Marlene’s story

A succession of government inquiries dating back to the 1934 McCulloch Report (New South Wales) have indicated over half a million Australians experienced childhood in an orphanage, children’s home, training school, institution or some other form of out-of-home care during the 20th century, inside environments of excessively cruel and brutal institutionalised violence. Those environments were shrouded in secrecy and complemented by inadequate training, staffing levels and poor organisation for those assigned as state-sponsored care-givers.

Children were placed in state-sponsored care after being orphaned, being born to a single mother, divorce, separation, poverty or family disintegration resulting from domestic violence or their parents’ inability to cope with hardship and crisis. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were separated from their families, in most cases forcibly, as part of an official assimilation program orchestrated by successive state and federal governments.

Most children placed in state-sponsored care were made wards of the state through no fault of their own after being charged with being uncontrollable, neglected or being “exposed to moral danger”. Many of these vulnerable children were subjected to an institutionalised reign of terror that saw childhood innocence replaced with fear and psychological degradation. They were state-raised in an incarceration process that created unintended and devastating consequences during their adult lives.

A national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families conducted by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission resulted with an April 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, that revealed a stolen generation had been removed from their families and placed in state-sponsored care as part of official government policy and practices that continued until the early 1970s. A high proportion of Indigenous children who were separated from their families under these policies and practices in turn had their own children removed from their care.

The predominant aim of the forcible removal of Indigenous babies and children was to absorb and assimilate the children into the wider non-indigenous community so that their cultural values and identities would disappear.

The forcible removal of children from their families on the grounds of their race was government sanctioned genocide unique to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander race. No other Australians were subject to the same discriminatory assimilation policies from the day they were born. It was also believed that children of “mixed descent”, particularly those with “fairer skin”, could be easily assimilated into the broader non-Indigenous community under the white Australia policies. Marlene Riley became one of those statistics.

December 18, 1958 Marlene was snatched from her family at Gunnedah, NSW, and made a ward of the state. She was 10-years-old. Her younger sister and two brothers, Christine, Gary and Steven, suffered the same fate. They were charged with being neglected and destitute. The state separated the children in different institutions in the care of the NSW Minister for Child Welfare. It was a care that failed to materialise for Marlene who desperately tried to reunite with her family.

Marlene’s forced separation from her family and siblings created an angry and rebellious teenager. On numerous occasions she ran away from institutions. Those incidents resulted with NSW Child Welfare authorities charging her with being uncontrollable and being exposed to moral danger.

On September 8, 1960 Marlene was given a General Committal and sent to the Training School for Girls at Parramatta as punishment for running away. There the rebellious 14-year-old became one of the youngest ringleaders involved in the 1961 riots. Marlene climbed onto the roof with another girl and refused to come down after witnessing the superintendent viciously attack a pregnant girl. Although the cause of the riot was buried in a bureaucratic whitewash Marlene still vividly remembers the reason:

“The riot resulted from Superintendent Johnson making Barbara Price pregnant and trying to induce a miscarriage by bashing and kicking the girl in the stomach.”

Marlene’s clear and incisive analysis of the riot was an embarrassment to the NSW Child Welfare Department which simply adopted an expedient and cost effective containment for those children involved in the rebellion, who were said to be difficult and unco-operative.

The concept of a mini Alcatraz for girls, based on the US experiment where a strict regime of isolation and institutionalised violence in a secluded maximum-security environment had been employed to punish, was considered the most appropriate model. The Institution for Girls at Hay was set up in the century-old Hay Jail and opened in July 1961. The purpose of the converted jail in the remote town of Hay was a well-kept secret but the girls who were sent there never forgot the horror they experienced.

Following the riots NSW child welfare authorities were determined to suppress Marlene’s rebellious nature and deter others from following her lead. She became one of the first teenagers to be incarcerated inside the new Institution for Girls at Hay.

On September 24, 1961, 14-year-old Marlene Riley was forcibly drugged with mind numbing Largactil, handcuffed and spirited away in the dead of night to the converted jail in the remote town of Hay. “When they walked into the cell that night, it was out of the ordinary, so I knew something was up. They just said to me, "Marlene, we want you to take this medication. I said, 'No'. And I knew it was a psych drug and I wouldn't take it, so they said, ‘We're gonna have to - if you won't take it willingly, we're going to have to do it by force’."

For the next 13 years hundreds of teenagers would suffer a similar fate.

At Hay the girls were subjected to a harsh and regimented existence in which they weren't allowed to talk to one another and had to march everywhere with eyes downcast. The girls were locked in their cells at 6.40pm where they had to stay in their beds until morning and were forced to sleep facing the door. If they rolled over during the night the guards rattled the door and got them out of bed. They were made to stand beside their bed for an hour before they returned to bed.

Marlene remembers one particular night a sadistic senior officer tried to sexually assault her in the cell:

“He opened up my cell door. Of course, you jump to attention straightaway, eyes down to the floor, facing the door, and he started talking to me. ‘Hello, Marlene. I'm here to see you. You lay down on that mattress and get your pants off’.

“I looked up at him and looked him in the eye and said ‘No’ and he said, ‘You will. I've had all the other girls here and I'm going to have my way with you too’. I screamed out; ‘He's trying to rape me!’ and the other girls started screaming too. It was the longest 5 or 10 minutes in my life.”

Four weeks after the attempted rape the girls were interviewed by Edward Moylen from the NSW Child Welfare Department in Sydney. Marlene Riley was accused of making the whole thing up, but in the following days she recalls the officer involved left the institution and never came back.

Marlene was transferred from Hay back to Parramatta in June 1962 and an assessment for her release was considered: "She is by nature a rebellious girl and has found it difficult to maintain acceptable response. However she has tried hard and can be said to have satisfied minimum requirements. She has now been detained for almost twelve months on this committal and the superintendent considers she could be given further trial in the community. Her discharge has been recommended." (Letter from Director to Under Secretary August 27, 1962).

Ministerial approval was given for Marlene's discharge and she was released on September 5, 1962.

The tragic disintegration of the Riley family by the NSW State Government continued to impact on Marlene as her younger sister and brother, Christine and Gary, also followed the incarcerating child care process through the institutional systems at Hay and Tamworth respectively.

Gary, who was later shot during a Sydney underworld feud in 1983, left the NSW Child Welfare system as an 18-year-old apprentice in violent crime. Convictions for armed robbery and violence resulted with a lengthy criminal record. It also included classification as an intractable prisoner that earned his transfer to the Alcatraz of the NSW prison system at Grafton.

Gary Riley was 30 when Gregory Francis McCarthy gunned him down in 1983. McCarthy was also a product of the state-run NSW child-care process. For Marlene the disintegration of her family and the death of her brother was the product of the brutalising child-care system that stole her childhood.

“The daily ritual of floggings and bashings took its toll but we would say to each other; ‘Try not to cry. Don’t let the bastards see you cry’”. Marlene recalls. “I remember standing there and trying not to get knocked off my feet but I wouldn’t cry. When they locked me in isolation that is where I would cry. I am 56-years-old now and I still find it hard to cry.”