Hi to all the writers and readers who associate with AIMN. I have been involved with AIMN as a writer and supporter for roughly seven years now. What a personal blessing for me that has turned out to be.

Michael and Carol Taylor have set up this wonderful platform. It hosts the pithy (and she even swears now and then) political commentary of Kaye Lee. It runs the Rossleigh discourse on everything that is crazy in this world. It gives many other intelligent people and bloggers the space to express their opinion and analysis of events that are currently happening in our society.

Just because I carry traumatic legacies and rarely comment on things … that does not mean that I am not paying attention to the writings that appear on AIMN. I am paying attention. The rare thing about AIMN is that, while it might carry strong critical analysis of political happenings etc … the Articles that appear on AIMN are not hate-driven or mindlessly ideological in content. Now what a refreshing change that makes from the fodder that is presented from the Mainstream Press.

I am proud to be associated with this platform. I am mortified that nobody liked my ‘Eating Tomatoes in Portugal‘ article, but I easily toss that one aside and say … this platform, which gives a voice to so many people, is beyond value.

Regards Keith

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(Author: I’m currently working on a Space Elevator article, however, since Mars is all go at the moment I’ve dug up an old article of mine from the AIMN Archives just for the heck of it. The re-named article provides a partial answer (quite accidental on my part) to the riddle of the Fermi Paradox, and it does wonder about what ‘story’ will humanity leave behind on Mars.)

When carried on the wind, and when afforded the passage of uncounted millennia of time, even the soft red dust of the planet had sufficient ablative power to erode down even the strongest of the Alien’s structures. Had we arrived a million years later, which is nothing in the cosmic scheme of things, in all likelihood, there would have been nothing left to study, or learn from.

Had we arrived two million years earlier we would have met them.

Bittersweet. That is the only way to describe our feelings when we first discovered the remnants of this space-faring civilisation. In our journeys throughout this galaxy, we had never, ever, seen any evidence that any other species had become post-atomic, or had clawed their way up the gravity well in a lasting sense. Yet here we were, on this small dusty red planet, looking at the evidence such as it was, and we had missed a face to face meeting with them by the smallest mere speck of time. Bittersweet.

But enough of such musings. As a Space Archaeologist, I have a job to do, and a report to write. If death and taxes were once perennial in our embodied era, the need to publish as First Author, and gain and retain resources, is still a must in the current one.

Report to the Senate Select Committee on Civilisation Number 3,113: Another example of Cosmic Folly in the Race to Space.
Principal Author: Identity 756
Co-Authors: Identity 832. Identity 184.

Source of information: Crystalline Data Cubes x 6. Located in a lined and once inhabited lava tube below Alien Base A. Called A simply because it was found first. AI Identity 184 managed the de-coding of the Alien’s digital records and a translation of same into our language.

Data from the Cubes is comprehensive. It details evolutionary history of the species, the rise of their civilisation from one-cell through to the level of multi-cell, the attainment and management of technological sophistication, and it also provides the timeline of their development of rocketry and their ultimate achievement of the prize of inter-planetary travel.

Their species was homogeneous, of one single type only, though they did adopt the artificial construct of ‘differing out’ on such matters as melanin content, and on a matter that they called Political Ideology. Prior to their demise, the Aliens had not achieved disembodiment, or transition through to absolute sentience as AI.

Prior to delivering the full body of the Report, I would like to present the following as an Executive Summary. It speaks for itself and is a direct translation from a digital video segment on sub-level 32 on Data Cube 4.

Mars Base Plymouth, Olympus Mons. 19th September 2045. Daily log. Security Classification Level: “Seriously? Who is left to care?”

“My name is Harald Jacobsen. I am a Human Being. I am the last surviving member of the Mars Joint Mission Number 15. I will run out of oxygen in two days time. I am well aware that no other human beings will hear my words. There are, no longer, any other human beings. My words are for those who may follow, who may one day come into and explore this Solar System.

I am not a technical expert, I am not a scientist, I am a plumber. And whoever you are who follows on from us, I am all you’ve got. All you’ll get is my view of things. But where to start?

Living and working in Space had always been my dream, and gaining a position on the multi-national Mars Base Plymouth maintenance team was that dream realised. The commercialisation of Space had largely been achieved in a cooperative manner. The Chinese, Americans, Europeans, Russians, and Indians largely stuck to a collegiate approach. The minor fracas over equitable access to the frozen water at the base of some of the Moon’s craters was settled satisfactorily by arbitration.

The scientific community, largely funded by governments, sought to explore and understand Space. The industrial community driven by private entrepreneurs sought to exploit it, especially the mineral resources in the asteroid belt. But tensions between the two were held to a manageable level. Bases were set up on the Moon and Mars, and exploratory missions were planned to explore the planets and moons further out in the solar system.

In many ways, we had it all. As a civilisation, we had managed to escape our planetary cradle, the birthplace of our species. We now had one egg in three baskets. If such a thing is possible we had ensured the survival of our species. Let’s face it, it was highly unlikely that one massive rogue asteroid could wipe out Earth, the Moon, or Mars, all in one go.

The Arms Race in Space was a bit of a worry though. So much happened in that area so quickly, and all of the space-faring nations dived in and played their part in ringing the planet with nuclear mega-tonnage. So it is a little hard to just point the finger at any one country, they all contributed to the craziness.

Somewhere in the Data Cubes no doubt you’ll find many Technical Papers that describe the reaching of the climatic tipping point on our home planet, Earth. We didn’t stop crapping in our own nest soon enough is this layman’s view of it all.

Despite the many warnings, we kept shooting foul gases up into our own atmosphere. We thought we had decades, a century even, to clean up the mess. We were wrong. The times of crisis, the point of critical mass, arrived in a rush. It felt as though Earth herself was saying that ‘I’ve simply had enough’. She bumped up the temperature by more than a notch.

But it was survivable for us as a species. We evacuated our coastal regions to avoid the rush-in of the mega-hurricanes, and the sea level rise caused by the total meltdown of the planet’s glaciers and ice sheets. We migrated to the sweet spot latitudes to escape the encroachment of the inland drought-induced deserts, and we emigrated to the continent of Antarctica.

But the common folk were not part of the ‘we’ who did those things. It was the powerful and the rich, and their attached national military forces, who grabbed and defended for themselves those safe havens.

Water refugees, sea level rise refugees, heat refugees, food refugees, were all turned back to their terminal fate.

Here on Mars, and on the Moon, we watched it all unfold. We had our own concerns, because we were still at least a decade away from achieving full self-sufficiency. We still relied heavily on re-supply missions from Earth.

And then the wave of Nuclear Suitcase Bombs happened in the safe havens. And then, in retaliation, big red buttons were pressed. And pressed again. And pressed again. And so it unfolded, and so it all ended.

The madness did not migrate to the Moon or Mars. Perhaps the button-pressers simply ran out of missiles. We managed to eke out our dwindling supplies for a bit but they were finite, and they have now run out. My last fellow human being died yesterday. There are three bottles of oxygen left.

When you folk from a future time study our species you’ll probably wonder about a few things.

Like: how can a species ignore such high-level evidence pointing to human-induced degradation of climate and atmosphere? How could a species so successfully stick their heads into the sands of deniability as the evidence mounted, and mounted, and mounted?

And: you’ll probably wonder at the level of self-species hatred that we carried. At first, we threw rocks at each other. Then we threw spears. Then we hacked with swords and shot with bullets. Then we used cannons and bombs. Then nuclear-tipped missiles. The voices of destruction defeated the voices of peace. We wiped ourselves off the face of planet Earth. No doubt you’ll wonder how any sentient species could have done that to itself.

Was it truly all like that? Well, I’m the last voice left, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Mine are the last set of human eyes that will ever observe the heavens, and I’m pretty pissed off because being the last Human was never supposed to be part of my job description.

Do I have any famous last words to share? No, I do not. Unlike the main character in Andy Weir’s 2011 book The Martian, there will be no happy ending for me. There are no potatoes.

I’m Human. I’m alone. I’m scared.”

Comment from Principal Author AI Identity 756

I will use Human Alien nomenclature in this summary. The full report follows on from this.

Humanity was a low-level civilisation, and just like the 3,112 other failed civilisations we have studied thus far in the galaxy known by the Aliens as the Milky Way .. they were hardly unique. They succumbed to the same self-destructive drive as the others. They never managed to become post-nuclear, or post-war, and they killed off their own habitat, and ultimately their own species.

Humanity called our home galaxy Andromeda, or NGC 224. The latter name has a nice ring to our ears. From there we have sent out many exploratory missions into neighbouring galaxies. The result has always been the same. Unfortunately, I cannot yet supply an answer to the Senate on the question that we have asked ourselves over and over again …

Does lasting intelligence exist anywhere, or are we, as we fear, truly alone in the Universe?

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My finger is itchily hovering over the button that will sever my connection with Facebook. But before my digit descends I’ll pop out to the Mapleton Village shops and pick up a coffee, and sit in the park, and think about things.

Right. Coffee done. I’m back.

It would be so easy to press the button but the truth is I’m feeling very conflicted. I’d like you to read the following PR notice that FB has trotted out there for years … “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

Maybe, in a time that ended long ago, that statement had a ring of truth to it. But then the founders of FB moved on from being jolly College IT Nerds and discovered the feel of staggeringly huge amounts of money in their mitts, and then re-designed the platform to put even larger amounts of same in that same sweaty place. We, the users, were moved on from feeling part of a community of like-minded souls and friends and became nothing more than sources of usable data. We were turned (on the Platform I’m saying) into exploitable objects.

Yet, many of us, even with that clear knowledge in our minds, stayed with FB and endured that excruciating period when FB used a creeping method to algorithm us away from clear and concise contacts with our friends, and bastardised our Newsfeeds with so much unwanted crap.

And now … here we are at The Australian Independent Media Network (The AIMN) … faced with a direct attack on our abilities at the community level to cross-platform share our joys and fears on issues that are important to us. Did FB even take a nanosecond to think about the fact that The AIMN is not a Hard News site? The AIMN is a collective of writers and readers (often quite interchangeable between both of those roles) who share opinion pieces on politics or environment etc, and who share their stories and insights with other like-minded souls. We are a community and we have a community presence on FB. I feel quite angry at how FB is treating the founders and owners of The AIMN and how, from the FB point of view, not a shit is given to the years of effort that went into the building of this community. I know The AIMN will survive, but kicks in the guts are kicks in the guts.

Talking of which … I am part of a small FB Group called Survivors and Friends … I’ve only just recently joined but they used FB to archive all their previous articles and Survivor stories … their archive disappeared this morning. Which makes me doubly angry.

Why is this all happening?

Our gutless Government is owned lock stock and barrel by conservative media. Our monopoly mainstream media is jousting with the monopoly social media platforms to gouge whatever they can out of each others’ revenue streams. Without the backing of monopoly level conservative media our current Government would have been chucked out long ago. So no surprise that the Coalition is sucking up to Murdoch.

Bit trite for our Government to argue on behalf of Murdoch et al about how their revenue streams are being ripped off by the larger social media platforms, when that same Government is flaying the revenue streams of the ABC.

Meanwhile … The AIMN, Survivors and Friends, and all of the other community level organisations who utilise FB to share their information were today told in no uncertain terms by FB to go and get stuffed. They were also shown that the only thing that trickles down to them from the 1% looks like, smells like, and is, shit.

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Over time the Australian Independent Media Network (AIMN) has, amongst many of the other things it does, proven itself to be a sensitive and non-judgemental supporter of Survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It has provided Survivors a platform to express their sometimes quite raw and confronting stories.

As a Survivor who was afforded such an opportunity by AIMN I fully realise that in this life you cannot just take, it also requires that you stand up and give back. There must be a balancing in such things.

As I write this I am thinking about Survivors in my age group who might just now be thinking of whether, after the passing of the majority of their lifetime, they should finally embark on the difficult legal journey to attain justice and redress.

They represent a cohort of Survivors in our society who will never get the chance to stand up in Court and directly confront their abusers. They will never get that chance because their abusers are long dead, and those Survivor’s claims for justice and fair compensation are deemed to be historical, and therefore, very difficult to prove.

I am specifically directing this article to Survivors of my generation. I am soon to be 69 years old. My experiences were hardly unique. How those experiences impacted on my whole life may be unique to me, but the abuse experiences themselves represent a commonality of experience unfortunately endured by far too many children in those years that are now almost a full lifetime ago.

To prosecute a case for justice in the modern era, when the events under scrutiny occurred well over 60 years ago, and whether that abuse occurred in an Institution or in the family home, is a very difficult process for older Survivors to go through. That is a truth, but it is a truth that does not minimise the difficulties any Survivor, of any age, goes through when they gather up their courage and seek acknowledgement, or fairness, or a lifting of their carried burden.

Two years ago I reached the end of a very personally arduous civil litigation process. It took 60 years of living before I developed the courage to stand up and seek justice. With hindsight, I can now say that I was woefully unprepared to enter that legal process. If you care to read my book, JAGGED (it is free on the Net/AIMN) you will quickly see how unprepared I was.

Still, every experience teaches us something. For any older Survivor contemplating the starting of their own legal journey I would like to offer up a tip, just a small nod to one of the ‘learnings’ that I experienced along the legal way.

The legal experience taught me about Body of Evidence. Nobody told me about it, I had to find out about if for myself. You may well ask what is it that I mean by the statement Body of Evidence?

When the perpetrators of your abuse are long dead, when they cannot be directly confronted for their deeds, all you have to fall back on is the veracity of your own story, which will be determinidly questioned throughout the legal process, and the body of evidence that you have accumulated over the course of your lifetime.

In other words You are your own body of evidence. As you reach your 60s and 70s the measurable legacies and impacts that you have carried over the course of your lifetime become your answer to the hurdle of burden of proof.

As best you can, it pays to pre-prepare before you pick up the phone and contact a legal firm.

There are specifics that you can list out before you embark on any litigation path. Your chosen legal team will then later help you to put such information in a more cogent and effective form. The following are but a few examples and they may or may not apply to you.

1/ Inability to hold consistent employment.
2/ Inability to maintain effective relationships.
3/ Inability to trust.
4/ Continual fears and always being hyper-aware or on guard.
5/ No self-esteem.
6/ The belief that the setbacks in your life are solely your fault and deserved.
7/ The annoyance of scattered or unfocused thinking.

The legacies that you may carry can also be measured and described by professionals at the psychiatric level. These can include some or all of the following.

1/ Chronic Depression.
2/ PTSD
3/ Agoraphobia.
4/ Melancholy/sadness.
5/ Addictions to drugs/alcohol – either as now and then self-medication or as a lifelong addiction.
6/ Diminished life potential.
7/ Inability to ‘hold down’ the bad memories as you age.
8/ Anti-authoritarianism.

I did not pre-prepare. Didn’t even think of pre-preparing. So I urge you to do so. My exposure to psychiatric forensic questioning during the legal process came on in a rush and I faded away under the pressure of it. Organise a strong support network for yourself before you initiate legal proceedings.

I cannot advise any other Survivor regarding which path of litigation is best for you to go down. But I can at least reiterate this tip. Prepare your Body of Evidence first. It will be a difficult thing to do and face up to. But it is worth doing – and it may well in part protect you from the ambushing and tearing down that is an untold component of any legal process that any Survivor, of any age, may experience as they embark on a journey for justice.

Remember: As an older Survivor – you are the Living Evidence, you have lived the life, your very being is the Proof, you are your own Body of Evidence of the lifelong affects and legacies that your experiences of childhood abuse imposed on you. Put it all down on paper. Compile a formidable document. Gather good support around yourself. Represent yourself with strength.

Regards Keith

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So here we go again, ‘Strayla Day’. Hype. Flag waving. White people not giving any sort of a real shit. Those born into privilege walking all over those who were not. How can anyone celebrate this day of infamy?

Which has nothing to do with Ernie Dingo.

Met him about 20 years ago at a Qld Folk Festival. Being a shy hermit I walked up to him and totally stretched myself into hopefully some form of intelligent vocalisation. I said “Hello Mr. Dingo”. He smiled, flashed his pearly whites, and we shook hands. And that was the end of that.

Of course it was not the end of that. It was the start of something.

I have watched his career on Television over many years. I have watched his interviews with many people from multiple ethnic backgrounds. And do you know what I have noticed? Everyone he talks with greets and leaves him with a smile. There is no hate in the man. He is so Aboriginal … yet there is no hate in the man.

When I met him all those years ago he did not dump guilt on me. He simply said “G’day Mate.”

I have never had a full and long conversation with Ernie Dingo. My loss. I wish such a conversation had come my way.

The bullshit of Australia Day embarrasses me. The warmth and love, to a white stranger, from a man like Ernie Dingo, humbles me.

It makes me stand back and think about many things.

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(Follows on from JAGGED #9 – Crazy Daze)

JAGGED! What a journey!

As I claw my way back into life I have come to realise that I cannot just leave JAGGED hanging on that terrible moment of despair … that moment when I genuinely believed that continuing to be here was just not worth it. To just leave things hanging on a blast of darkness is not fair to those of you who have been supportive and who have read and commented on the content of my mind and early childhood experiences, and the written version of that content as represented by JAGGED.

JAGGED will never be finished in any conventional sense. How could it be? It is an unfolding personal story that will continue to play out for as long as I live. There is no neatness of finality attached to it, there is no succinct summation of lessons learned, there is no statement of salvation attached.

You cannot go through the wish for and the actioning of suicide and come out the other side as the same person. In a very real sense the person I was did die in early August 2020. As I was I was not sustainable. Which probably leaves both you and me asking well who is Keith Edwin Thomas Davis now?

Still a human being of course, still breathing too. I’ve started to come out of the well of darkness appreciative of real things, things that money simply cannot buy. Love, family, friendship, breezes that ruffle your hair, the fact that my eyes can still see, the beauty of silence and calmness, the happy wagging of a dog’s tail, the feel of sun on skin, a justified love of the iconic split-windscreen Kombi. Not a long list to be sure … but certainly better than the old list that consumed me.

I haven’t written anything at all over the last few months. I’ve had nothing to say. Probably because I needed to come to an understanding of who am I now, who is rising from the ashes, what bits of me are going forward and what bits are being left behind. All a bit of a self-segue I suppose.

One part of me is being helped by mental health professionals. The public health system kicked in big time … a psychologist visits me in my home roughly once a fortnight, and I go to see a psychiatrist who is organising a weekly series of psychotherapy sessions that will run for a year … how amazing is that considering there are no fees attached, bless the public health system, and especially considering the fact that the Catholic Church refused to accept responsibility or even consider sending any form of remedial therapy my way.

Also, I organised my own Mental Health Plan through my GP and I see another psychologist every other couple of weeks or so. I have got over my absolute fear of anti-depressants and I slip down a capsule of Elaxine SR 75 each morning with that vital first cup of coffee. I am starting to feel better, I actually even found myself cracking a smile yesterday … not for any grand reason, just simply because I could.

Miracles don’t happen and the flicker flicker of my abuse experiences and the legacies of same still flow through my mind, but not as powerfully, their clarity is muted, and there are days now when that particularly nasty movie does not run across the inside of my forehead at all. Millimetres of progress in that area are millimetres of progress … to me they seem like huge strides.

The women of this world are beyond value. My daughter, once she found out what had happened, offered to come back from London and spend time with me, I asked her not to end the journey of her lifetime, and she is very much on the creative journey of her lifetime, and so we connected on WhatsApp and now video and audio talk once a week … fathers and daughters … special special special. My female friends, again once they realised what had happened, pulled ferociously and lovingly in behind me, no judgement, no chiding, just flat out targeted love and support. You can spend your lifetime feeling unappreciated because of depressive legacies and it is gold to find out that indeed you are appreciated, and more to the point, always were. A male Survivor has also been there quietly in the background over the last few months … he doesn’t say much … he doesn’t have to … I’ve felt the support.

Hopeful delusion is a luxury I can no longer afford. Hoping for justice and fairness from the Catholic Church, and trying to deal with their brutal smack-down of my claim, led me to wanting to kill myself. None of that is worth a re-visit. I will fill out a form for the National Redress Scheme, it is just a form, they’ll do with it what they will, I’ll send the form in, and then forget about it.

You can probably all read between the lines where my pursuit for justice from the Catholic Church is concerned. I held the mirror up to them and told them that their rape of me was wrong, their mental cruelty towards me was wrong, their physical abuse of me was wrong, and that their response to me as an adult was wrong. Their re-traumatising of me nearly killed me. It is not worth a re-visit.

As for writing? There have been some stirs of late. I’ve started an article on the Re-imagining of Australia … on what sort of nation we could become post-COVID. Why not? Chances to re-form our country do not come along all that often. It will take some time to write it.

Meanwhile I’ve been getting down and dirty in the earth, getting soil under my fingernails, and building things. I’m laying a paving path for a friend and I’ve done some marine wire work on her steps … therapy comes in many forms.

So, good old dear old JAGGED. An incomplete book written by who I once was. Now … I live. I think. I love. I accept help. That is an appropriate end to the telling.

(Ed: To read Keith’s story in full, you can start here with Part 1).

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Follows on from JAGGED #8 – ghost-woman MOTHER

(JAGGED has contained some difficult material regarding suicide ideation and the legacies of childhood sexual abuse – this installment of the book contains perhaps the most raw example of that – and it is only fair to warn you. After this installment though, the material will be lighter and the book will start to work towards a conclusion).

Chapter 26: Locked up in my own Asylum.

On Saturday 1st August 2020 at 7.59 AM a shattered weeping mess of a man walked through the doors of the Acute Mental Health Ward of Nambour General Hospital (I know that to be a fact because my admission tag is sitting on my desk in front of me right now). The walk from the spot where I had parked my car up to those doors represents the longest walk, and the longest reach for internal change, that I have ever undertaken in my life. I’m glad that I did that.

I’ve mentioned at the odd time that JAGGED is a live document, that it is being shared with you as it is being written, and so it has been, and so it shall be with this Chapter no matter the personal discomfit felt by me. Since JAGGED is being written in the immediacy of the moment I’ve decided to write about my admission to the Ward before too much time passes, before I fall into the trap of watering things down or skewing truth in order to present things in a better light.

My voice is my own voice, but it can also be seen as representative of the legion of unheard Childhood Sexual Abuse Voices who ended their own lives when the legacies, the pain, the confusion, the depression, and the terrible carrying of an imposed shame, proved in the end to be unbearable.

On that Saturday, for me, after sixty-two years of trying to hold it all at bay, it finally became unbearable. I gave myself permission to let go. My strength ran out. It all felt like it was out of my control – like the air rushing out of a pricked balloon. I did not see it coming.

I would like to be able to tell you that I made a conscious decision to voluntarily commit myself – but it was nothing like that at all. Whatever drove my legs up the hill to that hospital it certainly was not my conscious mind. On that day my mind was in terminal spin down mode, totally fogged out – I just wanted it to end. People say that you have to hit the absolute bottom before you start to look upwards again – well no, things don’t work that way – hitting the bottom with velocity tears apart the landing pad and plummets you into the fucking abyss.

This is literal – on that Saturday I gave myself over to the Universe and said I give up, I’m yours if you want it, you decide. The harmed side of my mind defeated the unharmed side – and it did so with such an impelling rush that, and why hide truth, I faded away and fell apart under the assault.

Writing JAGGED and finally being able to fully open up about my abuse experiences did not by itself send me into the abyss. Nor did the death of my sister. Nor did the energy-sapping experience of litigation against the Catholic Church. Nor did the weightiness of the constant carrying of suicide ideation. Nor did the depression. Nor did the agoraphobia. Nor did the PTSD. I was able to hang on tentatively despite those things.

What ultimately tipped me over was the shame. That most least talked of legacies of childhood sexual abuse – that deepest of deep down feelings that one has no value; that inner core of immovable belief that one is simply worthless; that one deserves no better; that one brought it all upon oneself. The shame of the perpetrators, the shame that they should have felt but did not feel was transferred into my spirit, and my heart. It has white-anted me throughout my whole life where work and relationships are concerned and finally, on that Saturday, it led to structural collapse.

It is very easy for others to say that one should not feel shame for the abuse experiences one experienced as a child. Well, shame is one of the most intractable and insidious of legacies, and it does not shift or mitigate away over time. It clings around and compresses your heart and being with a strength that grows (if professional therapeutic help is not on the board) with the passing of time.

I spent nearly ten days in the acute mental health ward under suicide watch. The staff in there are beautiful human beings, they assisted me back out of the abyss – it was a gentle cajoling conducted over a number of days. Right at the start .. whoosh .. in went the Valium .. whoosh .. in went the Mirtazapine. As someone who has never used such things it threw my brain all around the shop.

I’ve heard about people being in a zombie trance-like state, and I can only suppose that I must have looked like that. I spent a lot of time in the first day or two crouched up in a foetal sort of state and gushing tears. Looking back on it now a lot of pain and hurt and other shit took the opportunity to vent out.

And …

I cannot, any longer, be the man who walked into that Ward. I cannot go back to who I was before Saturday 1st August 2020. That person threw his fate to the Universe and the winds.

For the last sixty-two years I have lived in an imposed world. An Asylum that was crafted for me by the legacies of childhood sexual abuse. A world of darkness, a world of imposed mental ill-health, a world of fear, a world of shame. It is not surprising that that world ultimately sought to end itself, what is surprising is that it took so long.

This is not a moment of casual whimsy, this is not a floaty mind-fuck recounting of the last week and a half. It is an indicator of change that must happen. The man who walked out of that Ward and who is sitting here writing this right now is choosing to start off again, is choosing to reach for life, is choosing to accept help, is choosing to grasp upwards and outwards with all of my strength and claw my way out of this abyss. There is no other option.

I don’t kid myself that it will be an easy path to tread …

It is the most brutal of internal and external assessments of self to understand that a week and a half ago I gave myself permission to end things. I did not stand in the road of it. I reached that most terrible of spaces. Yet, my legs walked me up that hill to that hospital.

I rejected, not in any way in my conscious mind, the permission that I had given myself – and that is a position that can only be reached once, and it cannot be denied that once that sort of let go freedom has been offered and rejected there is only one thing left … stick out the left foot and take a plodding step, then stick out the right foot and take another plodding step … and receive any and all help that is offered.

For the first time in my life I am now taking a mild form of anti-depressant. I now have after-care support from Artius. I have decided to re-consider any further form of civil litigation against the Catholic Church and I’m pulling together an application to the National Redress Scheme (the civil litigation system simply re-traumatises and does not, and probably because of its adversarial nature cannot, ever deliver justice). I have set up a Mental Health Plan with my GP and I am slotted in to see a Psychologist who is familiar with trauma counselling and EMDR. In other words I’ve hauled myself up off my agorophobic arse in order to get out there and do something for myself.

My story, the story of my experiences, the story of the life I have lived and the legacies I carry as a result of multiple instances of childhood abuse ultimately has to have a point in the telling.

Before my young mind could even begin to process the first instance of abuse and the trauma of that first instance of abuse, it was then swamped by the next instance of abuse, and then the next instance of abuse, and then more of it over a seven year period. I was never able to process any of it. All of it has remained unprocessed and locked inside to this day. No wonder I describe my world as a dark universe, no wonder I say that it is my darkness.

Early intervention is key. Unpacking the trauma affects out of the young child or young teenager is key. There is no such thing as later in these matters. Later is dangerously capable of cementing legacies permanently into the mind/psyche of the abuse victim. Don’t just take my word for it as you sit and look at this – all you have to do is read JAGGED.

Early intervention in my era was not available, it was the era of chin-up and bear-up and don’t whinge. A jack hammer will be required in my case to let in light and beauty because the concrete has had sixty-two years to set – so be it, I’m prepared to fork out for a set of heavy duty ear muffs.

It is my current belief that all Survivors of childhood sexual abuse, whether they were abused in institutions or in their own homes, should be afforded free access to professional level trauma counselling for as long as it takes to unpack the trauma and the memories, to the best degree that is possible, of their unwanted earlier abuse experiences.

That will not be cheap, it will cost society some money. But think of the alternative. A tranche of unproductive lives that could never realise their potential and contribute fully to society, and a portion of that tranche of people who see no way out but to end their own lives. The cost of that, and the cost of the drug-masking and the alcohol-masking in order to blunt down the affects of abuse trauma, and the resultant drain on our health system creates a far greater monetary cost for society to bear.

If a young child or young teenager is abused today, there is no tomorrow in the mind of that human being, there is only today. Early intervention at the professional level gives them a chance of a productive and fulfilling tomorrow – it can create a tomorrow for them.

It tore my heart out to see some of the young people locked up against their will in that acute mental health ward. A proportion of them are childhood sexual abuse victims – they are at the beginning of their journey and I am well towards the end of mine in age terms. Their minds have been pushed to the psychotic verge by the strength and variety of drugs they took to try and push away their memories. Without help they are self-medicating to oblivion. I am not one to judge – in no way am I one to judge them – when I was young I could have so easily gone down that path.

I do not want anybody to live the life that I have led. I do not want a young person of today go on to live the kind of life I have led. It is why I plead the case for early intervention and free access to longer term professional level psychiatric trauma help for Survivors for as long as it takes.

Our public Acute Mental Health system does the best it can with the resources on offer. The one thing it cannot do is offer longer term therapeutic help. The system aims to guide the patient through the acute phase, in my case my wish to leave this life, and then tries to put in place post-care services. Real help, at the psychiatric level, comes at some considerable cost which is beyond the financial means of most patients who are treated in the public mental health system.

Closure is a word that people who have never experienced trauma like the sound of, and they genuinely hope that it will be granted to Survivors of the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Closure is simply a word that does not exist in real life, there is no such thing as Closure.

However, the ability to subtly re-wire how the brain/mind processes past traumatic events is possible. Getting in early and mitigating down the affects of childhood sexual abuse is possible. Developing a gut-feel that one’s terrible memories exist in the past, and do not exist manifestly in the present, is possible. Except for the second sentence in this paragraph I intend to pursue those other possibilities on a personal level.

The legacies of childhood sexual abuse affect every breathing aspect of a Survivor’s life – work, relationships, and view of self. It is why mock apologies are worthless. Without professional intervention many Survivors live in internal and external worlds that mirror back and amplify the imposed legacies and from which, for those Survivors, there is seemingly no escape. Living that reality over sixty-two years ultimately threw me into the abyss.

JAGGED is my voice. Standing just behind me are the echoes of far too many other Voices that did not survive long enough to speak, or be heard.

I want to re-connect with health, family, love, and hope.

I want beauty and laughter back in my life.

To be continued … Link to Part 10)

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Follows on from JAGGED #7 – Bang goes the suicide gun.

I’ve never celebrated Mothers’ Day, and I never will. JAGGED is now 29,577 words long. In printed form that equates to roughly a 120 page book. That is quite a few words launched up from the depths of darkness. So far I have referenced my Mother with about six or seven of those 29,577 words – simply because I have very little to go on where her existence is concerned. In the next Chapter I tell you what I know, and I will give you an opinion on my parents.

I wonder how many other Survivors of institutionalised childhood sexual abuse (or non-institutionalised for that matter) have trodden the same parentless path that I did?

The forensic psychiatrist hired by the Church to interview and assess me asked me what percentage of my internal damage was caused by the break up of my family, and what percentage was caused by Catholic Church abuse. Even though I thought it was a stupid shitface of a question for a professional to ask a traumatised person, I told him that 80% of the damage was caused by the Church, and 20% was caused by the family break up. He was not happy with my answer. Well … I wish I had thought to say this at the time … ‘the fucking rapes and mental cruelty and abuse happened under Church care mate, what part of that don’t you get?’

This was taken just after I ‘visited’ the Church paid Psychiatrist. I felt assaulted during/after that session.

The session with that Church paid psychiatrist was very adversarial, and when he greeted me with the words ‘this session will not necessarily be to your benefit’ the words you’ve landed in a viper’s nest Keith immediately sprang to mind. The Church does not hire psychiatrists to bolster the legal claims of Survivors, the Church hires psychiatrists to water claims down – but there is more to the story than that …

It would pay Survivors to realise that when you launch civil proceedings against the Catholic Church the following can possibly happen to you, as it did to me. Both your own legal team, and the Church, will hire forensic psychiatrists to write a medico-legal report, and to probe, test, dig into, expose, question, and examine every single aspect of your abuse experiences and the legacies you carry as a result of that abuse. It is an unremitting process and it re-traumatises because it re-immerses you into the abuse experiences in a very rough and ragged manner. In my case the internal me, the me that lives in a permanently depressive abuse-induced environment, was brutally reefed out into the glaring light of day – re-traumatise doesn’t begin to explain how such a process feels.

It might surprise you to know that I do not hate that Church hired psychiatrist because there would be no point to that hate. The fact is, and this is the way it works folks, the odds are that the very next day he might have been hired by a Survivor’s legal team to compile a medico-legal report to prove the veracity of that Survivor’s claim against the Church. How a psychiatrist treats you in these matters very much depends on who is paying their bill.

Chapter 25: Hi Mum and Dad – where the hell were you?

I have no memory whatsoever of my Mother, and my siblings never, ever, once mentioned her to me. So it has left me scrambling through some old letters that my father and a distant cousin of his sent to my older sister many decades ago, and it has also caused me to scroll through various ancestry.com pages to try and pick up some hints and clues.

I am not the first person on this planet who has a Mother that he never knew, but I must say, it is such a strange feeling to know that while I personally went through such shitfull orphanage/visitation family abuse experiences, my Mother was out there in society kicking around, literally just up the road, and doing whatever it was that she did. I capitalise the word Mother because I believe that Mothers are very important human beings in the life of a child – so are Fathers.

The only person who remotely knew what my Mother was like was my Father – and when I met him for one day back in 1989 he told me that all of the time he was with her (long enough to have four children) he never did quite figure out who she was. When she left him to return to her husband and other child he was, to say the least, emotionally blown to the far side of the Andromeda Galaxy.

So here’s what little I know about my Mother …

Her name could be Vera Colman/Coleman, my Father knew her by that name, other family sources such as they are also say that her name was Vera Bess Kennedy (known as Davis). Who knows? Here’s a bit of a teaser photo I found on the Australian War Memorial site – could it actually be a photo of my Mother?

The timing, 1942, and the place, Qld, all fits. Could my Mother be in this photo?

This Chapter is also a bit of a combo – in that, if you read between the lines, you’ll probably form an opinion on why my family split up and I was placed in a Brisbane orphanage in 1957. Before my family fell apart we lived in Sydney and then, for a reason that will become pretty obvious, caught the train up to Brisbane.

Here are the excerpts from the letters, all of which were written in the 1980s …

Father: “I guess I have been very much a “loner’ since the end of 1957, the time we all parted in Brisbane.”

Father: “The few words of advice were to not thump my head on a brick wall. I knew then that everything was hopeless, that it was impossible for me to get you out of there.”

Father: “I knew her only as Vera Coleman (Colman). I never heard the name Bess. When I first met her she was sharing a flat with another girl, so it never occurred to me that she was married – a husband and teenage son.”

“Towards the end of 1957, Vera went missing on a Saturday (in Brisbane). On the Sunday the five of us walked down Edward Street to the Botanical Gardens for the afternoon. I think I notified the police that night of her disappearance as there was no word from her on our return to the room.”

“Vera turned up some days later, it was at least five days later but may have been more. It was around noon, her only conversation was that she was married, and was living with her husband and teenage son. She was only there long enough to put her clothes in a suitcase, then left. She was in a very determined mood.”

“Whether this happened before or after I went to St Vincent De Paul I don’t remember. I am Anglican, but Vera had kept you on the instruction of the Catholic faith. They arranged where you were to go.”

Insert from me: Ah – the good old Catholic Church. There they were with four kids on their hands, two girls and two boys. The family of those kids had just broken up and what was the first thing the Church decided to do? – they decided to split us up even further. My two older sisters were placed in an orphanage at Wynnum (Nazareth House), and my older brother and I were placed in a different orphanage at Nudgee (St Vincent’s). Just to cap it all off, the Church then separated my older brother and I into the ‘big boys’ and ‘little boys’ section of St Vincent’s. I was the youngest, and had just turned five years old at the time.

Father: “The police came to see me, I had previously reported to them what had happened with Vera. They told me that I had no jurisdiction over the children (my children) and that I had no rights concerning you! All this, with a few words of advice, showed me exactly where I stood – nowhere.”

Cousin: “Frank last saw Keith in the ‘50s’, you were all down at the Quay. It is beyond our comprehension why you were all separated. We were all delighted when Keith met Bess and had a lovely family, so what happened?”

Cousin: “I was asking my brother Frank about Keith, he also remarked that he was one of the nicest men he ever knew, and that will always be the same with me.”

Cousin: “Something has come back to me. One evening we went over to Balgowlah with some toys for you and to see Keith and Bess. The house was opened, but no one at home. I think now you must have all gone to Qld. We left the toys but never received an acknowledgement, which was very strange.”

Cousin: “I think Keith has kept away because of what was done to you children.”

“I remember he met Bess in Brisbane. She was a Brisbane girl. I just cannot understand why they ignored you all those years, or put you in a Home, We are all so shocked and unless the circumstances were mitigating, it is unforgiveable.”

Father: “It is time to send you the enclosed papers, which will serve as a crash course on part of my history, for better or for worse, which is best in the long run. At least you will be aware of the facts if they crop up.”

Father: “The reason for moving to Queensland? We had notice of eviction from the house because of rent arrears so decided to go back to Brisbane. At least I knew I would be able to find a decent job in Brisbane. However things went wrong otherwise. I worked at Lennon’s Hotel up until 1959, and I then returned to Sydney.”

My Father. He thought he knew my Mother … well a bit of a surprise came his way!

So, there are only little ghost-whisperings about my Mother in those letters – but they are all I have to hang my thoughts and feelings about my Mother on.

Over all the decades up to my current age I have not thought about my parents all that much. I have nothing much in my memory to create any sort of imagining of what they were really like as people.

But I do know this. By dumping us and walking away they left four siblings permanently separated from their parents, and permanently separated from each other. My siblings and I were never able to re-connect in any meaningful way later on in life and not one of us ever broached the issue of our orphanage experiences with each other.

I was the youngest of the four of us. The split up of my family did contribute to the harm that my mind carries. I told the psychiatrist that it equated to about 20% of the damage. The other 80% was caused by the nuns and priests and workers at St Vincent’s, and by the members of the Visitation Family that I was placed with … all of those bastards circled my vulnerability like moths to a fucking flame.

So what do I think of my parents?

My Father was a loving, small, weakened man. He was badly damaged by his war experiences up in New Guinea in 1942 when the cargo vessel the MV MacDuhi was blown up under him by Japanese bombs. When I met him in 1989 for just that one day, he also told me that his later war experiences serving on American landing craft towards the end of the Pacific War haunted him – and that the sight of what human beings were capable of doing to each other created an internal trauma within himself that he was never able to move on from.

My Mother is a total unknown to me. I have no concrete information on what type of person she may have been. She was a married woman with a teenage son. She moved in with a lover, had four children with that lover, and then returned to her husband and son. She walked away from her other four children.

I have very mixed feelings regarding my parents. Part of me loves them – I was too young at the time to understand what was going on and why their relationship, and their stewardship of their four children, failed. When I met my Father in the flesh I chose to love him.

But there is one thing I cannot forgive …

Over the seven interminably long years that my childhood sexual abuse experiences unfolded, when I desperately hoped that somebody would come and rescue me from the orphanage, my Father was still in Brisbane for the first two years of it without once visiting me, and my Mother was just up the road in Brisbane for all of that time without once visiting me. They were both, literally, just up the bloody road.

I cannot, and never will, forgive either of them for that.

To be continued …

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Follows on from JAGGED #6 – Mental Illness and the Law.

A decent person, and I thank him for it, recently wrote in to AIMN re JAGGED and said …

“You are exposing us to the experiences and development of a person completely outside the parameters of the lives which most of us have encountered.”

I didn’t want my voice to come from that different place. My rough voice is the only authentic voice I have. Yes, it speaks of confronting things in a raw manner at times – it speaks of the damaging legacies of childhood sexual abuse. I am glad that most people do not have a need to speak with a voice such as mine.

Chapter 22: Bang bang goes the suicide gun.

For any of the following to make sense it might pay you to re-read Chapter 4, I don’t need to read it again because I see that movie on the inside of my forehead every day – and warning warning warning – this Chapter is about suicide.

Talking about suicide does not bother me at all. Talking about suicide is just words. The ‘feeling’ behind the words though bothers me greatly.

Flicker.

Flicker.

There is just a sliver of happenstance between the thought of suicide, the ideation of it, and the act itself. I’m still here so far because I seem to have an in-built dampener on my trigger finger. I don’t want to be here locked into this harmed mind – it saps my energy to still be here in this harmed mind – I want release from it. Yet, when my darkness flies me over the edge the undamaged part of me finds voice and says … just for a second stop … just stop for a second.

You might think that I’m some sort of navel-gazing idiot for saying the following, but it is true enough. The voice that pops up to try and stop me belongs to a four year old child. The voice comes from who I was before I was damaged. When the psychiatrist told me that my psyche/personality escaped fracturing, even though alas etc my mind didn’t, his words resonated and rang true. Not all of me, not everything about me, was swamped away and dessicated by the abuse.

Apparently there is an infamous suicide spot in the south of the UK, some very high chalk cliffs with the ocean swirling way below, and the police report that when the bodies are recovered quite a few of them have chalk under their fingernails – in other words – they jumped off into the abyss, slid down the slope, and then – too late – wanted to change their minds. My four year old voice simply stresses the fact that once you leap there is no coming back.

But the gap between the ideation and the act is thinner than a hairline. I am well aware that in what I am about to relate any of the circumstances could have proved terminal – a reflexive jerk on the trigger could just as easily have beaten the arising of my inner voice as not.

Flicker.

Flicker.

The only reason that my suicide ideation has not turned me into a raging daily alcoholic or drug addict is because I know that trying to totally blank out my mind simply doesn’t work. What is there is there before the drugs, it is there during the drugs, it is there after the drugs – it cannot be blotted out.

Flicker.

In the early 70s I worked at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville (as the Vietnam War was slowly grinding down). American servicemen threw on a BBQ for all the local staff and they took great delight in encouraging me to drink a skin-full to the point where I threw up and passed out. I ended up in Townsville hospital with alcohol poisoning. Those servicemen thought that sort of thing was a lot of fun, they couldn’t have known how much back then I welcomed the shutting down of my mind – it was only later that I learnt that it could not be shut down.

In Townsville in those days you got your driver’s license by driving around the block with a cop in your car – if you didn’t hit anything you got your license. A couple of weeks after getting that license I left Townsville to return to Brisbane. I learnt to drive on that trip. Somewhere just before Rockhampton a stretch of the highway was bordered on both sides by a long run of gum trees. Without thinking about things I found myself aiming my car at the trunk of a solid tree. Smack-city didn’t happen. My Hillman Imp was such a light little wonderful shit of a car it spun out on the gravel verge and slid without a scratch between two trees and plopped to a stop in some long grass. I sat there thinking ‘what the fuck just happened?’

In 1985, just after my son was born, I pressed the barrel of a rifle against my forehead (I had an unused rifle back then simply because many people had unused rifles back then), but then I hesitated because I thought it would all be a bit too messy, so I switched the barrel from my forehead to my mouth. I put my finger on the trigger. The rifle was a semi-automatic .22 with a magazine and a light-pressure trigger and I figured it would just go bang bang bang lights out. Even though I’m a pacifist I know the power of guns – in the earlier let’s train up the cadet kids for Vietnam days I had learnt to field strip and fire .303s, Bren Guns, and the rather deadly SLR. But the lights stayed on. I phoned a friend, she came around, removed the rifle, and the thought of ever owning a rifle again, forever from my life.

In 2004, when the tsunami was roaring into Indonesia, I stuck my head inside a gas oven. I don’t know how often you have ever phoned Lifeline with your head stuck inside a gas oven – but I did that afternoon. They talked sense into me and I pulled my head and my phone back out.

(I will not talk too much about the death of my dog Zoe in these matters – it is still very raw – when she died in 2016 I noosed-up a verandah railing and just sat there staring at the rope. It was a bastard of a day).

In 2018, after experiencing the loss of a valued relationship I lay on my bed repeating and repeating the fuckful mantra of ‘I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. I want to die’. The request was not heard in higher realms. The lights stayed on.

Also in 2018, specifically on the 3rd September 2018 – when I totally lost Executive Function (a friend filled me in on EF yesterday – no wonder I say that Survivors need advocates during their legal journeys) and melted down on Settlement Day – I sat on the verandah of the old farmhouse where I was living in isolation and just stared at the sky thinking ‘just fucking end it, just fucking end it’.

In 2019 I embarked alone on a 7,000 kilometre road trip out into the Australian Deserts – it was my first strong attempt to tackle my agoraphobia. Went to Broken Hill, Lake Eyre, Uluru. On a desert side track the car over-heated. As I sat there out in the heat and the glare while I waited for things to cool down the thought came into my head ‘Just walk off into the sand dunes. Who’d know? Who’d care?’ – the thought was that enticing I took nothing and walked about half a kilometre in before my inner voice kicked in and said ‘not now, not now, not this way.’

Those are just a few instances of many …

You might think that jeez his is a classic case of someone calling for help just before the light gets snuffed out. Well no, it was, and is, not like that at all. My undamaged inner voice tells me that suicide is not a beneficial act, my damaged (and far larger) inner voice tells me that suicide would be a sweet release from it all. My undamaged inner voice has won the skirmishes so far – so that little voice must have some fucking power attached to it.

My suicide ideation is a direct legacy from my childhood abuse experiences. It is very different from other reasonably normal thoughts of death – were I physically riddled with cancer and enjoying no quality of life I’d opt for voluntary euthanasia as a normal matter of course. But suicide ideation arising out of traumatic abuse experiences is very different to that – it is an imposed gift that just keeps on giving.

Flicker.

Flicker.

Every day it is in my mind that surely not being here must be better than being here. Such thoughts nibble away at me every day. The other night I was simply cooking a spag bol when tears came to my eyes and I thought ‘I just don’t want to be here’ – nothing external to me triggered the thought, it was just ‘there’. That I haven’t topped myself is no particular saving grace – the continual inescapable thought of not being here is not a particularly nice ‘feeling’ to be saddled with.

When my stark voice speaks I say that ‘they’, being the abusers, killed me. From an observational point of view I see that they committed a series of crimes against me, with one of those crimes being a form of unfolding pre-meditated manslaughter stretched out over a lifetime – quite a life sentence in many ways. I think a part of me just does not want to give the bastards any form of final satisfaction – and that’s why I am still here.

Flicker …

My voice is my voice, it speaks of me. I don’t know if other Survivors of childhood trauma carry my level of suicide ideation – they might carry a lighter or a heavier load. You will only find out by asking them.

Chapter 23: Poems from ‘not there’.

I have always liked to write. I can say things when I write that I am incapable of expressing when I speak. And these early sort of poems, they are a fair measure of how divorced and separate from life I felt back then. I felt invisible, I felt disengaged, unacknowledged, unloved, I felt ‘not there’ – nothing in the external world made much sense to me. To be fair to the earlier me, nothing much in the external world of the present era makes much sense to me either.

(1969)
CUBICAL OCCUPATION

empty walls
echo rippled nothings
as a ceiling fixes a permanent gaze
on a disinterested floor
as the door yawns for a
final closing hand
to share with the windows

(1972)
THE CITY

Drifting down a pavement
Nothing on my mind
Observing passing people lazily
What are their thoughts?
Their constant daily grind?
Their eyes are dead fixed constantly three feet behind my head

Chapter 24: A mini-thought in passing.

Is a ‘needy’ need for love and nurturing one of the legacy consequences of childhood sexual abuse? I think it can be. Over the course of my life such a thing must have drained the patience of my female partners down to the marrow of their very bones.

To be continued …

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Follows on from JAGGED #5

Chapter 16: Mental illness and the Law.

Have you, as a person who carries a permanent form of depressive mental illness, ever launched a legal case against the Catholic Church for damages? As a Victim/Survivor of institutionalised childhood sexual abuse I did so three years ago. It was not a lot of fun.

Anybody reading JAGGED knows by now why I carry that permanent form of depressive mental illness. In launching my action against the Church I sought justice, acknowledgement, compensation, and access to professional level remedial therapy. The Rolling Stones said it all – you can’t always get what you want – and in this case I certainly did not even remotely get what I needed.

In relating the following legal material I am aware that, no matter how badly I feel about what transpired, the best I can really do is relate the facts to you – both how I saw those facts unfolding, and how I felt about their impact on me …

When I initiated a claim against the Catholic Church for abuse suffered under their care at St Vincent’s Orphanage I had little idea how much that legal process would highlight the divide between what I am capable of handling in a rational-thought manner, and what I am incapable of handling in a rational-thought manner. The legal process brought that divide into very sharp focus because it so amplified the strength of my depression. The longer the case went on the less capable I became.

I am not a lawyer, the law is fog-city to me, so always bear that in mind. I am a Survivor (even though I do not like using that word) of childhood sexual abuse. As a Survivor who was exposed to some aspects of the law I would like to say some things about my legal experiences over the last few years.

I initiated the claim three years ago and now, looking back, I am pretty aware that I needed an advocate or advocacy organisation at certain points in the legal process to assist me to fully understand the consequences of some of the decisions that I was being asked to make. It is pretty hard for me to admit to something like that.

The legal process I entered into was pretty cut and dried. No Win No Fee. My lawyers were good, and further on I will tell you how very good they were, but they were not there to ‘tell’ me what to do, they were there to receive ‘instructions’ and then act upon them – which they did to the best of their ability.

If you refer back to Chapter 14 you will come to an understanding of what I was able to tell my lawyers about the abuse I had suffered at St Vincent’s Orphanage. I was able to talk of some things in a halting manner, but I was totally incapable at that time of speaking about matters such as the ‘visitation’ family and the abuse that had occurred there.

When you have a level of depression that shuts you down it is an impossibility to lay everything out coherently in a short space of interview time with a panel of solicitors and a barrister, no matter how sympathetic they are. It is only now, three years after the initiation of my claim and after exposure, via my legal case, to the influence of forensic psychiatrists, that I have found myself able to speak of certain things.

When people say that people like me should find their voice and speak up it needs to be realised that it takes an awful length of time to start speaking and it takes even longer to say everything that is there to be said. My form of depressive mental illness amplifies as I age and that has not been beneficial to my earlier efforts to open up and speak.

Chapter 17: The initiation of my claim against the Catholic Church.

On 8th February 2017 I spoke with Porters Lawyers (Canberra) and launched my claim against the Catholic Church for personal injuries suffered as a result of my being physically and sexually assaulted whilst I was a resident at St Vincent’s Orphanage, Nudgee (“the home”).

I thought that fairness would unfold, and that justice would be done. Babe in the legal woods stuff because little did I realise …

On the 3rd September 2018 a miserably beaten-down depressive wreck agreed to sign any sort of Settlement with the Catholic Church. Anything to stop the spiraling weight of my depression. As my barrister said to me on that day “they’ve just abused you again mate”. He was right, and I knew it.

Porters Lawyers, and the barristers they align with, are right up there in the good people stakes as far as I am concerned. You know, they could not possibly have known it at the time, and this is just a straight truth, their genuinely offered high level of moral support over that period pulled me back from many brinks where I thought it would just be easier to give life away. That is not a dramatic statement from my end, it is simply how things were.

Porters Lawyers were very efficient, and I am not trying to make this sound like an ad for them, rather, I am trying to make a distinction between the people who represented me, and the adversarial legal landscape that they and Survivors have no choice but to try and navigate.

So, while I am critical of that adversarial legal landscape Survivors face, I am not critical of how Porters Lawyers represented me. They steered my claim from conception to completion in under two years – which is apparently quite a feat in legal terms because most civil litigation claims take a longer period of time than that to reach Settlement.

I am very critical of the adversarial legal landscape that Victims/Survivors of childhood sexual abuse face when they initiate their claims because that legal landscape greatly amplifies deeply ingrained currently held traumas and legacies and then adds new layers of trauma as compounding overlays. That is no fun for the lawyers representing the claimant, and it is no fun for the claimant.

We all know that lawyers, and in my case Porters Lawyers, are not mental health professionals and nobody expects them to be – in my opinion they sought to minimise harm to me as a claimant as best they could – and it is hardly their fault that the power of my depressive illness/darkness caused me to crumple at the very time in my case when what was needed from me was a bit of strength. I wish that I’d had a personal advocate with me at that moment in time. But then, why the hell am I so critical of myself in this matter – because behemoths like the Catholic Church are well practiced in the psychological demolition of anybody who dares to stand up against them.

Chapter 18: Keith Edwin Davis vs The Catholic Church – yeah right!

Well, it was hardly a case of derring-do on my part and wonderful enlightened outcomes achieved as an end result I can assure you. A living example of the power of depressive mental illness stood up and pointed the finger at the Catholic Church and then promptly for his temerity got mentally steam-rollered as flat as a pancake as a result.

That last paragraph pretty much sums up how the whole of the legal process affected my mental state.

If anybody thinks that, in the legal setting, the Church is all love light and awareness and mindful of not re-traumatising the Survivor then some hard facts need to come your way.

Just before I lodged my claim a legal practitioner gave me the following warning …

“The Church will seek to demolish you, and your claim. Their lawyers, or others acting for them, will scrutinise every statement you have ever made on social media, they will dissect your work and private life, they will look for your weaknesses and they will exploit them ruthlessly. They will acknowledge nothing. Their aim is to make you buckle under the pressure and just simply go away.”

Mmm – and I had thought that the Church , after assessing me and the legacies I carry from my time in their care, would simply be fair and reasonable. There were many rough learnings ahead.

But what led me to initiating my claim?

It was not just one thing. It was the accumulation of many things and realisations over many years. Sure, the all pervading nature of my mental/depressive illness and being gutfully sick of it played a big part, as did the loss of relationships and work capabilities over the course of my adult life. But the period between 2008 and 2012 brought some hard truths to light for me. The accumulated affects and legacies of childhood sexual abuse wear you down over the years and decades to the point that your ability to function becomes dangerously eroded.

At the time I lost the ability to function effectively in the workplace and for years I ended up mired into a dependency on the welfare system. Centrelink, bless their hearts, made an appointment for me to see a mental health nurse. She was great, and she didn’t muck around, and she didn’t try to soothe me with any sort of stupid euphemistic language. She saw me as a flat out suicide risk – which I was.

I spent time with the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service (CRS) and they managed to quiet my suicide ideation for a period. In 2013 I managed to pick up a permanent full-time job but my anti-authoritarian inclinations (I wonder, not, where those inclinations came from?) soon led to a parting of the ways between me and the employer. In rolled suicide ideation again.

So it was not just one single cathartic moment that led me eventually to initiate a claim against the Catholic Church. It was many things all added up together – and it still took a further five years from my time with CRS to find the oomph to initiate a claim.

When I phoned Porters Lawyers this thought was in my mind – “What happened to me when I was a child was wrong, it has affected my whole life. I want acknowledgement of what was done to me, and I want justice”. Neither of those wants was even remotely met by the Catholic Church.

Chapter 19: What does it take to reach Settlement with the Catholic Church?

It takes a gutting of your heart and soul is what it takes. During my legal journey I was well supported legally by Porters Lawyers. On the other side of the equation my claim was bitterly opposed by the Order of the Sisters of Mercy. Despite all the public protestations to the contrary by the Catholic Church that they care for the welfare of Survivors who were abused under their care – the brutal reality is that when a claim against them arises they go for the throat and try to demolish the claimant psychologically, and try to diminish or negate the claim.

I have to say that it makes me almost physically sick when I see representatives of the Catholic Church on television these days saying how much they ‘care’ for Survivors, and how much they wish to avoid re-traumatising the Survivor during any claimant proceedings. In the legal environment the nice words soon evaporate and the Church becomes nothing less than a vicious attack dog.

I did not have to justify the legitimacy of my claim. Unfortunately for me I was the living proof of the damage done by my childhood sexual abuse experiences and there was sufficient documentary evidence in existence to show same – yet the Church still automatically threw up their ‘go away’ wall and I assume that it was only when Justice Burns in the Supreme Court of Queensland made orders that I be given leave to lodge a Statement of Claim on 15 March 2018 that the Church started to sit up and take things a little more seriously.

As for the Church caring for the welfare of Survivors, well, over the whole two years of my claim I never once met with a representative of the Catholic Church, the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, or the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane. No contact during the period of the hearing of the claim, no contact at Settlement time, and no contact post-Settlement. No acknowledgement of any form. Imagine what that does to the mindset of a person with a deep and permanent depressive illness? So don’t buy into the Church’s public PR on how they treat Survivors because it is absolute bullshit.

Everything about my whole legal process, in the end, came down to a few hours that unfolded on the 3rd September 2018 …

Chapter 20: 3rd September 2018 – demolition day.

It is easy, after an event, to try and re-spin things to make oneself look better, or braver, or more hard done by, or more together or more resolute and things like that. I don’t see much point in doing such things. Reality is reality. On 3rd September 2018 I fell apart mentally. It was bloody hard to self-behold.

And here’s the lead-up …

A requirement of the Personal Injuries Proceeding Act 2002 (Qld) states that in cases like mine the lawyers from both sides, my lawyers and the Church’s lawyers, have to attend a Compulsory Conference at certain staggered times. During those times the lawyers get to discuss the progress of the cases/briefs before them and, if all the necessary paperwork and legal requirements have been met, then the lawyers can then proceed to begin the process for some form of negotiated Settlement or even total negation of the claim, or acceptance that matters are going to move on to the Courtroom. That’s my understanding of what those Compulsory Conferences are all about – mediation sessions of a sort. Lawyers would probably describe them some sort of other way.

An important point to remember here is that I, as the client or claimant, was not invited to attend the conference or the mediation, either by myself or with a supportive advocate or advocacy organisation at my side. I can’t tell you why things are done that way, all I can tell you is that in my case that is the way it was done.

(The year and a half or so leading up to that Compulsory Conference fully re-immersed me in the trauma of what had happened to me as a child, and continually having to relate and relate details of the abuse, especially in the adversarial session with the psychiatrist hired by the Church, dragged me deeper and deeper into my depression. At one point I phoned a friend and asked him to talk me out of the idea of suicide – it is a very difficult thing to do to admit such a level of fragility as that.)

Over the course of an hour or so on the day of 3rd September 2018 I received a series of telephone calls from the barrister who was representing my case at the Compulsory Conference.

He did nothing wrong. He did everything right. He detailed everything that was unfolding in the conference room, and he detailed whatever offers the Church was making to settle the case. At each stage he asked me for a yes/no decision about what the Church was offering.

God knows what he made of my mumbled answers to it all. It was such a highly pressurised situation, conducted over the telephone, and I just did not know clearly how I should react and respond.

At my end it did not just represent an end-point to a time-limited legal process. At my end, on the telephone, it represented THE culminating moment in my whole life. A moment when I might finally receive some form of acknowledgement of responsibility from the Catholic Church for my lifetime of depressive mental illness and the legacies that I carry as a result of my childhood sexual abuse experiences.

There is nothing to hide here. On the 3rd of September 2018 I should have felt some form of positivity, but I didn’t. I’d never felt as bad as I felt on that day. If ever there is a case for arguing that a Survivor of childhood sexual abuse should have a personal advocate onboard during settlement negotiation proceedings then that day is it.

The Church made insulting offer after insulting offer. My barrister kept running back into the conference room to try and marginally improve matters. I don’t doubt that he could hear my confusion and my deterioration over the phone. He was the man who said to me – Keith – they are abusing you again!

I crumpled in, gave up, fell apart and asked the barrister to accept whatever the latest level of offer was. I felt like shit. The behaviour of the Church’s lawyers on that day confirmed that both they and the Church regarded me as nothing better than a worthless piece of shit. It was demolishing.

Since the 3rd of September 2018 the state of my mental well-being has deteriorated markedly.

Chapter 21: The Settlement.

I signed a Deed of Settlement with the Catholic Church in the matter of the abuse I experienced in St Vincent’s Orphanage while under the care of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy. I am legally restricted from telling you the details of that Settlement. But there are some things that I can say.

It was a very unsatisfactory and unfair Settlement. A strong man did not sign that Deed of Settlement, a broken man signed it, and the Church had achieved their aim. The fact that my solicitors post-settlement voluntarily dropped their fee level in order to top-up the compensatory segment of my Settlement should tell you everything you need to know.

Under Qld law it is possible, under certain circumstances, to apply to have Unsatisfactory Child Abuse Settlements signed under duress etc to be ‘set aside’. I am investigating what rights, if any at all, I have in that area – Civil Liability and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2019 (Qld).

The other more important matter of the abuse I experienced while under the care of the ‘visitation’ family (details contained in the latter part of Chapter 14) is not subject to any restriction or limitation imposed by the Deed of Settlement to my original Claim lodged on 8th February 2017.

I have only been able to very recently publicly disclose the facts of that abuse.

My placement with that ‘visitation’ family, which could only have occurred with the approval of my duty-of-care-bound care givers, in other words those who were responsible for my welfare as a State Ward, is a matter that was not included as part of the Claim that I lodged against the Catholic Church on 8th February 2017.

I have sought legal counsel on this matter this week and, at time of writing, I am awaiting legal advice, which always takes months and months, on the lodgement of a Claim for damages which will include a component for remedial therapy which, I hope, will arrest or mitigate the strength of my life-long depressive illness caused by my childhood sexual abuse experiences.

I am going to say something very rough here to all of those people who were paid by the Catholic Church to oppose my initial claim. For you the law is just a job. For you the law is just a game. For you the law is just about ‘winning’. For me, it is about the life that was taken away from me, it is about my very life. That you can look at yourselves in the mirror without throwing up is beyond my powers of comprehension.

That is all I have to say about these legal things. Engagement with the Catholic Church has been a dis-spiriting and damaging experience – it did not just re-traumatise, it added to the trauma. My advice to any Survivor who is considering treading the legal path that I am currently on is this – do not do it alone as I did – engage immediately with a personal advocate or advocacy organisation right from the start, I cannot understate the importance of doing so. From now on I’ll certainly be engaging that type of support.

To be continued …

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