Darwin must face its ugly history

Downtown Darwin's construction boom has seen new developments shoot up at record speed, but one site remains untouched.

A parcel of land sits between two major roads about 10 kilometres from the CBD, edged by a tropical pandanus palm forest.

"That's a bad place," the woman says.

Sandra Kitching is standing on the former site of the Retta Dixon Home, where she spent several years growing up as a mixed-race Aboriginal ward of the state in the care of the Christian Aborigines Inland Mission (now Australian Indigenous Ministries, or AIM).

Although the eight residential cottages have been levelled, with their concrete foundations all that physically remain, the memories are a living thing, enormous and sometimes overwhelming.

Ms Kitching won't go down to the treeline because that's where a chook shed once stood, inside which numerous children were molested and raped at the hands of one of their carers.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse this week wrapped up almost two weeks of hearings investigating the home, which operated from 1946 until 1980.

Nine men and women, part of a generation of lost adults, often wept all the way through devastating accounts of the way their lives were ruined by the sexual, physical and emotional abuse they endured in the care of missionaries charged with their protection.

They spoke of their inability to properly love their children, their struggles with drugs and alcohol, their lack of an education, marriages torn apart, all of them marked for life by their experiences at the home.

But they are a mere sampling of the many, many others who suffered silently.

"The house parents said prayers regularly and would pray for our sins, but it seemed they did not pray for their own sins," a witness told the commission.

Children were chained to their beds unable to sit or sleep for minor infractions. A girl was stabbed on the hands with a can opener until she bled for not properly cleaning a kitchen. Girls and boys were kicked and tied up like dogs, force-fed their own vomit, and beaten until they could barely walk.

One child was tied to a clothesline, had faeces smeared on her face and was deliberately scalded with hot water by her carer.

And then there were the rapes.

Children as young as seven were raped and molested by other children at the home, which had become a highly sexualised closed environment, the commission heard.

Girls were gang-raped by other residents, and older boys groomed younger boys to be their sexual playthings.

Many of these older abusers were in turn sexually abused by carer Donald Henderson, witnesses said.

Now 78 and living in Queensland, he was admitted to a mental institution a few weeks before the hearings and did not appear.

He was committed to stand trial in 1976 for the abuse of several children, but an "inept" prosecutor dropped the charges due to a lack of evidence.

Former residents say Henderson intimidated the witnesses out of giving evidence.

In 2002, he was again committed to stand trial to face charges brought against him by a different group of Retta Dixon alumni, but prosecutors dropped the case the month before the trial was due to begin, citing a "latent ambiguity" in the allegations.

But the commission heard this week that the trial could have proceeded on at least half of those charges, and that prosecutors were too hasty in abandoning the case.

Former residents have been emboldened by the painful process of sharing some of their deepest hurt with the commission, and by feeling heard, they said, something valued highly by people who had spent decades fearing authority and thinking their story wouldn't be believed.

"It has been an opportunity for our people to be heard in an open way without being judged, for many of our witnesses to begin ... taking control of their lives," former resident Sue Roman said.

Not wanting the commission's work to be in vain, on Wednesday she and some others approached Darwin police to see if Henderson could be charged a third time for his alleged crimes at Retta Dixon.

It is not yet known what redress will be offered: most residents have never sought compensation.

AIM's general director Rev Trevor Leggott told the commission he hadn't considered selling part of the organisation's $4.1m property portfolio because he didn't want to curtail mission work he thought was "more constructive" than compensating victims.

A witness known only as AKV said it was time for former residents to stop being so accommodating.

"There is too much humbleness going on ... we are being too kind, too gentle," he said.

He called for the Retta Dixon site to be returned to the former residents and a memorial created.

"How many motor cars go up and down past Retta Dixon Home having no idea what's gone on; meanwhile, (Darwin) has various developments springing up all over the place. It's not good enough to say the place will disappear into history; it's not going to," AKV said.

"We can't deal with the future unless we deal with the past, and the past is right here, right now."