day of Cardinal Pell’s evidence beamed back from Rome to Sydney in February 2016. If you boil day three down to its core, it’s a story of Auxiliary Bishop Pell and a schoolgirl. A schoolgirl who was now all grown up and had flown from her home in Cairns to be in that courtroom, in the hope, however faint, that she would get some admissions about what the Auxiliary Bishop had really known.
The schoolgirl was Julie Stewart. A slip of a thing with tawny hair, crinkled from plaits and tumbling all the way down her back. Julie was from the hardscrabble parish of Holy Family, Doveton. Doveton was in the southern region of the city, which the Auxiliary Bishop oversaw. It neighboured Father Noel Brady’s parish in Dandenong and coincidentally, Julie later went to the school there. She’d just made her First Holy Communion, and her photograph from 1984 floods the brain with memory, recalling mine from two years before. Same veil with scalloped edges. Same scratchy-stiff crown of artificial white flowers. Same high-necked dress, its hem threaded through with silk ribbon. Julie sits propped up against a pine-clad wall. Her frilly socks are pulled up to the knee, her feet shod with patent leather white shoes with little decorative holes punched out. They’re dangling from the stool because she’s so small. Her little hands are clasped as she beams at someone to the right of the camera.
‘We went to church every Sunday,’ Julie says. ‘And we used to say our prayers before we went to bed.’
In 1984, along with her First Holy Communion (always in capitals, if you please) Julie also made her First Confession. The Church was modernising—masses, once Latin, were filled with the jangly guitar tunes of ‘This Is the Day That the Lord has Made’, walls were adorned with macramé owls and godseyes, priests were donning open-necked shirts and chunky brown wooden crosses hung from their necks. So at that time, they began to call confession ‘reconciliation’.
The year of Julie’s introduction to the blessed sacraments was the year that Peter Searson came to Holy Family, Doveton. Searson was a shocking piece of work, which of course little Julie didn’t realise at first. A vain and shallow creature, his hair was slicked down like a shiny Brylcreem helmet. He brandished a gun, hung around the kids’ toilets, was cruel to animals, dismissive to staff and preyed upon children. He was, by all accounts, dreadfully fond of himself and disdainful of pretty much everyone else. The very antithesis of what a priest ought to be. But like so many paedophile priests, he was very good at appearing to the kids when they first met him like a lovely guy.
The memory of Searson, wandering through a sea of students at Holy Family, is etched into Stewart’s mind. ‘I used to see him on the playground, cuddling. He was very affectionate with children and always had a smile on his face. And I remember, on the playground, he used to like playing with my hair. That’s another thing, I don’t like anyone touching my hair now …’ Stewart trails off. But back then, she was initially delighted at the attention. ‘I was like, “Wait till I tell my nana”, because a priest was someone very important in our family.’
Also etched in Stewart’s mind is reconciliation. Because it was reconciliation, and not stiff old confession in a tiny wooden box, the young confessor had the choice of sitting either behind a wall or in a moulded plastic seat next to Father. There was much discussion among the Holy Family youngsters about where they might sit.
But when Julie took her turn, Searson didn’t give her the option to sit behind the wall. She was to sit on his side of the partition.
‘I went to sit on the chair next to him and he said, “Come and sit on my knee”.’ She breathes in deeply. ‘So that’s, um, that’s how it started.’
‘It’ was the grooming. ‘I remember he placed his hand there,’ she says, pointing to her leg, ‘and his other hand was between my, uh, thighs,’ Julie told me.
‘He asked, you know, “Do you love Father?” And I said, “Oh, of course”, I’m thinking The Lord, “I love Father, I love The Lord”. And he giggled and I giggled. And he said, “No, no, no, do you love me?” And I said, “Of course I love you”. And he said, “Give Father a kiss”. So I gave him a kiss on the cheek, and he said, “No, no, no, give Father a kiss on the lips”. So I gave him a kiss on the lips. And that was just the beginning. That’s sort of how it started.’
Paedophiles seem to possess a peculiar knack of being able to pick vulnerability in a child’s eyes. And Julie had been abused before by a family member between the ages of five and eight. She’d become a bedwetter, beset with constant nightmares. She clung on to her mother like a little limpet. So when things got strange with Searson, little Julie knew what was going on. The first three occasions it was just the kissing. But from the fourth, the touching began.
Julie’s police statement was handwritten in bubbly teenage script some years later, when she was fifteen.
I sat on the very end of his knee, because I didn’t want to get to [sic] close to him, but he dragged me right up his lap and sat me on his lap. When he sat me on his lap, he sat me on his penis. I know this because when I sat down I could feel that it was erect … I knew something was wrong because priests don’t normally act this way and I became very scared.
In November 2015, ahead of her evidence to the Royal Commission, I meet Stewart at her hotel room. She is still a petite woman, with the same long shiny hair snaking down her back. She looks younger than she is and she’s plucky as anything.
Stewart tells me that the initial touching led to Searson placing his hand on his ‘private parts’, ‘and him trying to get his hands inside my, um, my underwear. But I used to brush his hand away. And I think I know I did that because I knew that that was wrong because of my previous abuse.’ He began to flick and tickle her genitals over her underwear. His penis would always be erect.
‘To be honest, I thought I must be a very, very bad girl for this to be happening to me again. And I just did not want to tell anybody because I thought I was such a problem to my family in the beginning because of family abuse—the family member that abused me. I didn’t want to tell anybody. So I didn’t. I just thought there must be something wrong with me and I’m really bad.’
‘So you never told anybody?’
‘I never told anybody … The priest in your family is somebody that is very, very important in a Catholic family … And you know, my nana, she had so much faith, she was the most beautiful …’ she trails off at the memory. ‘I was born on my nana’s birthday, I was very close to my nana … I just did not want to let her down. I didn’t want to cause a problem. So I never said anything.’
And so, of course, the abuse continued.
‘His face would always light up when I’d walk into the room, you know, you know, light up, straight away. And I was just sickened by it.’
She remembers vividly the last occasion, some time in the second term of Grade 4 the following year. She was willing herself to sit on the other side of the partition. It angered Searson that she didn’t go over to him immediately. He grabbed her and pushed her backside down against his erect penis very hard. ‘He whispered in my ear, “You are a good girl. The Lord forgives you.” And I just snapped … I remember putting my hands on his knees and pushing myself off and I just turned around and looked at him and he was sort of shocked that I’d done it and I just bolted out.’
Braids flying in the wind, the little girl raced out of the church, sobbing and hyperventilating, into the arms of her teacher Shirley Barrett, who had the other children lined up for reconciliation. She was taken directly to her principal, Graeme Sleeman. ‘They tried everything to calm me down and they couldn’t. And I remember Mr Sleeman, Graeme, tried to console me by touching my plaits, and I wouldn’t let him touch me. I can remember him saying, trying to ask me what happened, “What did he do to you?” And I recall saying, “it was horrible, it was horrible”.’
It is hard to imagine such an incident taking place in a modern school, and if it did, it could only end with the priest being marched off the premises posthaste. But that’s not what happened to Searson. He stayed at Holy Family for another twelve years. Twelve. It tore apart the school community. And it wasn’t like Sleeman turned a blind eye to what was going on with Searson. He fought the archdiocese for years. Sleeman lost his job and ultimately his career trying to expose the priest. Stewart told a series of other adults in the Catholic education system who did not act, or did not effectively act, or were nobbled by those above them.
Unable to stay at Holy Family while Searson was still there, Julie told a teacher at her next school about the abuse. Then, when she attended high school at St John’s in Dandenong, also run by the archdiocese, she told a nun. The nun referred her to the school principal, Michael Quin. She had a meeting with him and the nun, Sister Colleen. She had by this time been to see a detective, Ben Condon. She gave Quin a manila folder containing her statement and Condon’s business card.
‘And [Quin] said he was going to get advice on what to do about it,’ Stewart says.
‘I got called in a week or a couple of weeks, later. I’m not too sure. And [Quin] said “Um, well, there’s not much we can do about it, I think it’s best if you just keep seeing Sister Colleen and talking about it and trying to get on with your life” … I–I never read that statement ever again … I never saw it again. And I never got back the manila folder, I never got back the business card with Detective Condon’s details,’ Stewart says. At the time, she says didn’t feel that she could ask her principal for the materials. But now?
‘Well now, as a 40-year-old woman, it makes me question how big a cover-up this really has become,’ she says with a sour half-laugh. ‘They’ve all spoken to somebody. Who did they speak to? Who, who, above all of them is trying to shut it down?’
The type of memories that turn your bones to glass. ‘I was alone in this whole journey, and that’s how I felt. Totally. And broken. Totally broken, [I felt] that nothing is ever going to get done about this.’
Julie was fifteen. Her decision to go to police took place after she’d had her stomach pumped in hospital of the sixty Panadeine, twenty-four Panadol and some zinc tablets she’d taken to try to kill herself.
The police report, too, went nowhere. In fact, the Victoria Police investigation, or lack thereof, was a dog’s breakfast. Julie had been interviewed by a single, junior police officer, Ben Condon. It is now accepted practice that two officers attend these sorts of interviews and, given it was a teenage girl making the statement, having a female officer present is always encouraged. It’s unclear why that did not happen. When Julie told Condon that another family member had abused her, she says he made a curiously insensitive reply. ‘He said, “Oh my god, what were you wearing, a neon sign above your head, that said, ‘Come get me’?”,’ Stewart remembers. ‘And from then, I’d shut down.’ The police statement is, accordingly, less detailed about the abuse than the one she later gave to the Royal Commission.
Despite this insensitivity, Stewart does say Condon turned to her father as he was leaving the Stewart home and said, ‘We’ll get him’. ‘Bewdy’, was Mr Stewart’s reply. But she says Condon rang her some time later to tell her there wasn’t enough evidence. Condon gave evidence to the Royal Commission that he can’t remember taking the statement. The statement was taken in the days before Victoria Police had formed its groundbreaking Child Exploitation Squad and was still under the auspices of the Child Exploitation Unit (CEU). The unit wasn’t staffed by proper detectives and had no real expertise in the area. Children were still seen as chattels in the eyes of the law. Still, in 1994—weirdly, four years after Stewart first made her complaint—CEU officers wrote up a report, which concluded, ‘CEU have investigated the complaint and find no allegations of a sexual nature’. Searson was never interviewed. Assistant Commissioner Steve Fontana, who was interviewed by the Royal Commission last year, seemed stumped as to the reasons for that.
‘It appears that investigating officers erroneously did not characterise Julie Stewart to be a complainant who had made “allegations of a sexual nature”. The reason for this is not clear to me.’
Stewart wonders whether Condon or someone else was nobbled. Certainly, when further complaints were made to Victoria Police about Searson, a Sergeant Caulfield recorded the following note on the file:
THERE IS HIGH LEVEL RESISTANCE TO ANY ENQUIRIES BEING MADE ABOUT SEARSON, WITHIN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH/PARISH.
In October 1995, Sergeant Caulfield closed his file and wrote that ‘the enquiry [can] be taken no further by this office’. As Counsel Assisting Gail Furness, SC, and Counsel Assisting Stephen Free wrote in their final submission to the Royal Commission in October 2016, ‘given an offence was disclosed, this was a failure by Victoria Police’.
An understatement, to say the least, but for Stewart, the biggest slap in the face was in 2013, seeing the most senior Catholic in the country up on television in a Victorian parliamentary inquiry acting like he didn’t know about her situation. That is what jolted Stewart into action. That’s what brought her to Sydney one sunny day in March 2016.
And the story of Julie Stewart is why, despite questions about his years as a consultor in the Ballarat Diocese, it is his stint as Auxiliary Bishop in Melbourne and how he handled the Doveton situation that commentators have privately and publicly said is Pell’s stickiest when it comes to alleged knowledge of paedophile priests. Until the allegations were made about Pell’s own offending, it was assumed it was the years as Auxiliary Bishop, and the Royal Commission’s laser gaze on his action and inaction, that might bring the Cardinal undone.
The 2013 exchange that really got Stewart’s goat was while Pell was giving evidence about Searson to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations. Deputy Chair Frank McGuire interrogated Pell about his handling of teachers who had tried to complain about Searson. The Cardinal’s performance in that chair was vintage Pell, pointing out that Searson had ‘never been convicted of a sex crime. He was convicted for an act of cruelty.’ The pugnacious McGuire was undeterred. ‘Just from your evidence, can you understand how victims regard what happened during this period was really “hear no evil, see no evil, say nothing about evil” from the Church?’
Cardinal Pell responded, ‘I think that is an objectionable suggestion, with no foundation in the truth. No conviction was recorded for Searson on sexual misbehaviour. There might be victims …’
Stewart sat bolt upright in her living room at home. There was no ‘might’. She had a letter from Pell, dated 26 August 1998, and there was no ‘might’ in that letter:
I understand that, based on findings made by the Independent Commissioner, your claims have been considered by the Compensation Panel. The Panel has provided me with a recommendation, which I accept, and this letter is accompanied by a formal offer made on my behalf …
Unfortunately we cannot change what has happened in the past. You may never be rid of the memories or the hurt. Services such as those provided through Carelink can assist you in your recovery. The payment of compensation raises difficult and complex issues. It is my hope that my offer, based on the Panel’s recommendation, will be accepted by you as a preferable alternative to legal proceedings and that it too will assist you with your future.
On behalf of the Catholic Church and personally, I apologise to you and to those around you for the wrongs and hurt you have suffered at the hands of Father Searson. Whether or not you choose to accept the enclosed offer, I offer you my prayers.
The letter was signed ‘Yours sincerely in Christ, George Pell’ with the little cross that Pell always pens with a flourish next to his name. The ‘enclosed offer’ had been generated through Stewart’s involvement in the Melbourne Response. The process had been for Stewart ‘the most horrible experience of my life’, where she says she was made to sit across a small room from her abuser, Searson. ‘I was just sickened,’ she remembers. ‘I couldn’t believe it.’ The enclosed offer was for $25 000. A very small fraction of what Stewart would have received had she successfully sued in a court of law. Note the Cardinal’s hope that the $25 000 would be ‘a preferable alternative to legal proceedings’. She was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement and she now believes the money was just to buy her silence. She couldn’t bring herself to spend it for years. ‘I think I bought my mum and dad a washing machine and put some gas in my brother’s car and then I just put it away.’
But for Stewart, despite the paltry attempt at reparation and the manifest shortcomings of both the Melbourne Response and the letter, that letter simply proved that Pell knew when he went to the parliamentary inquiry in 2013 that there was a victim. That she was that victim. That she had, in Pell’s own words, suffered ‘wrongs and hurt … at the hands of Father Searson’. And that the precise nature of those wrongs and hurts had been relayed by her to Pell’s Independent Commissioner Peter O’Callaghan. If she was not a victim, then why had this happened?
‘Why did Peter O’Callaghan come to my house?’ Julie asks me with clenched jaw in November 2015, reflecting with anger on Pell’s evidence to the parliamentary inquiry. ‘Why did we go through all of that? Why did I then get rung up from Peter O’Callaghan and he told me that they believed me 100 per cent? Why did I go before a compensation panel? Why did I get $25 000?’
‘What do you think about George Pell?’ I ask her.
‘Not. Very. Much,’ she replies, acidly.
‘Do you think he tells the truth?’
‘No. He doesn’t. He does not tell the truth.’
Sitting in Victoria’s parliamentary library, the shadow of St Patrick’s Cathedral over his shoulder through the large window-pane, Frank McGuire, MP, is a little more circumspect when I ask him the same question, but he is acutely aware of the inconsistency. He chooses his words carefully and deliberately. ‘I was shocked to find out about the letter and disappointed,’ McGuire says. ‘Cardinal Pell may have misled the Victorian Parliament in his testimony or downplayed his knowledge.’ I ask him if there is any alternative explanation. He looks to the side, sighs and half smiles. ‘I’ll leave that to Cardinal Pell to respond to.’ Unfortunately, because of issues around separation of powers between parliament and the judiciary, Pell was never asked that question in the Royal Commission because Counsel Assisting was not permitted to do so.
But it had the effect of spurring Stewart from her home in Cairns into decisive and unbending action. Until the inquiry, Stewart’s name had never been made public because she wanted a quiet life. But now, she knew that she needed to be heard and the Royal Commission was the forum for that hearing. It would cost Stewart her anonymity, but she figured it was worth it. ‘There might be victims’ kept ringing in her ears. ‘That pissed me off, oh,’ she says, shaking her head slowly and deliberately, ‘I was so angry … That was a trigger point for me. And I thought, “Let’s get ‘em”.’
And hence, in November 2015, Stewart gave her evidence to the Royal Commission, along with her old principal, Graeme Sleeman. Filming a story for 7.30, our crew watched them embrace in a Melbourne hotel room before their evidence—it was the first time they had clapped eyes on each other in thirty years. ‘G’day Jules!’ boomed Sleeman. ‘How are you? Long time no see, eh?’ Julie buried her head in the shoulder of the big bear of a man and wept. ‘You alright?’ Sleeman asked her. She shook her head and sobbed.
It was impossible not to be transported back to the little school shoes thwacking on the playground asphalt, the long braids flying in the wind, the principal trying to get the tiny, inconsolable kid to tell him what on earth had happened. Now, after three decades of anxiety, self-doubt and depression for one; and for the other, a trashed career and banging his head against a brick wall, someone was finally going to listen to them both.