Blood on Their Hands — A Synopsis by Warren ‘Rocky’ Porter

Introduction by Lindy Warrell

Warren Porter became an involuntary Ward of the State when he was four years old and was institutionalised and nicknamed Rocky in what he calls hellholes until he turned 18. For a lad who had no formal schooling, Warren is now a long-term member of Sand Writers in Goolwa, South Austalia and has written two books. The first, Brutalised is pictured below, the second is A Tormented Life. Blood on Their Hands is a holding title for this, the synopsis of Warren’s third book.

You can find more on Warren’s adult life and discover his joy as an adult, even in hardship as he tells his story of working on the Trans Australia Line as a railway fettler in his piece called Heading Out Along the Line. Warren has led a remarkable life, and his stories highlight and expose essential aspects of Australia’s history.

The Synopsis — Blood on Their Hands

Upwards, and possibly more than 500,000 boys and girls during the last century spent most of their childhood growing in institutions run by governments and the churches; hellholes as they were known. Four-hundred and fifty thousand of these children were Australian, 40,000 Indigenous and 10,000 were those sent out to Australia from England under the child migration scheme. How these children were dealt with by bureaucracies and laws meant to protect them is encapsulated in what’s written below.

For good or bad, many, many children were sent forth into the unknown, with a brief history of each one being presented to the superintendent in charge of the institution they were to remain in. There had been many reasons for why this happened to children: being born to single mothers, domestic violence, divorce, separation and family poverty. And for those made Wards of the State, it was mainly because these children were deemed uncontrollable, neglected or in mortal danger that landed them in institutions.

But, not all children finished up in these hell holes for having done something wrong. No. It was just the circumstances in which they found themselves; they were classified as status offenders!

For most children sent to these hell holes like me, life for them was never the same ever again. Years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and backbreakingly hard child slave labour forever live within our minds. We cannot escape the memory of the shocking atrocities we were forced to endure throughout those childhood years of ours.

There are also the memories of the hundreds of once innocent boys and girls who disappeared from out of those hell holes, never to have been seen or heard of ever again. They are buried there, in unmarked graves beneath those very grounds! The blood of these missing boys and girls is in the hands of the bureaucrats responsible for their disappearance.

By the time it came for us to be released back out into the community, we’d gained an inheritance of moral confusion, abiding anger, psychological scars, depression, distrust, recurring nightmares and the determination never again to allow anyone to treat us the way those criminals treated us as children!

It was sickening to learn that many who developed severe emotional problems and depression committed suicide. Others became addicted to hard drugs and alcohol; many went on to become some of Australia’s most hardened violent criminals. A lot of girls became prostitutes. Many to this very day, are wasting their lives away in prisons and mental institutions! And there are others I know of who still carry a chip on their shoulders, even after all these years.

Over the years, there have been many inquiries into the abuse of us children. It was found that most had suffered all forms of abuse (some not mentioned above). Children were left so hungry they were forced to eat scraps out of bins; others were only permitted to take a bath once a week and in shared water, same with taking a shower.

Children were locked in dark places to be punished so severely as to draw blood.

Children were used as guinea pigs by the Commonwealth Department of Health, injecting us with full adult doses of vaccines, mainly to trial influenza vaccines and antigens for toxic effects. Tests were done first on us before allowing them to be used on children out in the wider community. These vaccines failed to protect us, the institutional children. Instead, we developed adverse reactions, mainly that of vomiting and abscesses.

There weren’t too many of us when as children in those fucking institutions, ever got the chance of receiving an education!

Over the many years I spent growing up in those notorious hell holes, I got to know hundreds of children and found most had been honest, decent boys and girls, who should never have been in these miserable joints in the first place. The authorities believed that these children were neglected and abused in their own homes.

Those fucking Morons! Why couldn’t they’ve gotten into those stupid heads of theirs, that even if these children were being abused at home, the abuse they suffered at home was nothing compared to the rapes and the brutality committed by the parasites in charge of the hell holes these innocent children were sentenced too.

This story is dedicated to the thousands of boys and girls who, like my dear brother Graham, sadly never had the chance to tell their stories about the rapes and the brutality they endured while as prisoners in those concentration camps. Concentration camps for children!

I blame these atrocities for so many children now laying graves. May they RIP.

AUTHOR BIO