A Healing and Hope Impact Story

Trauma is not suffered by the victim survivor alone - it pervades all their relationships and sits with their families in complex and differing ways. Healing and Hope compassionately and innovatively supports victim survivors and their families - this is one such story.

I'm the sibling of a little primary school boy 'caught up in the Highton tragedy'.  This is my story.

Euphemisms abound when we talk of trauma - we lacked the language, or the means to call it out then. These were things we never spoke about in the late 80s, early 90s - and who would listen anyway?

It took years for us to become aware of what happened to my brother, and for years longer, I buried it. In my early 20s, my mum thought the biggest challenge to my relationship would be when my brother died. We were expecting it, even then.

He's lived longer than any of us had thought he would. But what is the value of being alive if life has no joy? A couple of years ago, just around the time when Healing and Hope was starting up, my brother said something that set off warning bells. Talk of suicide.

I called the school and spoke with a director way past the end of the working day. Pleaded with her: "I just need you to know, my brother is one of the Highton kids, from the boarding house. I need him to be counted in those numbers. I'm scared he'll die, and no one will know what happened to him."

We didn't talk about it in the family. My parents implied that it wasn't my story to tell, and since my brother couldn't, wouldn't, speak about it, the topic was quarantined - and yet, it has affected every aspect of my adult life.

My brother has paranoid schizophrenia, PTSD, and depression. He's a hoarder. I have cared for him since I moved back to the city I studied in, first babe only a few weeks old.

As my children have grown up, my brother's skillsets for navigating the activities of daily life have diminished. He cannot manage to take care of any item of responsibility - he loses his house keys several times a week. A mobile phone passes in and out of his possession in a matter of hours. He collects money from a bank, in person, daily. He has been on the brink of eviction from state housing for a decade, interspersed with the occasional stints in psychiatric hospitals and prison. He has been on a disability support pension for around the same amount of time. I advocate for him in every aspect of his life.

Two years ago, when that suicide talk rocked my world, startling me out of buried pain, I started therapy through the school, and spoke often with Kate Parsons from Healing and Hope.

Kate had been the young matron at Highton who knew us all - my siblings, and the other kids affected by the Highton tragedy. Kate patiently supported me via long phone calls, helping me navigate the everyday disasters befalling my brother. I sent her long emails, when late at night, I needed someone to know what I was dealing with on a daily, weekly, basis. She was and is always there for me - no matter the time of day or night.

My brother has taken up an ever-increasing space in my life. I work full time. I have three teenagers. I manage a house and garden. I cook all the meals, do all the laundry. I'm busy well before my caring responsibilities for my brother cut in. I clean my brother's unit to help him pass his inspections with the Housing Trust.

Healing and Hope hear it all. The minutia, the daily stresses. Recognising what I am doing for my crushed, broken brother, they support me to support him. They have helped to keep him from homelessness.

For a few months, they paid for a house cleaner to lift the pressure on me. I would never have paid for a house cleaner myself. That assistance gives me back some hours in a fortnight, helping to buy me some sanity.

With the support of Healing and Hope, I have been able to lift my focus from not only dealing with the everyday problems, but address some of the bigger issues my brother is dealing with. It's constant, unrelenting, exhausting, thankless, joyless work.

My mother attended a Healing and Hope Mothers' Retreat Day in late 2022 and a second event recently. It was raw, difficult, important - a chance to hear from others. With significant encouragement, and no intention of speaking, my father most unwillingly attended the Healing and Hope Fathers' Retreat event in 2023. He came back affected, more aware of the challenges my brother has faced. An anger had awoken in him. It hurt them both, but it helped. As a family we are now better at communicating with one another about my brother's situation - a willingness to share. Healing and Hope, with kindness and compassion, brought together parents of survivors and has

shown my parents, and me, that we are not alone.

My father came to Australia from the UK as a 10-year-old. He studied at GGS. Then we all did. In all, almost 20 living family members have been through GGS, with some from generations before. My father had generously donated to the school but now feels as if he sacrificed his only son.

Healing and Hope is the olive branch extended by the school. The grace to give, the grace to reach toward, to receive what is offered. For my family, it has been like a bridge, an opportunity to reunify with a school I once loved, my family once loved. The school released me to a world a bright young thing, brimming with energy and promise, ready to make an impact. It has been so complex, then, to wrestle with the growing awareness, clarifying over time, that the troubles my brother has been facing had stemmed from the damage done to him as a child at the school.

It's been hard for me to accept that dozens of the kids I knew in the boarding house were affected. It had been awful to trudge through the mud of my brother's life, but realising the enormity, the scale of the damage, was incredibly distressing for me. Kids who had died by misadventure or of their own choice. Gorgeous, funny, beautiful souls whose futures were crushed, who were living like shells, broken like my brother, each in different ways. These kids should have grown up to be as successful as their classmates.

We cannot change what happened, but we can change how we respond to this damage, individually, and as a community.

Acknowledging the pain, suffering and ongoing trauma of our classmates. Recognising we may never know who has been affected. Making meaningful, genuine efforts to give dignity, hope and promise to their lives, and the lives of their families.

Extending that olive branch, and receiving it, in good faith. We need to trust that we are each doing what we can, from the standpoints we are working from. My story is not unique - there are many OGGs who have suffered horrific abuse while students at GGS, and not all are able to come forward to talk about their experience or raise their need for ongoing help with the school. And amongst us OGGs, there are people who have excelled in their professional fields, and now have the opportunity, the capacity, to support Healing and Hope to provide some support for their classmates.

In so many ways, there is the sense of 'there but for the Grace of God, go I', when we consider the scale of child sexual abuse that occurred at GGS and the number of teachers implicated over decades. While the historical abuse uncovered in the Royal Commission did not reflect a positive light on the senior executive and administrative staff in positions of authority at the time, the school today is making significant efforts to address the wrongs of the past and seeks to be known now for the way it is responding to, and supporting, former students who were abused.

Perhaps as former classmates, dorm mates and friends, in the OGGs community, we're also able to donate to Healing and Hope, the non-profit established to provide on-going support for victim survivors of childhood sexual abuse and their families.

I acknowledge the complexity of this issue, that it affects us all differently, and I really appreciate the support I've received along the way from Healing and Hope to keep my brother alive.