AFTER ‘THE GAME’
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde
Some time after the Pell business at the pool, Lyndon Monument says his brother Craig got wind of what the priest had been up to. It was Damian Dignan who let Craig know. Monument says his brother cautioned him it was best not to speak up about it. ‘With the George Pell thing, we just kept that quiet and kept it all amongst us. Because you feel like a dickhead,’ Monument says. ‘No-one wanted to be called a gay-bo. And, you know what I mean, when your friends, when you are young, you just don’t want that shit getting out.’
The fear of being a ‘gay-bo’ was a chilling one in 1970s Ballarat. Paul Tatchell is a survivor of rape by Brother Dowlan in the dormitory at St Patrick’s College in 1974. He’s a representative on the local shire council and, unlike many other survivors whose lives have gone pear-shaped, he’s done very nicely for himself in business—he refuses to let the abuse beat him, he says, because then, ‘he wins’. But Tatchell remembers the utter social isolation of being a kid targeted by a paedophile and the mortification of the gay connotation. ‘The greatest insult ever in Ballarat was to be called a poofter,’ Tatchell tells me. ‘If you were called a poofter, your life was over.’ So, the boys who were targeted by the Christian Brothers or the priests kept absolutely shtum.
In some perverse way, perhaps because of the silence caused by this rampant homophobia, if you were a member of the clergy and sexually interested in boys, you could quite comfortably escape the same ignominy. You could rely on your victims not wanting to be seen as ‘gay-bos’. You could easily fly under the radar. If things got a bit heated, you might be moved to another parish or to another school. You wouldn’t lose your job. You wouldn’t lose your prestige. And you wouldn’t lose your constant access to children. As Ridsdale did for a good two decades after one of his superiors first found out about his secret life and Dowlan managed to do despite decimating St Alipius and St Patrick’s with his sadistic abuse.
Whatever Craig Monument kept to himself, beyond his brother’s secrets about Pell (and the teacher who abused Lyndon) will never be known. Lyndon lost his brother to suicide in 2007. It followed the earlier suicide of Lyndon’s wife, Kim, in 2003, before she even made her thirty-second birthday. She left behind Lyndon and their two children. Craig was forty and left behind a young son. He is named in a report delivered by Ballarat detective Kevin Carson to the Royal Commission.
‘So abuse in the Catholic Church has had a big impact on your family?’ I ask him. His eyes well, his lip trembles. ‘Yeah,’ he spits the word out like a sour lolly. ‘On my family and on a lot of other families. I worry so much about my mum and there’s so many other old people out there—they’ve ruined their lives. Because it’s horrible living with someone suiciding in your life. It’s horrible having to live with that. And I know a lot of people that have to live with that. And for people to realise that they’ve stuck up for the Church all their lives and then their children are dead …’ he shakes his head as a tear falls messily down his face. ‘It’s just wrong.’
I ask him how many people in Ballarat he knows who have been abused by clergy. He sniffs and stares at me. ‘Fifty or more.’
‘And how many people do you know who have died [by suicide]?’
He puts his head in his hand and rubs his face vigorously. ‘Upwards of fifteen.’
‘That’s an enormous cross for a community to bear,’ I continue. He nods slowly. ‘All from one school,’ he says.
‘St Alipius?’
He sighs and nods. ‘That’s where it all started. There’s still places in this town where we drive past every day and you see the gouges out of the telegraph pole where you know that friends have run into it to kill themselves,’ he says exhaling forcibly and bitterly. ‘They put a rail up around it, but like, it still doesn’t stop every time you’ve got to drive past it, thinking about, you know,’ his lip trembles, ‘your mates and they fucken … sorry …’ he says raising his hand to apologise to me for swearing. ‘They lived a horrible life and couldn’t cope with it. And he just wipes his hands,’ Monument says, referring to Pell. ‘He doesn’t have to drive past that pole every day. He doesn’t have to look at people, kids that haven’t got their fathers, because they fucken killed themselves because of what they had done to them.
‘They don’t have to deal with it,’ he says, referring to the Church hierarchy. ‘We have to deal with it.’
Damian Dignan also kept it close to his chest. He had good reason. Because, like Monument, Dignan has made a complaint to Victoria Police about another abuser at St Alipius. And his childish attempt to blow the whistle on that abuse went horribly wrong. The woman, he says, was a student teacher and he says her name was Miss Karen. He believed she worked as an understudy of sorts for a time to their Grade 4 teacher. To date Victoria Police have not been able to find who Miss Karen was and where she came from. St Alipius’ records from the time are scant.
Dignan says she had shoulder-length dark hair, and if she were in a line-up today, he’d pick her straight away. Lauren Rowbotham also remembers Miss Karen being there—she believes she was a student teacher from Aquinas College, where, incidentally, Pell taught—and when I ask her for a description, she says she had longish brown hair, and, she thinks, a somewhat squeaky voice. But she says they had many student teachers come through and beyond that, she can’t remember much more about Miss Karen. Dignan says that on several occasions in class, he asked to go to the toilet and the teacher said Miss Karen could accompany him. There, he says, she would sit on a toilet in the cubicle, stroke his penis to arouse him, and place his penis in her vagina. Afterwards, she would wipe him dry and walk him back to class.
‘Miss Karen suddenly vanished from class,’ he says in his police statement. ‘I don’t know where she went or why she left.’ He never saw her again. Damian Dignan only ever told two people about what happened with Miss Karen. One was his little mate Lyndon. ‘You got off lightly,’ young Lyndon told him. The other person he told, he says, was his mother. ‘She took her shoe off and hit me in the face about six or seven times and said I was dirty.’
‘So that can’t have given you much confidence to go and tell her about George Pell?’ I venture.
‘No.’
‘Why do you think your mum did that?’
‘I wish I had the answers,’ he says, his voice faltering a little. ‘Catholic system, I think. I–I don’t … I can’t answer you that one,’ he says, blinking. ‘I don’t hate her for it … Parents back then were very misled.’
So Dignan decided that, apart from the odd occasion when he and Monument would vent together after a few beers when they were older, he would keep the whole business with Miss Karen and Pell under his hat.
‘I never spoke of it. Sometimes, it would go away for two years, then six months of your life it would haunt ya,’ he says. ‘Then it’d go away, then it’d haunt ya. And I never, ever dealt with it,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Never spoke of it. My partner of a lot of years—two children—knew something was wrong. I gave her a bit of a hint a couple of times, but never spoke of it. And just wanted to move on.’
But while he seemed functional, it had a devastating effect on his family life. ‘[I was] very distant. Didn’t show emotion. Didn’t know how to show love.’ His eyes start welling with tears again. ‘Took to alcohol. To not have … feelings. My way of never speaking of it. I lost everything I had.’ Dignan swallows, really trying to keep it together. Something clicks in the back of his throat and he has to force out the words. ‘My partner, beautiful children, a home …’ He looks skyward and his eyes well. ‘… Freedom. Yeah.’ He is a man who has made horrible mistakes and hurt people he loved. A man who finds himself, at the age of forty-six, living alone in a granny flat because of the mistakes he has made. A man with substance-abuse problems. Dignan is only a few years older than me, but he shuffles around like an elderly invalid.
Much later I speak to another Ballarat local, Pat Moran, who knew Dignan when he was younger. He is absolutely shocked when he sees the 7.30 story and barely recognises Dignan. He tells me that Dignan was a great young guy. A decent guy. When Darren Mooney sees Dignan on our program, he also can’t believe it’s the same bloke he hasn’t seen in years. He tells me Dignan was an excellent footy player.
I ask Dignan the question I have to ask, the question I always hate asking survivors because I know it offends them terribly. So I tell him how I hate to ask it. ‘Has it ever occurred to you to ever harm a child in that way?’ He is blunt and immediate in his answer. ‘No. No. Never. Never.’ He pauses for a few seconds. ‘I’ll tell you the honest truth, I’ve never had much to do with children,’ he admits.
‘Too painful?’
‘Mmm … Um, they used to think I was a bit cold,’ he looks off into the middle distance. ‘Yeah,’ he barks, trying not to cry again. ‘[I was] very distant. Didn’t show emotion. Didn’t know how to love. Took to alcohol. To not have feelings. My way of never speaking of it … That’s the problem with males,’ he adds, wiping away his tears. ‘We don’t know how to talk enough.
‘For years, I was very angry,’ he says. ‘I grew up a very angry young bloke. I took a lot of my anger out on myself. Self-destruction. And other people who cared about me and loved me.’ After he split with the mother of his children, he took up with another woman, who was also a survivor. When the relationship soured he pursued her from Ballarat to Adelaide. He was aggressive to her and would explode into anger. Her children were very fearful of his temper, although they say he never actually harmed them. He was, by all accounts, pretty awful during that period. He is ashamed of himself and her family can’t stand him. He was arrested for assault of that woman, but never convicted. It’s fair to say he probably got a lucky break there. He was convicted of another assault, of drink-driving offences, of drug possession. There is no sugar-coating the fact that during that time, Dignan was not a nice man to be around.
In my company, years down the track, he is always just gentle, courteous, but beaten by life. He shuffles around his granny flat in a baggy old t-shirt, tracksuit pants and thongs. His large brown eyes are bloodshot. He sighs a lot. He takes responsibility for his own actions—doesn’t resile from who he has been—but sometimes struggles to form the sentences to express his feelings. Monument believes Dignan is drinking himself to death.
Dignan got to Victoria Police’s Taskforce SANO before Monument. In May 2015, Dignan had been watching the Royal Commission in Ballarat and reading the survivors’ accounts in the newspapers with an elderly woman who owned the house in front of his granny flat. She was a dear friend to him. He spilled his guts to her about Pell and Miss Karen. She convinced him that he should go to the Royal Commission and say his piece. She drove him down to the Ballarat Courthouse, where the Commission was sitting, and deposited him on the doorstep.
‘I went in and stated my name and said I was at St Alipius in the seventies and they wanted to talk to me in an interview room,’ Dignan says. ‘[I was there] about two hours.’ The Royal Commission staff contacted Taskforce SANO and that’s how the investigation began. I spoke to someone who works around the Royal Commission, whom I discovered had met Dignan that day. I didn’t ask the staff member anything about what Dignan said or any details of the case—by that stage I had already interviewed Dignan and didn’t want to compromise the person. But I asked them what they thought of Dignan. Did they believe him?
‘Yes,’ the person replied. ‘I did. We get a lot of people who walk through these doors and one of the first things they bring up is compensation. That’s always a red flag for me. He didn’t want anything. He just came in here, quietly said his piece and walked out. He had nothing to gain by telling it.’
Dignan made his statement to Taskforce SANO’s Detective Senior Constable David Rae in July 2015. He told Rae a list of names of people he went to school with who had also attended the Eureka Pool. At the top of the list was Lyndon Monument. Dignan at that point had not seen Monument for a couple of years and certainly long before either of them thought of speaking to police. While they both say they will hold a lifelong brotherly love for each other forged in the trauma they suffered, they are simply too bad an influence on each other to stay in touch. Monument later tells me that if they were still hanging out, still going on the wild benders they always ended up on, he’d probably be in jail or dead.
When the cops went to see Monument, he did not welcome them at first. ‘Taskforce SANO made phone calls to me and I didn’t want to be involved and that, so I kept throwing them off,’ he says. ‘Eventually, they asked me if I’d give them five minutes of my time, which I did.’ Monument says he just didn’t want to open up the wound of the abuse. ‘Because it was a lot of pain for not only me, but for a lot of other people and I had learned to deal with things by just keeping them close to me, I s’pose. So I didn’t want to create …’ he trails off, ‘… for my Mum and stuff like that—you know what I mean? Problems, I s’pose. Or worry. I’d rather worry myself.’
It is hardly the picture of a man who, as some have tried to paint him and Dignan since I broadcast their accusations on 7.30, was a vexatious, delusional complainant. Monument approached neither Victoria Police, nor me. I found him through his lawyer, Ingrid Irwin. When I approached him through Irwin, Monument was simply ready. He had been waiting for almost a year for the Pell investigation to come to a head, and after Pell declined to come back to Australia ‘on doctor’s orders’, Monument feared he would never come back.
Monument appeared on every occasion I spoke to him as lucid and coherent. Sometimes his memory for dates is not great—he shares that with almost every survivor of childhood sexual assault I have ever met, particularly those who have had substance-abuse problems. And he is unabashed about the battering he has given his brain cells over the years with drugs and alcohol. He presents as far more clean-cut than Dignan. His closely cropped hair is clean and steely grey. His silvery goatee is neatly managed. His eyes are small and sharp and somehow birdlike. He wears his heart and his foibles on his sleeve. He has a jocular, friendly manner. He’s likeable.
He struck me as a man who has had a tragic life for a number of reasons and has made some pretty rotten mistakes, which left him hurtling down a serious criminal trajectory. He has let down everyone he loves. But despite some of his weaknesses, in all the conversations I had with him, nothing he said made me think he was on a delusional vendetta. Quite the opposite. Monument strikes me as the kind of guy who really couldn’t be bothered with that kind of caper. He can’t be bothered with survivors’ groups or Facebook forums or compensation schemes. He would rather just talk to a mate at the pub.
I ask Irwin for her take on the theory that he has some sort of maniacal vendetta—proffered by Pell supporters who have never met Monument and know nothing about him beyond a news cut on his assault charge and what they’ve seen on 7.30 in my story. Has it ever occurred to her that Monument is simply engaging in a very high-stakes and poisonous campaign against an innocent man because of what he perceives Pell represents?
She rolls her eyes. ‘No, absolutely not,’ Irwin says. ‘His experience with George Pell, and his response and his position on George Pell now, [are] based on what George Pell did to him. He’s not like that. He’s not a complicated person … He’s a survivor and he doesn’t need to embellish anything, he doesn’t need to add to anything. He’s very honest. He’s a humble man.
‘I don’t think Lyndon has an agenda about anything. I think he’s just trying to find a way to survive, albeit poorly at times. I think [that’s] totally to be expected. It’s amazing that he’s survived, really.’
In fact, Monument had more motivation to keep his head down and never go public. He had, after all, a chequered history with Victoria Police. The combined effect of deaths of his wife and his brother and the abuse he says he suffered had an awful impact on Monument, who had once run a successful business with his brother and comes from a decent family. ‘That’s why I took to drugs,’ Monument tells me, tearfully. ‘Just to blank it all out. And then, to this day, I know it sounds horrible and I would never hurt myself because I love my family and me kids, but I really don’t like living. Like, I don’t care if I get hit by a bus. I miss my wife, but I’d never do anything to hurt my kids either, so I just keep battling.’
Despite the embarrassment of speaking about his criminal past, Monument understands that it’s necessary for me to know it all and to publish it so it does not look like he has anything to hide. He understands this because since he made his complaint to Victoria Police, he now knows loosely what happened to Phil Scott after he made his complaint in the Southwell case.
As Irwin puts it, ‘I don’t doubt that people will look for anything and we’ve seen Pell’s lawyers do it before and they’ll do it again.
‘So many victims have trouble,’ says Irwin, who, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse herself, has that same air of vulnerability they all have. ‘They have trouble with drugs, they have trouble with crime, start with, maybe, petty crime. They’re angry, they’re frustrated, they’ve been disrespected. You’re changed as a person. It changes who you are, childhood sexual abuse. So to cope with it, you will turn to drugs, you will turn to alcohol.
‘I’m no different to someone that’s hanged themselves. We’re all the same. We all have a common experience and it’s horrible. It’s like people hold up a picture of themselves as a child—you’re stuck there. Whatever your issues are, you’re there. You go there in a split second. You never forget it. People say, “Are these people making it up?” And you know you could test them a hundred times and they will say the same thing. You never forget what happens to you. You never forget.’
Lyndon Monument did not forget and his life derailed spectacularly. After the death of his wife and later his brother, Monument got into what he calls a ‘very toxic relationship’. ‘Mum and my sister basically looked after the kids and I would just drink non-stop, stay awake for three and four days at a time and the partner I was with, she was on drugs too. Our life just spun out of control—there was violence, there was assaults, there was everything. And in the end it just came crashing down. I was jailed.’
While Monument’s tragic history perhaps contextualises his actions at that time, he is at pains not to use it as an excuse. He made very poor choices. His family, too, do not want him to be painted in that way. ‘I deserved jail for what I did,’ he says. ‘And I don’t blame that on nothing.’ What he did, in 2010, was go on a drug-fuelled, sleepless bender and, over a dispute about drugs, went to the house of a man who was with his partner. ‘I walked in the door and I assaulted him and I assaulted my partner,’ Monument says.
‘It was pretty reckless, I took to him with, I think it was, a cricket stump. And I punched her in the side of the head and I’m pretty sure I knocked her out at the time.’ He then headed out bush for three or four days, still not sleeping, still up to his eyeballs on methamphetamines and booze. Eventually a couple of his mates came and got him and he was admitted to psychiatric services in Ballarat for twenty-one days. After he was released, Monument was arrested. He was convicted and jailed for eleven months.
This was, of course, mortifying for his mother and the rest of his family—with such a distinctive name in a relatively small part of a relatively small town. And Mrs Monument had already had her share of terrible heartache.
While all the Monuments were supportive of Lyndon going to the police and firmly believe he is absolutely telling the truth about Pell and the teacher, they felt very anxious about him going public on the ABC and the impact that it would have on the family. Monument relies on their support. There was little for him to gain from speaking out, from inventing a story about a very powerful man.
When I heard some of his criminal history before I met Monument, I had, I am ashamed to say, pictured someone altogether different. I too was worried that he might not be ‘credible’. I had, frankly, a low socio-economic stereotype in my head and Lyndon Monument is not that stereotype. I did not expect to warm to him—I loathe domestic violence and this was, after all, a man who had violently assaulted his partner. But he makes no excuses for that. He is clearly genuinely sorry, for what that is worth. He says he feels ‘shit’ about himself for it. He is likeable, polite, funny, with an Aussie larrikin quality. After years of substance abuse and self-destruction, he now finally holds down a steady job, he has good friends and family who clearly love him and care about him. ‘Lyndon’s a good person,’ his old school friend Lauren Rowbotham says. ‘He’s got a good heart. He’s fried and marinated his brain, but he’s got a good heart. He’d do anything for you.’ Monument’s kids feel like they have a dad back for the first time in years. He leads a quiet life. On the whole, he is managing.
While Monument was brought up a staunch Catholic, he doesn’t think he’ll be buried a Catholic. Too much water has passed under that bridge. ‘I’ve lost hope in the Catholic Church. And I lose more hope every day, because they just keep covering up. Like, now is the perfect opportunity to just come out and get the whole lot out, over and done with, once and for all, but I feel like it’s going to just keep dragging on and on because the truth’s never going to come out. Like, just fucken tell the truth once, because it’s happened.
‘We can’t change what’s happened. We can’t bring back those who have died and those who are alcoholics and drug addicts, but at least we can fix it, you know? And make sure that our grandchildren, or your children—you know, it never ever happens again. Because,’ he says, inhaling sharply and staring at me steadily, ‘it’s fucking horrible. And if there’s one kid that it didn’t happen to, then that’s a win. A massive win.’
He makes it clear that he’s not after compensation—it couldn’t change his life, couldn’t undo what’s been done. ‘Money or nothing won’t make no difference to me, so they can take their money and shove it. I’d just rather see George Pell come back and be honest. That’s all I want … You sit there and you have to listen to him talking about honesty and you’ll go to hell if you don’t tell the truth. Well, where is he going?’
Irwin believes that the dam in Lyndon Monument has burst. ‘When he made his statement, I believe that he thought, “that’s the big thing”. Over the period of time where there hasn’t been anything,’ she says, referring to waiting for the police to act, ‘Lyndon’s been frustrated, because he’s strong and ready for something to happen, and then when it doesn’t, it’s a difficult space to operate in … It’s like, “once I’ve told, something’s going to happen and now the weight’s off me and people will do their jobs”.’
But of course, as hard as people try to do their jobs, a prosecution of this nature is about as difficult as it gets. A member of, effectively, a foreign government, with prima facie diplomatic immunity, commits alleged crimes with multiple victims decades ago, some of the complainants have substance-abuse problems and criminal convictions, alleged perpetrator lives overseas and could easily move into a jurisdiction which has no extradition treaty with Australia. It doesn’t get much trickier, for detectives hoping to get a result.
Years of seeing these cases has made Irwin extraordinarily cynical about the system: ‘To actually go to the police, it’s at cross-purposes, really, with your mental health.’
‘That’s a pretty appalling indictment,’ I counter, ‘on the system.’
‘Well it is,’ she admits. ‘If someone could show me different statistics, to what I know, if someone could introduce me to clients that have been respected by the process [I might feel differently] … I feel victims are on their last legs.’
Monument hopes that by coming forward, he will encourage others who are like him, who have held it all in, to also decide to tell their truth. ‘We shouldn’t feel ashamed of what happened to us … it’s not our fault and we weren’t wrong, you know what I mean? I just want people to realise that, like, we didn’t do it, and hope that they can talk to someone and just try to live a better life instead of hating their life … I don’t care about my life any more, I can’t wait to see my wife again,’ he says, looking to the heavens.
That’s the thing about all this: it’s not a good news story. It’s the story of a guy that really struggles with life, who says he hopes that by telling the truth, the burden of hiding for so long will be lifted. But even then, he’ll probably still, as he would put it, get on the piss after he does it. Indeed, after my interview with him, I watch him down in quick succession three schooners of some sort of whisky and ginger ale concoction.
‘I work, I’ve got a great mate who looks after me and tries to keep me working, which makes my life better,’ he says, the tears springing in those PTSD eyes again. ‘And when I’m not doing that,’ he says, ‘I just try to go to sleep as quick as I can. Because I hate being awake.’
As for Dignan, after all of the sadness and disappointment, he says he too just wants to start telling the truth. To give those around him some understanding of why his life went so pear-shaped. How a very small boy who was abused tried to tell his mum, only to be slapped around the head and told he was dirty. How a little boy who grew up in an epicentre of pain, turned out for a time to be a man he wasn’t proud of being. No-one else is to blame for his crappy choices. But maybe other people, particularly those he loves, might understand them a bit more.
Before the story went to air, he told his kids about the abuse, and he says they ‘respect’ him. ‘But I did the wrong thing by never seeking help,’ he says. He says the sexual abuse and corporal punishment he received at St Alipius—the ‘beltings’—left him ‘like a dog that’s been beaten too much’. ‘You’ve got no confidence. You can’t talk, and you’ll never talk. You feel ashamed. And yeah, you asked me how it affected me, mentally? It ruined my life. Ruined it.’ He breathes out quickly. ‘But I ruined it too by not getting the right help. And a lot of self-destruction. Around the people that loved me.’
‘I’ve got to the stage in my mind where,’ he says, wiping tears away, ‘I don’t really want an apology. I want to tell my kids why they haven’t got a father. Why they lost their dad.’
Dignan got back to me later. He told me that his kids had told him off for saying that on our show. ‘We do have a dad,’ he said they tearfully told him. He said he’d been spending every other day with them and he’d just bought a present for his son’s twenty-first.