Dark years of orphanage life

Andrew Mathieson
A GLANCE down St Catherines Drive and the sight of “salubrious” homes fails to tell the street’s true story.
Happy family lives today camouflage the misery once handed out decades earlier at a demolished Highton orphanage under the street’s same name.
Former ward of the state Leonie Sheedy knows the trauma better than most.
Even though Leonie has suppressed most of her childhood since mum dumped her as a three-year-old in 1957 at St Catherine’s for the next 13 years, she remembers enough.
Leonie transforms into an almost trance-like state when attempting to recall some of the horrific stories hidden for years behind four cold walls.
“There’s a big gap in some of my memories,” she acknowledges.
“There are quite a few years where I don’t remember much.
“That’s what trauma does to people.”
The brave voice of thousands of displaced orphans founded its first national support group in Sydney and lobbied pollies for a senate inquiry on behalf of grown men and women still suffering the scars of physical and sexual abuse.
Many Geelong wards of the state like Leonie had to leave the city, even the state, just to escape their pain.
But she was always quick to remind her two kids, now adults, of how lucky they were during ritual visits to the site.
“Every time we would come to Geelong I would make them stand underneath that street sign with me and we take a photo of the family,” Leonie explains.
“They would cry ‘Why?’ and I’d scream ‘Because it’s your mother’s ancestral home’.”
In her childhood, Leonie’s brothers and sisters were also scattered across many other orphanages.
She would catch up with her closest brother at nearby St Augustine’s – now Christian College’s Highton campus – once a week but recollects being denied a visit when one of them misbehaved.
Mum, who deserted the family home, stopped visiting Leonie when she was aged just 11.
The relationship was quickly eroded and the name Mrs Sheedy replaced the maternal tag.
“It’s very hard to say those words, calling her mother,” Leonie grumbles.
“It was also difficult to be a mother when you haven’t had mother.”
The sister nuns of the orphanage were never the mother figures Leonie craved. She remembers them as harsh and regimented.
Bells ruled meal times, bath times, even some toilet breaks, and Saturdays were strictly reserved for washing hair.
Polishing the floors was a daily chore that was just accepted with grim resignation.
Some of the same Geelong Sisters of Mercy first opened the orphanage back in 1933 before government ordered its closure in 1975.
The orphans were in fear of many of the ageing nuns and would eye off new sisters walking into St Catherine’s for the first time.
“When Sister Genevive came, she was different – she smiled at children,” Leonie says with a glimmer in her eye.
“That’s what I always remembered.
“That’s when I was 11 and I thought ‘I’m going to get to know this nun’.”
Leonie never heard the words ‘thank you’ until she received a card from the new sister for “polishing our floors so beautifully”.
“She was such a good nun I named my daughter, who works in a Kathmandu orphanage, after Sister Genevive,” Leonie smiles.
While many former orphans remain bitter and twisted about the system, Leonie picked her life up and fought the good fight.
She now proudly points out that Care Leavers Australia Network (CLAN) was born out of the “backroom of my house” in 2000.
The organisation has since attracted thousands of former state-ward home and foster children of whom more than 20 dedicated volunteers helped get the organisation off the ground.
“We worked for many years for no wages but that’s not why we started it,” Leonie says.
Amid debates during the 1994 international year of the family over the Aboriginal stolen generation, the split-up of past migrant and single-parent families, Leonie demanded an apology from federal parliament for the neglect of orphans.
More than 700 told their stories on the public record at a senate inquiry.
“It took us just 15 months of constantly lobbying politicians for this but we were told it would take us 10 years to get that far,” Leonie says.