Stateline New South Wales

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Our story last week documenting the cruelty, the abuse and the humiliation of those who went through the Parramatta Girls' Industrial School provoked a huge response.

Many former inmates who have kept the terrible memories within themselves told us the bravery of those women now coming forward had inspired them to finally come to terms with their past.

Sharon O'Neill reports.

JANE FRANCICA: I just had such anxiety, and, you know, it all came back to me.

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: Horrifying, terrible.

I shouldn't have been sent there in the first place.

LANA CARROL: They hurt our mother, you know.

That's our blood.

JOANNA PENGLASE: It's devastating.

The effect is devastating.

SHARON O'NEILL: Just how many girls went through that devastating experience of life at the Parramatta Girls' Industrial School is impossible to know.

There's been no official interest in finding out, no research on the numbers, no information on what happened to those so-called uncontrollable girls.

What we do know, however, is following last week's Stateline story on what really went on behind the walls of this institution, the response was overwhelming, as women like Charmaine McMahon saw her own life as a young frightened girl flash before her eyes.

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: It was a nightmare.

The people that ran the place were very cruel, mentally and physically, and nobody should have to put up with that, and I was only 15, so I was only -- I was a young, innocent girl, mixed up, but not through my fault.

SHARON O'NEILL: Charmaine McMahon arrived at Parramatta Girls' Home on her 15th birthday, just a few years after this incident took place.

WOMAN: I waited until dark.

Then all of a sudden you'd hear the keys clanging, coming down the steps.

I would cower.

SHARON O'NEILL: I'm assuming here that an assault took place in this shower room on you -- a sexual assault?

WOMAN: Yes.

SHARON O'NEILL: The crimes that were committed in this place were the end result of a total dehumanisation of the girls that were sent here -- a humiliation that began with the most common things.

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: There were men running the place.

No privacy.

No doors on the toilets.

When we had to go and the officer was there, we had to ask for the toilet paper, because she gave us the toilet paper -- two sheets.

Showering -- no doors on the showers.

We had to show our bodies before we went to the shower.

Very humiliating.

SHARON O'NEILL: So no dignity?

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: None whatsoever.

None whatsoever.

SHARON O'NEILL: Last week on Stateline, these women described the daily rituals of beatings, and the common practice of being locked away in small cells for long periods of time.

MARJORIE WOODROW: My nose was broken.

They took me into the jail with a bleeding nose and I stayed there all night with it bleeding.

No-one came to see if I was alright.

I nearly bled to death.

SHARON O'NEILL: This week we heard similar stories.

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: Many times I was smacked across the face, pushed for giving dirty looks, which I did quite a lot.

That was my way of rebelling, I guess.

I was locked in what I call the dungeon, but I think it's called the holding room -- it was called the holding room, which stunk.

I remember the smell.

And we'd have to -- if you wanted to go to the toilet, which I did, you'd have to do it in there, and I remember being in there for quite some time, and I was in there quite a lot.

KYLIE SCOTT: I feel angry and sad.

SHARON O'NEILL: Charmaine McMahon has relived the horror of Parramatta Girls' Home with the support of her two daughters.

It's not the first time they've heard their mother's story, but it's the closest they've come to seeing it.

LANA CARROLL: I feel sad for all the girls -- like my mum especially, but all of them.

They all went through the same thing, but you just don't hear about it.

Only we know because it's our mother, but there's a lot of other women going through the same thing.

SHARON O'NEILL: Jane Francica is one of those women.

JANE FRANCICA: It was just a frightening experience and I think I just might have just kept it in, you know, after all these years, but when I saw it --

SHARON O'NEILL: When Jane saw our story last week, the brutal memories of her time at Parramatta in the early 1960s came flooding back.

JANE FRANCICA: I remember one of the men just called me up to his office one day for something that I hadn't done, and next minute he just punched me and nearly broke my tooth, and then they put me in -- it was a room, it was called isolation, and they just gave me bread and water and they just threw a mattress in the middle in the night and --

SHARON O'NEILL: Was that the first time anyone had punched you ever?

JANE FRANCICA: Yes.

SHARON O'NEILL: You'd never experienced any brutality like that in your life?

JANE FRANCICA: Nothing, no.

JOANNA PENGLASE: Every day at Clan we get letters, e-mails and phone calls from people who tell us similar sort of stories.

SHARON O'NEILL: Joanna Penglase and her colleague Leonie Sheedy have heard the secrets.

Together they run a support group called Clan, and they've just successfully lobbied the Australian Senate to hold an inquiry into the way children in this country have been treated by institutions.

JOANNA PENGLASE: This absolutely common experience for people of my generation and older and younger is simply not known, so we felt we had to have an inquiry so that people could come forward and tell their story, so that their story could be acknowledged, so the history could be written down and so that some idea of the magnitude of the effect of this system of care could be assessed.

SHARON O'NEILL: What do you think should happen?

Should governments be blamed?

Should individuals be blamed?

LANA CARROLL: There's always someone that should be blamed.

KYLIE SCOTT: I think the Department of Community Services.

LANA CARROLL: Yeah.

KYLIE SCOTT: I mean, even the records -- there's no records of a lot of where my mother was.

We've got the documentation and it wasn't even put down that she was in Parramatta, so I think that they knew that something was wrong.

They knew.

SHARON O'NEILL: But what of the individuals employed by the department who committed crimes against these girls over many decades?

Stateline has been given the names of some former officers and doctors, but for legal reasons they cannot be broadcast.

The Senate inquiry, however, with the protection of parliamentary privilege will have no such restrictions.

JOANNA PENGLASE: Certainly, if people can be discovered, the so-called carers of the era can be discovered, to have committed criminal acts, they certainly should be pursued as any criminal should be, and it may well be that criminal charges will come out of the inquiry.

SHARON O'NEILL: The man who hit you in Parramatta, you ran into him some years back.

Can you tell me about that?

JANE FRANCICA: Oh, dear.

Um, yeah.

Yeah, I was shopping and I recognised him and I just said to him, "Do you remember me?", and he just looked at me and he went as white as a sheet, and then my daughter came -- because at that stage, I didn't tell her, you know.

I just felt like screaming at him, telling him how cruel and it didn't give me a chance to explain or -- because it's affected me now, as I've got older, to express myself, you know.

SHARON O'NEILL: Last October when Coral Pombo placed this ad in the 'Koori Mail' looking for girls who went to the industrial school, she started the process of revealing a terrible secret in this State's history.

In September she's planning a reunion of all the girls who suffered inside these walls.

Charmaine McMahon will be there, and she's hoping she'll meet up with a very special friend she hasn't seen for almost 40 years.

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: I became friendly with a girl.

Her name was Shirley Smith.

And I've been trying to contact her through the daily paper for quite some months now and haven't had any success.

SHARON O'NEILL: Tell me about your friendship with Shirley.

Was she a soul mate for you in Parramatta?

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: She was, yep.

Yep, she was.

I didn't sort of make -- like, I was friends with everybody.

I didn't have a problem with the girls there, but she was the one that -- yes, she was my soul mate.

SHARON O'NEILL: She helped you get through it?

CHARMAINE MCMAHON: Yep.

SHARON O'NEILL: It's just another fun day in the park for 6-year-old Alyssa Jane.

What she doesn't realise is that like so many women across this State, the silent suffering that her grandmother has had to endure for so long is finally coming to an end.

JANE FRANCICA: I think I've kept it inside me for so long, it's sort of I feel good now because I can sort of get it out of my chest and I hope it helps a lot of the women out there.