MONTE PIO, MURRAY DWYER ORPHANAGE REUNION
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Thank you to Nancy and Anne and Pat and other organisers for all the effort you’ve gone to over the years putting together these re-unions. And thank you for inviting me to share my own thoughts based on my own time in the orphanage. Some of my thoughts will no doubt reflect some of your own. Some might be different.
I’m not here to rake over coals or to re-create any unhappiness any of us may have felt during our time at Monte Pio or Murray Dwyer. I’d rather focus on the good things that came out of it all. My own life’s moved on in a very positive direction and, in my own way, I’m grateful for the harder times, because they make me realise what a good life I’ve got now. I’ve even made up a saying about that which I’ve passed on to my daughter and son.”
I’ve told them that when the tough times turn up, just remember, ‘The bad days only make the good days better.’
I’m very grateful to all the people who looked after me when I was young, including those nuns that really cared about us. But to me the strongest lingering memory of my time in the orphanage was the loneliness and the emptiness – that thing that chews away on the inside of you when something important is missing. And in our case, it was our parents, and our brothers or sisters that we ached for.
I’ve written my life story down until the age of 22, and I’d like to read you an edited version of the chapter on my time at Murray Dwyer.
MURRAY DWYER ORPHANAGE
The orphanage was a two storey red brick building on the bank of the Hunter River, near a big BHP plant, and it housed boys who kept their sadness to themselves. It was the place I learned to love and fiercely protect my young brother, and it was the place I first learned about a feeling I call ‘The Empties’ – when your emotional tank runs dry and you just sort of shut down and don’t know what to feel, so you feel nothing.
Other orphanage kids I can remember were an Aboriginal kid named Eric Hodges who was my best mate, Michael Akers – who I believe later became a priest, Gordon Waters and his brothers Don and Larry, Michael McGrath, and a kid named Lee Kerr.
The sisters who ran the orphanage were the Daughters of Charity and they wore starched white, three-pointed ‘Flying Nun’ hats, long black habits and squeaky black boots. I can’t remember all their names, but there were two I remember clearly.
One was a lovely lady, very kind and gentle and nice-looking. But she also commanded respect – she was nobody’s pushover. Really she was the perfect people manager. She got us to do our jobs and behave – as well as boys can be expected to – without a lot of fuss.
The other was very different. I’ll call her ‘Big Sister’. She taught us what the words ‘hard’ and ‘discipline’ mean. She was a very tall strongly-built woman, with a face of grey stone, and it’s difficult to imagine that there was anything soft inside her at all. If you made a mistake, she taught you a lesson – simple as that. Quite sincerely though I’m glad I knew her. Anyone who stepped out of line when she was around got the back of a wooden bannister brush hard and often. It seemed like I stepped out of line a lot, because I felt the numbing wallop of the brush regularly.
The orphanage morning ritual involved getting up in the dark, freezing cold early Newcastle morning and traipsing across the bitumen courtyard to the chapel for prayer, kneeling on bare bony knees on a hard wooden kneeling board and praying to a God who must’ve just been toughening us up.
After prayer, it was back to the refectory for breakfast – usually toast and porridge and Dripping Bread. My best mate, Eric Hodges, used to put heaps of salt on his porridge and everything else, even sweets. I often wonder if the poor bugger eventually killed himself with a salt overdose.
After breakfast, it was into the clothes room to grab some clean clothes for the day. First in, best dressed. The quicker you were, the better the clothes you were wearing for the day. I see the Vinnie’s and Salvo’s bins these days, and it reminds me that’s where my clothes used to come from. It’s a good memory, and I’m one of the many people who’s not scared to put his hand in his pocket for the Salvos or the Vinnies.
Every school day we’d trudge down the road from the orphanage in lines behind one of the nuns to Mayfield West Primary School to learn the three ‘r’s, interspersed with big doses of prayer and other churchy things. While I was there, I did all the things Catholics are supposed to do. I had my Confirmation, First Confession and Holy Communion.
I made a stuff-up of my First Holy Communion and Big Sister made sure I’ll never forget it. All of us boys were in the orphanage chapel when it was time for Communion; I hadn’t had my first communion ceremony yet and, as Catholics know, you’re not allowed to receive communion until you have. I was just sitting there watching all the bigger kids go down to get the ‘host’ on their tongue, when Big Sister nodded at me. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do, so I just sat there looking stupid. So she nodded at me again. Then I started to think “Geez, she must think I’ve had my first communion and she wants me to go down there, and if I don’t go, she’ll belt me. Then again, if I do go, God’ll know and he’ll probably belt me.”
I sat there looking stupid and scared for a little while longer, then decided that God would probably go easier on me than Big Sister would, so off I went, down to the kneeling board in front of the altar. I knelt down and the priest said some words and put the host on my tongue. It tasted something like a corn flake to me. After that, I went back to my pew and sat down – followed all the way by the icy stare of Big Sister.
“Aw no. She knows.” I thought. “Now I’m in the shit with God and Big Sister.”
Big Sister didn’t let me down. She gave me a good flogging with her favourite bannister brush afterwards. Nothing really bad happened for a while though, so I reckoned God had let me off.
My Confirmation ceremony went off without a problem. A man that I’d only just met was my ‘sponsor’ for the occasion, and I knelt down and kissed the Bishop’s ring, just like you’re supposed to. Thank God I got that one right.
First Confession ceremony must’ve gone okay as well, because I don’t remember being flogged for it. What I can remember though, was one of my later confessions. I’d been playing marbles in the playground one day at school and one of the kids, not an orphanage kid, was fudging, which means cheating, and I told him so. He didn’t like me telling him and he came out swinging, so I gave him the old one-two my Nanna had taught me, and finished it off by throwing a marble at him, which sadly hit him in the head. Down went he in a heap with a big lump on his head, and that was the end of that. I didn’t feel guilty about the fight, but I did feel guilty about the marble. Not too long after that, it was confession time, so I went into the confession box, and the conversation went as follows.
“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. These are my sins. I hit a kid in the head with a marble.”
It was all innocent, honest, and well-meaning from my side of the box, but when I look back, the priest in the other side of the box must’ve nearly wet his pants laughing. The long and the short of it was I had to say twenty five Hail Marys for penance. Being a Catholic from the wrong end of town was hard work sometimes.
It certainly wasn’t all doom and gloom at the orphanage. A lot of us were good mates, and after school we’d all line up behind the nuns and trudge back to Murray Dwyer to have a bit of a muck around before tea. There was an old see-saw in the bitumen playground and, now and again, a soccer ball would turn up so we’d kick the skin off it. We weren’t allowed outside the brick courtyard though – it was like a big prison yard.
But the place we probably had most fun was the Rec. Room. It was a big wooden-floored area on the bottom floor of the building. Apart from running around stupid like boys do, we’d dig up a piece of cardboard box from somewhere and pull each other around on it flat-out. Now and again, you’d hear a terrible scream when some poor bugger slid off the cardboard and got a big wooden splinter in his bum. Yeeoow! Then he’d be off to one of the Sisters to have it dug out.
New kids were easy meat for a while, until they learned to treat everything with suspicion. For instance, one of us would say “Hey, you hop in that old cupboard over there and we’ll show you a trick.” In they’d get, and we’d lock the door and a few of us would grab the cupboard and shake the hell out of it, then tip it over and belt the hell out of it. Then we’d open the door and the poor bugger would fall out, looking like he’d been wrung through the wringer. You only caught ‘em once.
After mucking around for a while, we’d be told to wash and go for tea. The tucker wasn’t bad in the orphanage. The problem was, we could never get enough. Growing boys need food and a bloody lot of it. We always reckoned we were “starvin’.” My two favourites were Dripping Bread and Gramma Pie. Dripping Bread, as all us old orphanage kids know, is bread fried in good old animal fat. It’s probably the quickest way to get a heart attack, so it’s been off the menu for years, but it tasted bloody good – especially with lots of salt and pepper. If you didn’t already know, Gramma is a type of pumpkin and some people call it Pumpkin Pie. But it was Gramma Pie at the orphanage and I still love it. It’s got sultanas in it as well, and it’s bloody beeyoodiful with custard.
Some of the orphanage kids talked about the good food and the fun they had with their ‘Holiday people’ and my little brother Russ and I were always going to go with one or other of them, but it never turned out that way.
After tea was shower time. That was a fun-filled experience, especially in winter. Newcastle winters are bloody cold, and we never got a hot shower at Murray Dwyer. Maybe the big kids who showered before us got the hot water, I don’t know. The best us little fellas could hope for was lukewarm. The showers didn’t have partitions, so there was no privacy.
After showers and dressing in St Vinnie’s pyjamas, we could head down to the TV room and watch the old black and white telly for a while until we were all sent to our dorms.
Night time was the worst at the orphanage. That was when the emptiness hit the hardest. The dorms were big dark open rooms with dozens of beds side by side, no partitioning, and cold bare floors. I was lucky; my little brother was in the next bed on my left, so I knew he was okay. I can still hear the nuns’ big black boots squeaking as they swished through the dark dorm with a torch.
I’ll always be glad I went to Murray Dwyer. For all its coldness, the experience taught me to really appreciate the small luxuries in life that so many take for granted.
It also introduced me to real brotherly love. In there, I think through necessity, my brother Russ and I became very close. He would get very insecure and upset, and I would tell him that I loved him. While we were growing up after that, I had no control over myself if anyone tried to hurt him. He was my little brother, and it was my instinct and my job to protect him.
The orphanage closed down a couple of years after we left and the old brick building was eventually demolished. Some years ago I contacted the people who kept the records, and they sent me documentation of our attendance. It’s just yellowy old paper, but it’s a reminder of when times were much skinnier.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I’d like to say that no doubt like all of yours, my life’s had its ups and downs – and that includes before and after my time at the orphanage. But I’m a happy and fulfilled person now and that’s what’s important, so I don’t dwell too much on the downs.
But since our backgrounds are similar, I respect you, and I owe it to you to be honest. So I will say I know what abuse is. I know what cruelty is. I know what violence is. And I know what neglect is. But over time, from those things that you absorb, but which brutalise you as a child, that leave you feeling lost and without a rudder and with that sense of emptiness that an orphanage kid knows, I learned empathy. And I learned to love and protect and respect decent people. And I eventually learned again about trust.
And I clung to those qualities like a life raft in a rough sea, because I knew with a rare certainty that they were good qualities. And they offered me stability. And without realising it, on the way to get where I am, I’ve sought out the kind of people who had those qualities, and I’ve tried to steer clear of those who don’t.
I’ve learned to appreciate and be very grateful for the simplest of things; like a hot shower and a full belly. And I’ve learned that true friendship is as important to me as the blood that runs through my veins.
When I think about my childhood, before, after, and including my time at the orphanage, I stop and look back at that small person and I’m proud of him. Just as you should all be proud of yourselves.
We are those kids.
We were all just small children with small feet, but we trod a long path, sometimes all alone, and we just kept going.
And we made it all the way here.
Thank you.
Patrick ‘Rick’ Sullivan – Resident, Murray Dwyer Orphanage 1963