It should be a photograph filled with happy childhood memories, but instead it tells the tragedy of a community torn apart by horrific child abuse.
The picture shows the Grade 4 class of 1973 from St Alipius’ Christian Brothers School in Ballarat. Second row from the front, fourth from the right with head bowed is Philip Nagle.
When you look at the image today, instead of making you smile, it only awakens feelings of sadness and anger, as it states that 12 of the 33 students photographed committed suicide due to the sexual and physical abuse they suffered. It took place at school.
Scroll down to watch the video
Philip Nagle (circled) claims that 12 of the 33 students in the photograph committed suicide due to sexual abuse that took place at the school.
But Nagle believes what happened to his dead comrades will not be forgotten.
The 50-year-old was the first person called on Tuesday at the opening of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, a pedophile ring involving Catholic clergy in Ballarat in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
At the end of his testimony he asked for a minute of silence in honor of his 12 classmates. His only hope now is for more people to make public the heinous crimes that took place at St Alipius so that justice can still be done.
‘If more of my classmates come forward, fewer will commit suicide (in the future). Because those who don’t show their faces are the ones who are killing themselves. Twelve students in my class committed suicide,” Nagle told Daily Mail Australia.
Nagle said some did it indirectly after years of alcoholism and drug use, because they couldn’t deal with what was done to them.
Nagle, 50, was the first person called on Tuesday at the opening of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.
“Some didn’t even make it to 50, others didn’t even make it to 40. They reach a breaking point and can’t take it anymore,” he says.
Some of Australia’s most notorious abusers, including Gerald Ridsdale, Robert Best and Edward Dowlan, were part of a pedophile ring operating at St Alipius’ and St Patrick’s College.
Nagle, 50, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by disgraced Stephen Farrell, who was a Christian brother at the school.
“He was our teacher at the time. Because Risdale and others were serial offenders, people like Farrell flew under the radar,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
Gerald Ridsdale was part of a pedophile ring that operated at St Alipius’ and St Patrick’s College.
‘Only three of Farrell’s victims have come forward: me, my brother and another victim. Of this he has 10 convictions. But because people like Risdale and Best had many victims come forward and Farrell didn’t, he got away with it.
Farrell didn’t even go to jail. He was given a suspended sentence of two years and three months for his offences.
‘Players like Ridsdale got a lot more because their offenses were so bad and more people showed up. But Farrell was also part of the pedophile ring,” says Mr Nagle.
He knows other victims of Farrell, but police warned him not to go hunting for victims and he is not allowed to name them.
Ridsdale was jailed on pedophile charges in 1994 for sexually abusing children between 1967 and 1987.
“I’ve talked to some of them, but they’re not willing to do anything about it,” he says.
What he had to endure at St. Alypius is etched into his psyche. Nothing can erase the terrible experience she had to go through at the hands of Farrell.
“He was too strong for me. I was just a nine-year-old boy. He would just leave you alone, knock you down and sexually assault you,” Nagle told Daily Mail Australia.
‘You have to realize that we were just little kids and they were adults, so we didn’t stand a chance.
‘They were supposedly men of God in their black robes. Priests and Christian brothers were held in higher esteem than their fathers in those days, they were beyond reproach.
It all happened over a 12 month period. We were terrified. “It ruined our lives.”
Gordon Hill told the inquest he was taken to St Joseph’s Home in Ballarat in 1946 and was initially abused by a priest when he was just five years old.
He is still devastated that Farrell did not go to jail and believes suspended sentences for these types of crimes are simply unacceptable.
His comments came as Gordon Hill, 72, told the inquest on Wednesday that he was taken to St Joseph’s Home in Ballarat when he was three in 1946, and was initially abused by a priest when he was five, in a place called ‘the rooms of terror’.
But Nagle’s fight for justice still continues.
“I don’t know what the investigation will accomplish unless they start getting some of these perpetrators on the stand, but I’m very happy with the process,” he says.
‘In Ballarat they call us “survivors”. “We came together as a group of survivors of this atrocity and tried to help these other victims live.”