Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (17 page)
Read Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home Online
Authors: David Cohen
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #True Crime, #New Zealand
Easier said than done, of course, but somebody, Doolan realised, had to start the ball rolling, applying the same kind of tough-love to the institutions that the institutions had been dispensing with a fairly free hand for nearly 25 years. ‘Try as you might to change it,’ he said, ‘it’s an unnatural, abnormal environment in which one ends up managing the effect created by that environment as much
as the difficulties that brought these kids to you in the first place.’
All the external messages Doolan was receiving said as much too. Among the eloquent reports he carefully studied was one filed by a social worker, Lainley Cowan, in Wellington, written up in the early 1980s after visiting Kohitere:
When we sat with our young people at lunch, we looked around and there were a lot of others crying — it’s making me sad [now]. When I asked what was happening, [it] was that those young men came from more distant places and they had no contact, not only with their families, but not even the social workers who had sent them there. And … here we were kissing these young men in a Maori way, sitting down with them and bringing greetings from other colleagues … and from their families … and all around us young men were weeping, not having had contact with their families or their social worker for sometimes months … And it just reinforced my feelings … that although we didn’t know what else to do with the young people — and we had precious little to offer — that removing them from everything was not going to help them when they went back.
Much the same tune was being sung by most of those involved in a succession of inquiries and reports commissioned within the department and outside of it during this period of Doolan’s personal awakening, a period in which the Human Rights Commission was also fielding a series of complaints about the treatment of predominantly Maori children in the department’s Auckland operation — complaints that the commission would ultimately uphold.
The first of these inquiries was held on June 11, 1978, at the Trades Hall in Auckland, and was perhaps most notable for being
the only forum of this type to include the testimony of any state wards. Among them was Cruise Epiha, who participated in a depressing question-and-answer session on the experience of being kept in one of Social Welfare’s cellblocks. Here, he said, he was periodically joined by
other fellas who mucked around and kept on getting sent to Secure. The PT area was pretty small. We wore shorts and a T-shirt. I had to undress in front of two or three housemasters when I got there. I was too scared to say I didn’t want to undress in front of any of them. Then you had to have nit stuff rubbed in your head and then into the showers. It was ‘thank you, sir’ all the time. But you aren’t spoken to much, only head nods — out of cell, into shower, out of shower, into cell.
Could you explain the head-nodding?
Oh, he comes in the door after you’ve had your shower. He looks at you, then he nods at your head. ‘Thank you, sir.’ Then you shake your towel out and you go like this [pulls waistband of shorts forward] so he checks you while you stand outside the door, and then he goes like that [nods] again. You go, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and you go back to your room and stand outside your door and then he does that [nod] again and then you go inside the door.
He doesn’t talk to you?
He just nods his head. I knew one guy that was beaten. He was jumped on and hit on his bed for making noises while he was lying on his bed reading a comic. Another boy has fits.
Is he an epileptic?
I don’t know. He’s a state ward.
Did you notice anything about the colour of the staff?
About a quarter of the kids were their colour [indicates white males], mostly they were my colour. The staff were mostly their colour.
This was the kind of thing that broke Doolan’s heart — and ultimately the back of the system he helped oversee.
EPUNI HAD GREAT HOPES THAT IT MIGHT YET
quieten the critics by sticking to its last. The institution believed — or at any rate hoped — that things might be improved by enhancing its physical surroundings.
The late 1970s had already seen a buzz of building activity at Riverside Drive, including new accommodation for clerical and managerial staff and an increase in the facilities devoted to sewing, clothing and food storage, and more was planned. In late 1982 a one-piece fibreglass swimming pool was added.
The following year the department set aside $20,000 for the purchase of a prefabricated building to erect over the pool. A redesigned medical room was built, a dressing room added to the gym, the boys’ bedrooms were carpeted, the driveway resealed and a cafeteria-style layout was introduced in the dining area. Other improvements were successfully sought. Epuni was expanding its operation not so much as if there was no tomorrow, but as if there would be endless tomorrows just as soon as the criticisms swirling outside the institution subsided.
This air of optimistism extended to an impressive ceremony held
on the evening of March 9, 1984 to mark Maurie’s quarter-century at the helm, an upbeat occasion during which three trees were planted to honour the chief’s lifelong dedication to the residence: a rata, a totara and a kauri.
To put it mildly, Epuni’s principal didn’t entirely buy into the way Maori issues were being parlayed down in Wellington. He did not appreciate the way outsiders were accusing the system he worked in of racism. He particularly disliked the way people seemed to be looking at the matter through what he felt was entirely the wrong end of the telescope. On the whole, as he later put it, he believed that the ethnic problem — if the whopping disconnect between an overwhelmingly white system and its largely brown beneficiaries could even be called that — wasn’t so much to do with a Pakeha system failing the nation’s Maori, but rather the nation’s Maori failing to apprehend the Pakeha rules and conditions. The challenge was therefore to educate Maori inmates in how to cope with the various processes of the Pakeha way that these kids were missing out on.
‘They’d come from a rural family where, you know, they were still living in the past with their right legs off the ground,’ he explained. ‘They were urbanised, they were on their own and they didn’t seem able to get back to the family or marae, and as a result they were missing out. They couldn’t actually cope with the times of stress.’ True, there had been meetings with some Maori elders to find more creative ways around the problem, but these usually went nowhere.
‘Why is it,’ Maurie asked one visiting tribal delegation from Masterton, ‘when at a time where I might have had 50 Maori boys through, I’ve had no Chinese boys through?’
They couldn’t say, or at any rate they seemed disinclined to answer.
‘I guess,’ the principal told them, ‘it’s because they’re taught to respect their elders!’
Bowing to the now considerable pressure, though, Epuni did institute an ethnic programme of sorts, for both staff and boys, called taha Maori, which included elementary lessons in the language, bone-carving classes for the inmates and a project aimed at developing a whare wananga using carvers and weavers brought in to work on site.
Doolan was frustrated with Maurie, ‘a lovely guy’, as he put it, ‘but somebody trained in a model of care that left him completely out of his depth in the new environment.’ Epuni itself had long left him cold, too, at least since his experience running the ‘hellhole of a place’ following the big disturbances of the early 1970s.
But Doolan’s frustrations were much wider than that; he felt stymied by most of the residential managers, even by himself, recognising as he did that everyone had become captured by the system they were working in. ‘If anyone was going to be institutionalised it was us,’ he later admitted with a rueful chuckle. ‘Remember that we stayed in those places much longer than the kids did.’ But what pained him the most was the realisation that he still lacked the emotional courage to apply the kind of radical solution that he knew intellectually was now needed.
SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS, IF NOT THAT ELUSIVE
inner resolve, Doolan took to the road, travelling with a group called the Maori Perspectives Committee — a group of senior departmental employees who regularly toured and met with local Maori elders, inviting them to give their perspectives.
Early in 1986 Doolan and his team arrived one evening at Te Takere Marae, near Patea, in south Taranaki. A younger woman at the gathering recognised him from previous encounters, only this time she seemed to sense something was different about the man who represented the residential system that she had come to detest. He was listening more. Didn’t seem at all peremptory.
Perhaps he hadn’t really changed at all, she thought while getting to her feet, but he seemed like someone who wanted to, even as he asked those present for suggestions on how the department’s policies might better be fashioned within the existing set-up. The pair looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then the woman walked over to Doolan, tears now rolling down her cheeks, and started to speak.
‘Mr Doolan,’ she began, ‘with the best will in the world you cannot do this for us.’
Doolan was having problems keeping his eyes free of mist as well. The effect of the woman’s words had been almost devastating. ‘That was when it moved from here to here for me,’ Doolan explained years later, pausing mid-flight during an interview in his native Christchurch to point first at his head and then his heart.
She had brought home, finally, ‘the fact that we couldn’t do it, but also that we were working with the best will in the world. And hearing both of those things meant everything to me.’ It was like the girl who kicked in doors all over again. Only this time, Doolan knew, he had what he needed to make good on the conviction.
THE WOMAN AT THE CENTRE OF THIS PASSING BUT
pivotal scene never fully realised the effect her words caused until nearly a quarter-century after they were uttered. ‘That’s very interesting — I never really knew that,’ Tariana Turia admitted. The Maori Party co-leader, as she had since become, did not appear at all displeased; curious, perhaps, and a little reflective, and possibly a bit puzzled why the penny had taken so long to drop.
In the 1980s Turia and her husband George had taken a very active interest in the state of the children’s residences, in particular the old Holdsworth School in Wanganui (a long-term institution for under-12s established on the site of the former New Zealand Friend’s School, administered by the Quaker Society, that cared for
around 500 boys during its existence) but also the other facilities such as Epuni, from where a significant number of the Holdsworth boys were drawn.
In the beginning their interest was mainly pastoral. The couple would take kids out for afternoon trips and sometimes weekends away up the river to places like Jerusalem. Sometimes they visited the Wanganui institution to put down a hangi. As they got to know the wards, though, they also got to hear their stories, not only about Holdsworth but also the other residences, the whole system, really, and, especially, about what was going down at Lake Alice.
Their feelings deepened. ‘The whole way in which these places functioned felt really abnormal,’ Turia said. ‘I suppose one could have looked at somewhere like Holdsworth as a boarding school in some sense, but the kids weren’t there because they wanted to be there. Nor were they there because their families wanted them to be there. They weren’t happy kids. So yeah, you know, I became very critical of the way the rules were applied, the way in which the system functioned and what I believed was happening to those young people.’
Turia paused for a moment. ‘What was
really
happening, I mean.’
Not that she ever supported the concept of institutional care in the first place. Turia and her husband believed that locking kids up could only be really justified in circumstances where there was a provable case that the action would improve a child’s life and the life of his family. ‘And they can make a family’s life better,’ she added. ‘It’s just that they’ve never done that. They took children away. They would deal with a child in isolation from their family and then they put those children back with their families if and when they thought that they had either punished the child, or the family, sufficiently because of things that they’d done wrong. And they did more damage, in actual
fact, than if they’d have left them alone in the first place.’
Years later these ideas would find expression in one of the policies the impressive minister would most closely be identified with, an ambitious political plan known as Whanau Ora. It was an initiative by which government departments would pay private Maori organisations to deliver welfare services to families, and allow them to determine what those families needed. Initially, at least, the details of how this would be achieved remained a bit fuzzy, but for anyone with eyes to see there was no doubting Turia’s background to the issue.
What about circumstances in which the family
was
the problem? ‘Well,’ Turia replied evenly, ‘kids are really resilient and they’ll tolerate a lot from their parents which they would not tolerate strangers doing to them. And for most of the kids who I know who have been in care, that’s a common theme — you know, it’s one thing to put up with getting a hiding off your father or even your mother but not when it is being dealt out to you by others.’
For her, the ethnic dimensions to the New Zealand experiment were much larger than even the most liberal-minded official from the 1980s — a company in which she included Doolan — ever really imagined. It was in fact little different to the plight of the ‘lost generation’ of young Aboriginal Australians, removed from their home situation, placed with strangers inside strange institutions, and for the most part never reconnecting to any kind of real family.
‘And as we now know it failed miserably,’ she concluded with a heavy sigh. ‘It just turned these kids into — what’s the word? — I mean I use bad language, which gets me in trouble — but, you know, into slaves for the colonials, actually. That’s what they were doing to them. With the best will in the world.’
