EUREKA
If you continue in my Word … you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.
John 8:31, given on St Alipius parish school website, 2016
In 1974, in Ballarat East, a little boy was packed off to start school. His name was Lyndon Mark Monument. Lyndon was following his older brother and big sister to St Alipius primary school just down the road. The Monument children were attending a school and a church with an illustrious Catholic goldfields history. St Alipius sprang from a community of 1850s mining parents who camped on the land and wanted to see their children taught in the Catholic tradition. It was the thirteenth non-government school opened in the Victorian colony.
In the 1880s, the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers arrived in Ballarat East, to teach, respectively, the little girls and boys. The religious orders were to stay at St Alipius for the better part of a century. The Brothers in particular will not be forgotten easily. On the drive into Ballarat from Melbourne, St Alipius is the first church and school you clap eyes on. And fluttering on the iron fence posts are hundreds of coloured ribbons. The ribbons, now somewhat weathered by fierce Ballarat winters, are there for the children. The children betrayed by those Catholic clergy. And anyone who arrives in Ballarat cannot fail to be confronted with the memory of that suffering.
So little Lyndon Monument, a good kid, was to grow up in the eye of a child sexual abuse storm. Lyndon Monument is one of George Pell’s accusers. But you need to know a bit about Lyndon Monument to understand where he is coming from when he accuses Pell. By the time Monument went to St Alipius, literally dozens of children at the boys’ school there had been abused by the Christian Brothers—Ted Dowlan, Gerald Leo Fitzgerald, Stephen Farrell and Robert Best—and a priest, Gerald Ridsdale. They left behind them a generation of kids who grew up, in many cases, to lives of dysfunction, alcoholism, underachievement, suicide.
As of February 2015, two data analyses by the Royal Commission put the number of successful or substantiated child abuse claimants against Ridsdale and the four Christian Brothers stationed at St Alipius at fifty-two. But of course, they were the ones who had it in them to complain or to seek compensation. And they were the ones that were still alive. Along with them, there are many who couldn’t bear to think of it, the many who took it to their graves; not to mention those who took their lives but have never been included in the abuse suicide stats, such as they are, because they never spoke up but, on reflection, all the signs point to abuse—in the wrong class, with the wrong teacher, at the wrong time. As is pointed out by Rob Walsh—who was abused by Ridsdale and Best and lost two of his brothers and his cousin, all St Alipius alumni, to suicides—there was barely a child at St Alipius at that time who escaped abuse in some form. Walsh knows of twelve suicides of people who went through with him.
One of the St Alipius suicides that flew under the radar was Lyndon’s brother Craig. Two years older than Lyndon, he was at the boys’ school during the danger period. Craig Monument never breathed a word about abuse to his family. Craig was in Fitzgerald’s class. You were pretty lucky in old Fitzy’s class if he didn’t get at you. At bare minimum, he forced all the boys to kiss him on the lips.
‘I can remember Craig crying every night, like he didn’t want to go to school,’ Lyndon says. ‘You’d never seen someone who didn’t want to go to school like that … He’d just find anything not to go to school.’
Craig Monument’s classmate, Darren Mooney, brought a compensation case against the Christian Brothers in July 2016 for what he was subjected to by the now-deceased Fitzgerald. Mooney tells me the Christian Brothers’ insurance company now refuses to indemnify the order for claims by Fitzgerald because it is clearly documented that he abused children—it was known by the order’s hierarchy. ‘In my grade alone, between now and March,’ Mooney says, speaking to me in December 2016, ‘there’s about ten settlements due from Fitzy alone.
‘It was just hell there,’ Mooney tells me. ‘There’s no other way to describe it. I still deal with the anxiety from being a child in that place on a daily basis—it was beaten into you. You did not know if you were going to be loved one minute, or beaten the next.’ He said it was also impossible to learn as a child when you were so hypervigilant to beltings and sexual abuse. ‘We didn’t learn anything—not a thing.’
‘I remember thinking,’ he says of Fitzgerald, ‘all I wanted is for this prick to open the window so the world would see what was going on.’ But the frosted windows remained jammed shut on all but the most stinking hot summer days. ‘So we couldn’t see out. It was just cruel. Thirty kids in a tiny room in an autocratic, brutal environment.’
Father George Pell lived at St Alipius in the presbytery. He was there in the seventies when the Christian Brothers were doing their worst work at the boys’ school just a stone’s throw away, and for one of his years there, he lived with Ridsdale. There were so many whispers about not just Ridsdale, but the four Brothers, and all of the kids at the school knew who was dodgy. Pell was a man who fancied himself as connected and a player. He is known to have at times walked the playground, to give confession to the children in the Church, to say a confirmation mass. Of the dozens of St Alipius people I have spoken to in my research, only one can’t remember Pell being involved in their school or parish lives at some point or other.
Lyndon Monument had another teacher who was, he says, his abuser at St Alipius. To understand Lyndon and his friend and co-accuser Damian Dignan, and the impact of what they say happened with Pell, you have to understand the context of their treatment by this teacher. Even the barest mention of the teacher’s name to anyone who went to St Alipius in the seventies brings with it a shudder. In fact, when I rang many people to ask what they knew about Pell, they volunteered, unprompted, stories of that teacher. At this point, I am not able to name the teacher for legal reasons. ‘Cruel’ and ‘sadistic’ are just two of the descriptions offered.
The teacher taught Lyndon and his group of mates. The tight little group comprised Lyndon’s best mate Damian, and two sets of twins: the Murphys and the Anwyls.
The teacher had a sadistic streak, and would use metre rulers to discipline and humiliate students in front of others, Monument told police. Physical punishment was used to control the students—the teacher would ‘belt you as soon as look at you’, says Dignan, who describes the teacher as ‘an animal’.
Monument’s school friend Lauren Rowbotham says she in particular was targeted for beltings—something that others in the class have mentioned too. Rowbotham is currently receiving legal advice about it. She would come home with terrible bruising from being whacked. She says things got so bad, her parents, who are now both dead, went up to the school and complained about the violence. And she also remembers that Monument and Dignan were singled out for beatings too.
One incident etched on Monument’s mind concerns a meat pie he’d been given for lunch, which he didn’t finish. He threw the remains of it in the bin. Years later, he told police the teacher made him fish the cold pie out of the bin and eat it in front of the class. ‘I ate the rest of the pie and I was extremely embarrassed and disgusted,’ he says. ‘I remember crying in front of the class.’ But these stories pale into insignificance when compared with what Monument says he subsequently fell victim to.
It is a difficult story for Monument to tell—he squirms in his seat as he remembers. It started, Monument recalls, when he was in Grade 6. The class had gone on an excursion and as they were walking back to the school, he says the teacher approached him and started up a conversation about masturbation.
He then began to be kept in at playtime. ‘At playtime and lunchtime, I wasn’t allowed to join the other kids—I had to go and sit in [the teacher’s] office,’ Monument says, drawing breath and looking to the side. It was supposedly to do ‘special work’ by himself and he was instructed it must be kept a secret, he told police. The principal and another member of staff alerted Monument’s parents and asked if Lyndon had explained why he was being kept in.
Meanwhile, the 11-year-old Lyndon was being subjected to, he says, strange and perverted behaviour. He was given a notepad, for ‘homework’. ‘Like, go home and wait for my brother and sister to go to bed and then crawl up to my parents’ bedroom and then listen to noises to see if they were having sex and go back the next day and report what I’d heard … I used to just make stuff up because I didn’t want to get into trouble.’
The creepiness turned into full-scale abuse. Masturbation, oral sex—he was forced to give it and receive it. The teacher continued to ask him ‘sex questions about my mum and dad’, he says. ‘I didn’t know what was happening to me or what she was doing … These incidents have had a big effect on my life. There is not a time in my life that I don’t think about what happened to me.’
The case is being handled by Victoria Police. There is so much more to this story and the teacher’s identity is about the most shocking part of it. When you combine what Monument says happened with this teacher and what happened with Pell, Monument’s life trajectory starts to make an awful lot of sense.
Monument’s abuse claims about Pell centre on Ballarat’s Eureka Stockade Pool. Known locally as just the Eureka Pool, it’s also in Ballarat East and was the place where children in the inland town flocked during the hot, dry summers. The Eureka Pool on Stawell Street was managed for nearly forty years by local Graeme McKenzie and his wife Loyola, or ‘Roly’ to everyone she knew. The McKenzies lived close to the Monuments. They ran a tight ship and were loved by their community. Graeme was king of the kids.
Like every other mother in that part of town during that era, Lyndon’s mum would send her kids down to the pool every day during summer. From when the youngest, Lyndon, was eight, the three children were allowed to go on their own. This was the 1970s, and children had free rein.
I met Roly McKenzie in her home in Ballarat East in May 2016 to ask her about those days. Graeme had died a few months before and Roly blinked back tears as she recalled what were for her and her family golden times. Roly remembered in the late seventies that a priest used to come most days to the pool. He’d arrive alone about 4 p.m. wearing his black priestly attire, pay his admission fee, go to the change room and come out wearing his Speedos. The priest’s name was George Pell.
Lyndon’s sister also remembers Pell at the pool. As she’d be lying on the grass on the side of the pool with her girlfriends, the intelligent and observant 12-year-old would watch the passing parade. She noticed that Father Pell had a routine. Once he’d changed, Pell would enter the water and swim some laps, and then he’d begin to talk to some boys, sometimes including Lyndon, in the shallow end of the pool. Then he’d bring them to the deeper water and he’d play the game. The game seemed like an awful lot of fun. But Pell never invited any girls to play.
Darren Mooney, who is now principal at a tiny primary school north of Ballarat, was allowed to play. ‘It was always boys, there was never any girls flying off his shoulders or playing with him in the pool,’ Mooney remembers.
I remember when myself and various producers discussed this decision not to play with girls at the pool, there were several possible interpretations canvassed. One was that it was not appropriate for a priest to play with young girls at the pool and Pell was according the girls the modesty they deserved. The second was that, well, he just liked boys better. The third is the sinister motive. The third is the motive that several of the kids who played there have now sworn to tell about in police statements. The third will see them cross-examined by an expensive criminal Queen’s Counsel. The third, if they survive it, if they are all telling the truth, could see the end of the career of Cardinal Pell.
There were variations to Pell’s game, but most commonly, as told to me by many children who were there at the time and adults such as Roly McKenzie, involved Pell clasping his hands under the water, then lifting the boys into the air and ‘bombing’ them. Sometimes they’d stand on his shoulders too and dive in. The laughing of the little boys echoed around the 2-acre lot.
‘He would grab you, have his hands on your backside, then push you off. Hold your hand and then he’d be doing backflips. And it seemed to go on, you know, all day. He just seemed to be there every day. So, in a sense, as a kid, a 7-, 8-, 9-year-old kid, it was fun,’ Mooney remembers.
Monument played the game. ‘We all sort of knew who George Pell was,’ Monument remembers. ‘And looked up to him in a way I s’pose. And he was always like the godly figure we all had to look up to, like we’d all get told in class, “George Pell is coming today, so, you know, brush your hair and tuck yourself in”.’
Monument’s memories of Pell from that time at St Alipius are positive. ‘He’d come in and everyone would sort of gravitate to him because he was an enormous figure and all us little kids, of course, we’d just run up to him and idolise him, basically.’
His mate Damian Dignan also remembers Pell, although his memories are less sanguine. Dignan was a very small kid, the youngest of six siblings brought up in their parents’ milk bar. I first went to Dignan’s house to meet him—on the suggestion of Monument, who had been told by police that Dignan had spoken to them. The pair hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for a couple of years—too much water under the bridge, too much temptation to blot out all their sadness on mad benders. But they still had an abiding affection for one another. When I left Monument, he gave me directions to Dignan’s house and told me, ‘Tell him I said, “I love you, mate”.’
I told Dignan that I was there to talk about Pell, that Monument had sent me, and that Monument said to say he loved him. I didn’t say anything else. Dignan, by then a shell of a man who had destroyed his life and his health with substance abuse, just stared at me for a few seconds. As he did, a fat tear welled in his right eye, and rolled slowly and noiselessly down his cheek, plopping into his instant coffee. ‘Yeah, I’ll help ya,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to ya. I love him too.’ As he said the word ‘love’, his voice did this barking thing I later came to recognise when Dignan is choked up. I explained that I didn’t want to tell him about what I knew as I didn’t want to pollute his account. He got that. So he told me about what happened to him.
Dignan remembers Pell saying mass and taking his confession at St Alipius. ‘Father Pell was a big man with a strong and intimidating voice,’ Dignan says. ‘Father Pell scared the shit out of me. He was big. Solid man. Had eyes that’d stare right through ya. It’d pierce your heart.’ I remember Pell’s comments about his ‘fiery’ temper that almost never came out. I ask Dignan what he remembers of St Alipius. ‘I remember best times I ever got was when a storm would come over the school and you’d feel the wind, you felt free as a bird,’ he remembers. I picture this little kid with his bowl haircut, pants a bit too short for his little legs, running around, holding his little face up to the wind.
‘But on the other hand, [I was] a very scared young child … I was a free little kid, but I wasn’t. I was in a jail of hell as an education system and the Catholic system.’
Dignan also told me and police that he remembers girls running, crying, from Pell’s confessional. Lauren Rowbotham was one of those girls. She’s speaking for the first time on the record about what she knows. Rowbotham estimates she had confession with Pell ‘a good ten times’ and she says on a couple of occasions, things got ‘a bit boisterous’. I ask her what that means. She says that Pell would ‘yell at you for sinning’. ‘Sometimes he would hit you—push you around—you know, “Get out of here, you’re a horrible child, you have sinned”. I was not the most well-behaved child,’ says Rowbotham, who is a bit of a rough diamond. Several of the other girls could not be found. But one in particular regularly phones my producer Andy Burns out of the blue, to ask her what is going on with the Pell investigation. We suspect she knows something, but we can’t get it out of her.
But Father Pell clearly had magnetic qualities, albeit intimidating ones too, to Dignan at least. And that’s why, in the summer of 1978–79, when Pell was playing the game, Dignan, like Monument, thought he might like to join in. The boys were eight or nine at the time. Monument wore footy shorts with his undies underneath to the pool. Dignan wore board shorts. Pell, both remember, always wore dark-coloured Speedos and goggles. Monument says that Pell would wade out to the middle of the pool where the boys were playing. ‘I remember that he would call us over and then offer to throw us into the air. We would then dive back into the water.’ The priest would use his hands as stirrups for the boys ‘and you’d put your foot in his hand and “one, two, three!” he’d throw you out of the water’, Monument remembers.
For Lyndon Monument and Damian Dignan, they say the game began to get weird.
‘As we played the game, I remember that we seemed to drift slowly into the deep end of the pool,’ Monument remembers. ‘When we were in the deep end, I noticed that the way I was being thrown in the pool was different. He still offered both of [his] linked hands under the water and I would put both of my feet into his hands.’
According to Monument and Dignan, Pell’s free hand under the water began to wander. At first in the sort of way that you might think was a mistake. But then you realised that it wasn’t a mistake; that it was deliberate. That a 30-something-year-old priest in Speedos had a grip on your private parts in a public swimming pool and you were eight and you were damned if you knew what to do.
‘Father Pell would let one hand go and I felt his other hand reach up and hold my crotch area,’ Monument told police. ‘The hand on my crotch would cover my penis and testicles and would also cover my anus area. Father Pell would throw me into the air and I would dive into the water.’ Monument says the priest would have an open hand cupped around his crotch during this. He later explains to me at one point that he distinctly remembers Pell’s fingers being at the entrance to his anus, but as to whether the priest digitally penetrated him, he could not comfortably remember. While the behaviour was repeated, Monument remembers it as furtive and fleeting.
‘When Father Pell first started throwing in this way it felt uncomfortable and I didn’t like it. I didn’t say anything to Father Pell at the time, because I looked up to him.’ Monument estimates that Pell would hold him on the crotch for about half of the throws. He also recalls that Pell would put his hands under the shorts and underpants that Monument was wearing, touching his genitals before rocking him up and down.
As for Dignan, he shifts uncomfortably in his seat as I ask about it. He says ‘things got a bit rough around the testes, around the anus’.
‘What would he do?’ I ask.
‘Grab you,’ he replies, pursing his lips awkwardly. He swallows. ‘[I felt] scared. Scared but hurt. Very forceful around the anus.’
He told police it was a ‘firm grip’ when Pell grabbed him by the penis and testicles, and that as time went on, it became firmer. ‘Towards the end, Father Pell began to hurt me when he threw me up in the air. I didn’t like it and I knew it was wrong.’
It wasn’t until much later, when I had listened back to Dignan and Monument’s evidence and carefully re-read their police statements, that something about what they described suddenly seemed deeply familiar. I went back and read the Southwell Report. Phil Scott had in 2002 described Pell at the 1961 camp putting his hand’s down his pants and getting ‘a good handful of his penis and testicles’. On one of the occasions this had happened, said Scott, when they were ‘in the water, jumping in the waves’. What Dignan and Monument were describing was not identical to the abuse alleged by Scott, but it was very similar, it showed a very distinct pattern, a certain modus operandi. What the lawyers describe as similar fact evidence.
Officials in the Catholic Church who were involved with the Southwell Inquiry did not miss it when the 7.30 program broadcast our story. They were aghast at the parallels in the stories. ‘I was very, very aware of that when I watched the TV set,’ one official, who had compared notes with other officials involved with the Southwell case who had watched, told me much later. ‘It seemed to be exactly the same … They were talking about the same kind of offence and here is the evidence mounting up. I believed them,’ the official said. ‘How could you not? I was aware of the earlier story [of Phil Scott] and I thought these ones were so similar—absolutely no grooming, just straight out grabbing.’
But as I am talking with Dignan that day in Ballarat, I’m simply scrutinising what Dignan tells me on its own merits. ‘Could there ever be an interpretation,’ I venture, ‘that it just so happened that his hands slipped down there, you know, by mistake?’ This was something that Dignan himself told police he thought the first time it happened. But it kept happening.
‘Fair enough, one time,’ he replies. ‘But it got to a stage where every time he picked you up it was there. And ah,’ he grimaces, ‘not much fun, no.’ He told police that the touching happened about four of the ten times that Pell threw him up into the air. He says among the kids the word about Pell began to be that he was ‘a poofter’, ‘a very scary one’. I asked him why he thought Pell was scary.
‘He’d snap your arm or snap your leg as soon as look at ya,’ Dignan replies. ‘Very strong and powerful.’ A fiery temper. Dignan says he stopped going to the Eureka Pool soon after. There is no evidence from Dignan, nor does he allege, that Pell was ever violent with him, but he simply says he was left with the impression that something violent could happen at any moment.
Paul Auchettl, another St Alipius alumnus who was abused by the Christian Brothers, is twelve years older than Dignan and Monument. But he too remembers seeing this ‘scary’ side of Pell—who knew his family—in the early seventies, when Auchettl was a teenager. Pell would offer to drive him to the pool and he too played the game. Auchettl tells me during one conversation that he always had a strange feeling that Pell was somehow ‘keeping an eye’ on him. But it was just his gut. He says when one of his friends stole the strap that the Brothers used to punish the kids and gave Pell a whack on the hand as a joke, Auchettl says Pell threw the boy up against the wall with a violent force that shocked them all. ‘He was a sort of fearful figure,’ Auchettl says. ‘He was very large, very imposing, and he could raise his voice suddenly. So you stood there and listened, you didn’t take him on.’
One of the other boys who was at the pool with Monument and Dignan was Gerard Murphy, who would go along with his brother David. The Murphy twins were big boys, much bigger than Dignan, and their father was a journalist on the local paper who had gone to school with Pell. Gerard Murphy knew in much later years what happened to Dignan and Monument, and he and his brother certainly played the game with Pell, but he says he believes the reason he and his brother were not targeted was because they were bigger, tougher kids who ‘did not take any shit’ and would have kicked up a fuss if they were touched in public. And he also thinks his dad’s job made it risky for Pell. ‘I was lucky,’ he says. ‘But Digs,’ he says, using the nickname they all had for Dignan, ‘was a lot smaller and he used to get launched from the front, where it would have been easier to touch him—whereas we were at the back, doing horsey rides’. So for Murphy and his brother, it remained an innocent game. ‘It was cool fun, it was great fun. He never laid a hand on me,’ Murphy says. But he doesn’t disbelieve Monument and Dignan when they make the accusation.
The other set of twins in Monument and Dignan’s circle, the Anwyls, both say that they have some memory of the game at the pool. But they did not spend anywhere near as much time there because they would go away every year for summer to Queensland.
But Lauren Rowbotham remembers feeling strange about what she witnessed at the pool. Rowbotham has decided, for the first time, to allow me to publish her corroborative account of Dignan’s and Monument’s story. We knew about Lauren before my story for 7.30 went to air, and she helped us in the background where she could. But she was very reluctant, as many people are, to be named or appear on television.
Rowbotham, too, is scarred by her childhood at St Alipius and she now feels that it is important to put on the public record what she says she saw. She would sit on the side of the pool and agrees that Pell would only ever play with boys. She tells me it has stuck in her mind for a particular reason: the way he would throw the boys into the air and catch them. ‘He used to get them by their genitals,’ Rowbotham says. ‘He would grab them by the arse and the legs and the crotch. He’d never grab them by the arm or the leg. I remember thinking, “I’m glad he’s not catching me, because I’ve got a bikini on and it would come off”,’ she says. Rowbotham also remembers that her parents, who have both died, warned her about Pell. ‘My parents told me to keep away from him,’ she says. ‘George Pell has managed so far to keep it very, very quiet. I don’t know why. I know who he is. We all knew what Father Pell was like. How he has not been charged yet is absolutely beyond me.’ Rowbotham believes that some of the people who have been approached by police about this issue are not telling everything they know. But then Rowbotham herself was angered by the way that the SANO detectives handled her—she feels they weren’t interested in her own complaints about the teacher who abused her because they were of a violent nature, not sexual; she found their approach insensitive to the severe childhood trauma she says she suffered. She has refused to have anything to do with the taskforce since.
Roly McKenzie did not remember ever seeing anything untoward happening between Pell and the boys playing the game. She remembered Pell throwing the boys into the air, sometimes playing with a tennis ball. She found it difficult to believe anything of that sort could have occurred because she and her husband were such responsible managers of the pool and so passionate about children’s welfare. Although she did say in her police statement she did not know how Pell threw the boys into the air, because she didn’t ‘pay that much attention to him’. She told Taskforce SANO detectives in a statement that no-one ever complained about Pell and, in fact, the children would ask her and Graeme when he was coming.
Roly had just lost Graeme when I went to see her. She was frequently teary and said for that reason, she wasn’t comfortable going on camera, but gladly gave me her police statement and wished me well. Sadly, two weeks later she died. After my story went to air some months later, Andrew Bolt accused me of bias against Pell, partially because I didn’t interview Roly McKenzie. I expect that at the time, Bolt had no idea that Roly McKenzie was dead.
It wasn’t just in the McKenzies’ pool that some children had decidedly strange encounters with Pell. It was also in the change rooms. After swimming, Monument says Pell would frequently invite him into the Eureka change rooms. And in the change rooms, he says, things would get weird again. ‘Father Pell then took off his bathers and was completely naked. Father Pell then began to dry himself and said to us, “Come on boys, dry yourselves off”. I then pulled my bathers off and quickly dried myself between my legs. Father Pell would watch us when we did this.
‘I don’t know why Father Pell insisted that my mates and I go to the change rooms with him after he finished playing with us in the pool,’ Monument says in his police statement. He points out that after this stripping off and drying episode, where Pell would warn him of the perils of chafing, he would then put his wet undies and bathers back on and jump into the pool. So the whole exercise was pointless from a chafing point of view. There was no need for him to get ‘changed’ at all—he had nothing to change out of, nothing to change into. If the priest had merely an innocent motive, why did he, as Monument alleges, invite Lyndon into the change room at all? Why did he insist they get changed when they were only going to run back into the pool again? Monument told police the only theory he was left with: ‘I look back now and think that he only wanted to perve on us when he was naked.’
Monument tells me that he struggled to make sense of it in his young mind. ‘I don’t really know what went through my mind,’ Monument remembers. ‘Like, I didn’t like it, but because it was the Church and he was just, he was George Pell, you just weren’t game to ever say anything, you know what I mean? So,’ he says, raising his eyebrows and shrugging fatalistically, ‘I just tried not to think about it.’
Some weeks before I met Darren Mooney, I spoke to Darren’s older brother, Peter. Peter is now also a teacher. Each brother was not aware that I had spoken to the other until after our interviews. Again, I took care not to pollute conversations with accounts of what others had told me. I’m not even sure how Peter’s name came up—he was just one of those on the Ballarat grapevine. Peter remembers Pell turning up to the pool frequently in summer too, from the time when Peter was about twelve. That would make it approximately 1974.
Peter was another victim of St Alipius—the notorious Best and Dowlan got at him too—it started when he was just eight. He spent the better part of a decade ‘being called a liar by QCs’ who were representing the Brothers in criminal cases. Peter and the other victims prevailed, but it came at a cost. ‘A lot of my mates are dead now,’ he tells me softly.
Peter remembers Pell playing the game, but he also remembers Pell in the change rooms. ‘Everyone used to say, “Pell’s in there again”,’ Peter remembers. ‘He used to give me the creeps.’ Peter says that in the change rooms during his time, which was before Lyndon Monument’s, Pell would sit on a bench across from the urinals and stare at the boys. ‘I did not like him,’ Peter says. ‘You just got a sense about him.’ As we speak on the phone, Peter describes the layout of the pool change rooms, where Pell would sit, where the urinals were, where the showers were. He has no doubt in his mind what the priest was up to.
As for the other, younger, Mooney brother, Darren—he too was very wary of Pell in the change rooms. He said the priest would parade around, naked and unabashed, in front of the boys. ‘Since the Royal Commission came to Ballarat, there’s been a fairly high level of talks about, or allegations about George and his misconduct and paedophilia-type activity,’ Darren says. ‘Of course, it’s allegations at this point.’ But he says within his own little friendship circle, the St Alipius boys who went to the pool, the discussion about the weirdness in the change rooms, the inappropriate vibe around the pool, came long before the Royal Commission. ‘Look, it’s something that we’ve talked about for years,’ Darren says. ‘Well before any abuse allegations came up. We have a reunion every year and it’s one of the first things that’s ever mentioned—you know, how could someone like that put themselves in that position? In a change room, it just seemed odd.’
The odd bit, according to Darren, was that Pell would just be standing there, naked, for longer than he needed to be, on a regular basis. ‘And he’d be towelling himself off,’ Darren says, motioning as if he has a towel diagonally across his shoulder and back. The motion is distinctive and identical to another demonstration of Pell towelling himself off that I had been shown by someone who had never met nor heard of Darren Mooney and was talking about another inappropriate incident in change rooms that took place a good seven years after the time at the Eureka Pool. The person demonstrating it lived 110 kilometres from Ballarat and knew nothing about what had happened there. I will get back to the account of that incident by that person—named Les Tyack—later. Suffice to say that when Darren motioned with the imaginary towel in precisely the same manner, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
Being a teacher himself, Darren lives in a time of working-with-children checks, male teachers being cautioned not to even give the kids a hug, stringent child protection policies, mandatory reporting. But he insists that he is not just imbuing Pell’s behaviour in the change rooms with the societal norms of today. He says that even in his teens, he began to feel that this was inappropriate and weird.
‘Going through adolescence and what I’d experienced at St Alip’s, I think I came to the realisation, probably for the first time when I was about fifteen, sixteen, that what I saw in the pool [and the change room] was probably not what should have happened … It just didn’t seem quite right that a person in that position would be undressed in a public place, amongst young kids.
‘And I daresay that a man in his position should know better than to, you know, be undressing in front of kids,’ he says. ‘Fair enough to go and swim and play with kids and do what you’ve got to do. But at the end of the day, to put yourself in a position where you’re naked in front of young children, I just think it’s unacceptable.’
Young Lyndon didn’t speak up about what happened. This was an era where children were seen and not heard and, at St Alipius, he knew of kids who had been severely punished for making accusations about the Christian Brothers. ‘They’d come to school with bruises and that from telling their parents and stuff, so a lot of people just kind of kept everything to themselves,’ he says.
Pell never said a word about this behaviour either, Monument says. ‘No, he just made like it was normal.’
‘Now you’ve got kids,’ I continue, ‘how would you feel about a priest doing those things?’
His eyes glisten and he gets a hard look about him. ‘I probably shouldn’t say how I’d feel, because I would be very angry and yeah, I’d never let anyone touch my children like that.’
When Monument sees the Cardinal on television now, he feels a violent surge pulse through his body. ‘I hate George Pell for everything he’s done,’ he says. And that’s not just what he says the Cardinal did to him all those years ago—it’s Pell’s front seat in the institution which condoned and brushed under the carpet rampant abuse that went on in Ballarat, and Monument’s belief, like every Ballarat survivor I have spoken to, that Pell must have known.
Monument says he saw Pell play the game with other boys for many summers after 1978–79, well into Monument’s teens. And indeed, Pell only left Ballarat in 1984. ‘I’d see him at the swimming pool and he knew who we were,’ he says, giving a knowing nod. ‘He’d just look because, we’d look, and then he’d look away. We’d look, because by then, we’d be talking about him, you know? He’d just walk along and look like that,’ he says, demonstrating a furtive, sideways glance, ‘and then he’d just walk away.
‘But I can tell you today, if he came back, he’d know exactly who I am. And he wouldn’t be able to look me in the eye.’
‘What would you do if you were face to face with him?’ I ask.
‘I’d just ask him to admit and be honest,’ he replies. ‘And I’d say to him, you know, “Look, we’ve all stuffed up, we’ve all made mistakes, like, be honest about it. Let’s fix what’s happened.” This town has been fucken ruined. Ruined. It really has. And you’ll only hear about one third about what happened. Because there’s so many more that just don’t come out.’ He takes a swig of his glass of water. ‘And there’s a lot of people that don’t come out because their parents were very high in the Church. They were easier for the priests to get than people like us. You know what I mean? So there’s a lot of people whose parents were very, very close to the Church who probably copped it worse than us.’
Indeed, when I ring some of the people that Monument suggested I call to possibly corroborate what happened with Pell, they say they can’t remember, but mention by the way that Pell helped their brother out of legal scrapes, that Pell was very close to their father, that Pell put in a good word for someone in their family. These stories are legend in Ballarat. Pell the fixer. Or, as Paul Auchettl calls him, ‘back door George’. He made himself indispensible. And perhaps that’s part of the reason why these types of allegations have taken so long to come out. That and the fact that child abuse allegations always take a long time to come out—thirty-three years on average, said the Royal Commission. Thirty-three years before, as Peter Blenkiron says, the ‘pimple pops’.
Damian Dignan stopped going to the Eureka Pool after ‘the game’ became so rough that, he says, Pell was really hurting him. But he says he continued to have confession with Pell. And in the confessional, he believed the priest to be playing mind games with him, goading him into admitting what had happened. Testing him. ‘It’s sort of hard to explain, just sitting in the confession box, with a very, very strong, scary man sitting on the other side,’ Dignan says.
‘You might have knocked off your sister’s play lunch, or something like that, and it wasn’t good enough. [He’d say] “Tell me what you’ve really done wrong”,’ he says. ‘And you couldn’t think of what you’ve done wrong. And I know what he meant.’
‘What do you think he meant?’ I ask him.
‘[For me to] tell me what he’d done. As in, the way he groped … held [me]. The way he threw me in the air,’ he replies.
‘Do you think that he was implying that you had done something wrong by allowing it to happen? Is that what you’re getting at?’ I ask further.
‘Yes.’
But Dignan says he couldn’t confess it. ‘As an 8-year-old boy, what have I done wrong? I had done nothing wrong … I think he was trying to tell me in his way, “if he thinks that I’m doing something wrong to him, I might have to shut him up”.’ There is, of course, no evidence that Pell was ever violent to Dignan, but as the likes of Auchettl and Rowbotham attest, Dignan was not the only one who felt scared of the priest.
I ask him how he has felt, watching Pell’s ascendancy, first through the Church in Ballarat, then through the Australian Church, and to Rome. ‘Absolute joke,’ he mutters, darkly. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the Catholic Church. I do. I believe in Jesus, I believe in God. But that man is evil. And he should not be there. Should not be there, where he is. He’s got a sickness. And probably, today, if I looked at him, I’d be a scared little boy again.’
Two months after I first interviewed Dignan, the 7.30 story was due to go to air. It was a Friday night in July and we had already emailed a list of questions off to Pell in Rome through his lawyers. I left the office and went straight to a school disco for my 6-year-old daughter. It was a chaotic sensory overload of flashing lights, thumping Taylor Swift music and little kids with glowing bracelets and lollipops in their mouths. I was exhausted and trying to pretend to my excited daughter that my mind wasn’t elsewhere. I saw a friend of mine who is a mother in the neighbourhood and, like me, had grown up in a Catholic family. ‘What’s wrong?You look so pale,’ she asked me. I told her I had a very big story and I could think of little else. She asked me what it was. I figured, given the questions had gone out, I could allude briefly to the secret I’d been keeping all those months. ‘Pell,’ I replied, raising my eyebrows meaningfully. My friend’s smile disappeared. All of the colour drained out of her face. ‘Allegations about him as perpetrator?’ she asked. I nodded. My friend took one look at me and said this, without stopping:
‘Catholic World Youth Day, Canada, 2002. I was working for the Church. And I remember we were staying at this hotel and there was this swimming pool. And I remember seeing George Pell with these young boys.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘And he was throwing them up into the air and piggybacking them and I don’t know, there was something about the way he was doing it, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something was just not right. I couldn’t tell you for certain that he was abusing those boys, no way, I didn’t see anything specific, but I just felt sick about it. And I’ve never forgotten it.’ She shook her head slowly.
I had said nothing to my friend about the nature of the allegations, no detail about anything at all. Just his name and a nod in agreement that it was about allegations against him directly. My ears started ringing. I told her that she needed to speak to Victoria Police. I told her that some of the allegations concerned a swimming pool where exactly that sort of behaviour was going on, in the 1970s. She looked at me and kind of nodded and didn’t say much more, and walked away to fetch her kid from the dance floor. I just stood there, numb, among the bobbing heads, and the disco lights and Pharrell Williams blaring from the speakers. ‘Mum, Mum, Mummmyyyy!!!’ I turned to see my 6-year-old daughter, who had been pulling on my leg, trying to get my attention. ‘Let’s dance to “Happy”!’