Ghosts of the Orphanage
Christine KenneallyChildren were sexually abused, but also routinely forced to eat their own vomit, beaten, locked in closets for days, and encouraged to bully each other. They were taught to swim by being thrown into a lake – some are reported to have drowned in the process. And there are other alleged, witnessed deaths, including a boy thrown from a window, a baby held by the ankles & swung against a desk until it stopped crying.
Kenneally deftly shows, by introducing us to the former orphans as fully formed characters, that while each of these acts is horrific, what’s truly horrifying is the cumulative effect of them, & the way orphanage residents were treated as less than human: they were even referred to by numbers, rather than names. “As awful as the abuse was, it was the absence of affection that was most devastating,” former residents of a Ballarat orphanage said.
While St Joseph’s is the central focus of the book, Kenneally ranges more widely, with examples from all over the world, including Australia. She found “a massive network, thousands of institutions, millions of children connected to one another if not by an explicit system of transport or communication, then by the overwhelming sameness of their experiences: the same schedules, the same cruelty, the same crimes committed in the sane fashion, then covered up by the same institutions”.