'It's been such a battle': Wolston Park survivors win shock payouts
Fortune had not exactly been smiling on Sue Treweek.
She had been living out of her car for a week after violence prompted her to leave her home in Logan, south of Brisbane.
Now staying at a motel with help from an old social worker mentor, Treweek, 52, was driving back from the Gold Coast when the battery in her car died. She was standing on the side of the highway with her brokendown car when the phone rang.
It was two Queensland government ministers – Cameron Dick (health) and Shannon Fentiman (communities).
“I was like, ‘Yeah, here we go,’” Treweek tells the Guardian.
She had heard it all before.
She is one of nine women who came forward to take part in a government review – yet another review – of the circumstances of their youth: an episode of horror that has stained the living memory of the state.
They were among up to 60 wards of the state who as children were held in adult mental health facilities where they were subjected to harrowing abuse, from “chemical restraint” to torture, serial rape and sexual assault, isolation and “degrading humiliation”.
Despite having no identifiable mental illness – they were labelled “delinquents” – the children were detained in Wolston Park at Goodna, west of Brisbane, between the 1950s and 80s.
Treweek endured eight years at Wolston. Among the horrors was the brutal 1984 murder of her friend Julie Muirhead at the hands of Mark Lawrence, the rape fantasist then also in psychiatric care. Treweek says she had been Lawrence’s intended victim.
“Lawrence had attacked me when I was 15 but I got away from him,” she says. “Well, he never got over that. Just before he was arrested for Julie’s murder he tried to get me to go for a walk with them. I’d already spent a few years trying to keep out of his reach.”
At 19 Treweek was assaulted and gave birth to a baby boy who was adopted out.
She emerged from Wolston at 22 in 1988, the year World Expo came to Brisbane and locals were hailing how the state capital had come of age.
Treweek says she had “absolutely no living skills, I didn’t even have a clue about going to the shops”. But she ended up living in the bush in northern New South Wales with “a sleeping bag and a pillow case with some tinned food in it”, and a dog as her only companion, for almost two years after her release.
She encountered an old drover called Percy Hurrell, who “took me under his wing” and eventually into his home, and taught her basic life skills such as paying bills.
Treweek would become a dogged lobbyist for the Wolston Park kids but it took her 15 years to get just an apology from the government. A redress scheme about the same time, which Treweek says offered survivors $40,000 at best, but most just $7,000, was “like an insult”.
The Wolston matter was excluded from 1999’s Forde inquiry in the abuse of children in Queensland institutions, and did not get a public airing in the current royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse.
The latest review of Wolston was run from April by a community advocate, Betty Taylor. The call from Dick and Fentiman came through on Tuesday.
Treweek says she told her social worker mentor, Karyn Walsh from Micah Projects, just the night before: “You know what it feels like? We’ve been set up for another fail.”
She expected an update at best, or maybe a token offer of payment – another “insult”.
But after the expected assurances that the government was profoundly sorry for what occurred, Dick stunned Treweek with an emphatic offer: an ex gratia payment that dwarfed anything previously on the table. “The amount they offered, that was very respectable,” she says.
“It’s been such a battle. I thought this was going to take years. It’s actually extremely fast for any government to do something like this.
“I said to them, ‘Yeah, well – I’m stuck on the side of the road here.’
“But then the health department sent me a battery.”
A roadside van was there within a half hour. “How good is that?”
Importantly, it’s a payout for the wrongful detention in Wolston rather than the abuse suffered there. This means all nine survivors who came forward will receive the same amount, avoiding what Treweek says is “putting a price tag on suffering” and allowing them to still pursue the state in the courts for damages for abuse should they wish.
The government, which also released Taylor’s report on Tuesday, will offer the women counselling, legal and financial advice, and arrangements for ongoing support as part of a formal reconciliation scheme.
The unexpectedly decisive offer was the kind that could go some way towards drawing a line under the matter – a rare example of a government getting out on the front foot and exceeding victims’ expectations – at least for some of the women involved.
Barbara Smith, who endured abuse in foster homes and sexual assault in a church-run home before she was taken to Wolston as a teenager, says she thinks they deserve more given the “medical malpractice” involved.
“I’m an ex-nurse and I know you can’t go and put a needle into somebody without letting that person know what that injection’s for,” she says.
Taylor’s report notes that some of the women’s medical files show they were given daily doses of antipsychotic drugs and sedatives over years “to control behaviour, as opposed to the treatment of any diagnosed mental illness”.
The women’s accounts included being “raped and sexually abused [by wardens] while drugged, forcibly held down and injected with drugs, locked up in isolation while drugged and given electroconvulsive therapy if they refused or resisted drug injections”.
Smith’s family arranged for her to get out just before she turned 18.
“But the trouble is, your life was wrecked then,” she says. “You never made good relationships. I lost two babies the first year I got out and I believe that was from the drugs that they injected.
“The drugs! I think these drug companies asked permission to test the drugs out on us, I firmly believe that. And I’ve done nursing.”
Smith, 72, who now lives in Jindalee, puts down the ordeal to authorities at the time who “just didn’t care”. “It was absolutely a bloody disgrace,” she says.
She was in the gym when took the call from Dick and Fentiman.
“I got quite a surprise because I had thought they’re not going to pay us out. And we’re going to have to go through court and it’s going to take ages.
“I was very surprised at the amount. I think we deserved more, for the fact that nothing was mentioned about medical malpractice.”
“I told them, ‘I’m not a Labor voter so you won’t get my vote.’ I told them straight what I thought of them but I also thanked them for doing it.
“At least they had the integrity to pay us out, which is better than Campbell Newman and Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh did. They did nothing, they sat on their hands and did bugger all.”
Smith credits the Brisbane author Matt Condon and his exposé of the Wolston scandal for spurring the Palaszczuk government into action.
Treweek, meanwhile, says there is some unfinished business for her. She says the government needs to acknowledge and act for other children in Wolston who were not wards of the state like her, and who have been excluded from the reconciliation process.
“It was a dumping ground for disabled children, children with autism, deafness, children with physical and intellectual disabilities were put in there and just left there,” she says.
“I’m talking about 11-, 12-year-old children. I fought for so long to have all children included but [the government] wouldn’t do it in the end. If they opened up [the reconciliation
scheme] for all children there would have been a public outcry because there’s been a lot of kids.
“These are big institutions and there’s a lot of people out there with loved ones in there – aunties, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents – and even their children. That’s not the end for me because I still want those non-state ward kids to be looked after or recognised.”
Treweek says those other evenmore-vulnerable children have played on her mind “every day from the time I left Wolston”.
“It’s a battle I felt I could take on. It’s been very costly but I couldn’t leave there and be OK and not fight
for the other kids.”