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Allegations
of Abuse in Institutions |
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Late last year, as the
memories of the violence during his time at the school plunged him deeper
into depression, Fraser began writing them down and talking to other former
cadets about their experiences. Fraser, now a
50-year-old project manager living in Perth, posted his account - based on
official documents and cadets' experiences - on the internet last Sunday. It unleashed a flood of
emotion and hundreds of revelations from former cadets. His descriptions of
sexual, physical and psychological abuse at the school over three decades -
including the alleged cover-up of the death of cadet Grant Bain - were so
compelling that Defence Minister Mark Burton instigated an urgent inquiry
into the allegations. Now more than 300
former teenage cadets at the school, which operated between 1948 and 1991,
have come forward with complaints about brutality. Like most of the men
who have contacted him, Fraser enjoyed a successful professional life after
leaving the cadet school in 1972. At graduation he felt
an unexpected feeling of accomplishment. "I don't think
there is anybody who went through cadet school who doesn't feel proud to have
survived," he says. The 16-year-old Fraser
then moved straight into active duty as a signalman. Military life outside
Regular Force cadet school seemed a breeze and the young Fraser rose rapidly
through the ranks. He served at Defence
Headquarters and in Singapore as well as being seconded to the Royal
Australian Air Force and the Royal New Zealand Navy. "We really had
some good times. This was what life was about. We were having fun being
soldiers." By 1981 Fraser had
reached the rank of sergeant, but the challenge had gone. He left the Army and
New Zealand and spent the next seven years seeking adventure around the
world. He worked as a soldier
in Rhodesia during the bush war, lived in Germany and throughout the Middle
East. Never staying anywhere
long, Fraser wanted fun and excitement . He talks with pride about those
days. His successful military
career, later work in the private sector, and his family - Fraser married in
South Africa in the 1980s and had two daughters - were sources of
satisfaction. But towards the end of
the 1990s the busy and successful life Fraser had created was starting to
unravel. His marriage broke up and his wife and children moved from Sydney to
Perth. A serious spinal injury
that threatened to leave him confined to a wheelchair brought on panic
attacks. He was referred to a
psychiatrist and the source of his anxiety was traced to his experiences at
cadet school. In 2002 the
hard-working, heavy-smoking Fraser, who had moved to Perth to be close to his
daughters, had a major coronary. Fraser's physical health slowly returned,
but psychologically he began to deteriorate. "I had lost my
will to live. I could sit down and have perfectly rational conversations with
my partner about dying. That went on for a long time." The crisis point came
when Fraser came close to physically hurting someone important to him. "I don't want to
hurt them any more than I have by discussing it. But I will say I'm not a
violent person. Anyone who knows me or has served with me knows that violence
is a last resort for me. So when I got violent, that was like, 'You have
seriously lost the plot'." Fraser fled back to New
Zealand where his sister, a nurse, realised the signs of depression and made
him seek help. But it was his sister in-law who made him look at his life. "She gave me a
bloody good dressing-down and told me to sort my shit out. And that's when
this process began. That was the end of last year." As part of the process
he started writing down episodes from his past and the black memories of what
happened at the cadet school came flooding back, dominating his feelings of
pride at having survived the school. Today, dressed in a
suit with a crisply ironed shirt and polished shoes, Ian Fraser looks every
inch the former military man. In a self-assured manner he appears comfortable
discussing any topic - until the conversation turns to cadet school. His
manner changes. His hands with their bitten fingernails fidget and cigarette
breaks are needed to ease the tension. Fraser says that when
he arrived at the school he was not expecting such a severe culture shock. His first two days in
the Army seemed like a week. During those first days Fraser remembers the
exhaustion and the whispers. The whispers were about
the beatings the recruits would supposedly get from the seniors. "Within the first
week we started to hear things and I thought, nah, they're winding us up,
they're trying to scare the shit out of us." But within a month Fraser
started to realise the stories were true. One by one he and his
fellow cadets began being picked off for barrellings - which were severe
beatings. "It was never one
on one, it was generally one against four or five." Fraser soon found that
the so-called barrackroom discipline was dealt out randomly - usually simply
because you had annoyed the wrong person. He decided he would not
fight back when he was attacked. But that seemed to infuriate his aggressors
and the beatings became worse. Over the first six
months Fraser was barrelled on a weekly basis. He was in hospital
twice after being knocked unconscious. He felt trapped and alone. At his lowest point he
tried to commit suicide by overdosing on aspirin. He received no help or
counselling, just a "bollocking" for being so stupid. "They came very,
very close to finding my breaking point." When Fraser began at the
school in 1971 he thought he was pretty tough. After all, the third of
four children had grown-up in the sometimes rough playgrounds of Porirua. "Ha," he says
now. "I didn't have a clue, I didn't have a clue." Joining the cadet
school had seemed like the perfect escape from Porirua. The school had caught
Fraser's imagination when he saw it glamorised in advertisements on
television. There were promises of
continued education, of trade training and of travel. The backdrop of the
Vietnam War provided the adventure - there was the possibility that Fraser
could soon find himself in an exotic land fighting a real war. Many of the
Army's top-ranked soldiers had begun their career as cadets. "It was a way for
the Army to get them young - nice, young, pliable minds - and develop them
the way they wanted," Fraser says. Competition for a place
was tough. Each year hundreds of 15- and 16-year-old boys applied, hoping to
kickstart their military careers. When Fraser told a
teacher at Porirua College he was applying he was told, "You'll be
bloody lucky. Do you know what the competition is like to get in?" But with the support of
an Army major who lived next door, Fraser persisted and was offered one of
the elusive places. "It was like, here
is a big door opening up, here is an opportunity. So I grabbed it with both
hands." The cadet school did
provide Fraser with career opportunities. But the other legacy -
one of fear and guilt that somehow he was somehow responsible for the abuse
he suffered - has also shaped his life. As it has for another former cadet
who has enjoyed a successful career contacted Fraser this week with a
poignant message: "I am driven by an instilled, ingrained fear of
failure, not by self-confidence." Fraser has found other
former cadets who understand and has talked to them. "Then they started
telling me their stories. And I listened and I thought, 'That's bloody
awful'. Then I started doing the research and the more I learned the more I
became determined that this was totally wrong." Fraser believes the
Army had a duty to protect the cadets' safety. "Yes, we became soldiers
and we became damn good soldiers. But at that time we were children. They
failed us so badly." Fraser says he now has an overwhelming body of
evidence that abuse went on, brutal and endemic. "People have problems
that have lasted them half their lives. In some cases those problems were responsible
for people taking their lives." The death of Grant Bain
at the school in 1981 makes Fraser suspicious of the way other deaths were
reported. He would like to see all the deaths investigated. He has tried to
find out the number of deaths but says he has been stonewalled by the Army. Fraser is not sure
where the matter will end. He would like to see the abuse formally
acknowledged by the Army, victims compensated and given help and those
responsible for more serious offences, such as rape, bought to justice. It is
not only the victims of the abuse who have contacted Fraser. One email was
from a man who, Fraser says, had been involved in one of the attacks on him. During a Sunday night a
handkerchief that Fraser used to mask his sobbing was discovered hidden under
his mattress. Fraser was immediately
labelled a "gunge", meaning dirty - an offence senior cadets
punished with a beating. As Fraser stood to attention, one of the seniors
smashed him in the nose, causing it to explode in blood and leaving Fraser
sprawled on the ground. The attacker has
apologised. Fraser: "He is more cut-up about it than I am." |
