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Suffer The Children

J.A. Davies

14 April 2004 - Muriel Cadd couldn't believe it had happened again. As head of Victoria's only ­Aboriginal child protection agency, she was used to bad news. But when she got a telephone call last October alerting her that another two-year-old boy, Daniel Thomas, was missing, suspected murdered, she was devastated. Ten months earlier, she had taken a similar call when Mildura toddler Joedan Andrews vanished from a settlement just over the Victorian border in NSW.

In both cases, the boys had been the subject of child-abuse notifications to Victoria's protection authorities but the welfare system failed to save them. Now it was too late.

Daniel's body has never been found. As for Joedan, parts of his body were eventually discovered in a rubbish dump. Police are almost certain they know who the boys' killers are but so far no charges have been laid.

Their families liken the boys' deaths to that of toddler Jaidyn Leskie near Moe, eastern Victoria, with one crucial difference: these children's lives had already come under the scrutiny of child protection authorities. In the end, however, it counted for little.

"These deaths have rocked everyone and, I have to say, brought a great deal of shame to our people," Cadd says. "What messages are we sending? We have two dead Aboriginal kids yet no one knows anything. It's a disgrace."

Joedan and Daniel are not the only ones. According to the Victorian Child Death Review Committee, 132 children who were current or recent clients of the state's child protection system died between 1996 and 2002. A disproportionate number – 13 since 2000, including Daniel and Joedan – were Aboriginal.

These deaths have raised serious questions, not only about the adequacy of child protection services in Victoria but also over the unacceptably high levels of violence inside indigenous families and communities. As always, it is the children who pay the price.

There is plenty of loose talk within the fractured Aboriginal community of Mildura about the circumstances that led to the death of Joedan Andrews. What does seem clear is that he was killed in an accident at the notorious Namatjira Avenue settlement, 30km north of the Victorian border near the NSW town of Dareton, 10 days before Christmas 2002. No one – aside from those who were there – knows for sure what happened that night but many believe Joedan was run over and killed after being used as bait in a deadly game of "chicken" during a party.

His body was then wrapped in a shower curtain and buried in a shallow grave, only to be dug up by dogs and pieces dragged off to a nearby rubbish dump. This is where some of Joedan's remains were eventually found but most of the body is still out there. The whisper around "Nama", as the mission is known, is that a dog was shot and its body incinerated so that the contents of its stomach could never be examined.

More than a year later, no charges have been laid although police, Joedan's family and many who live on the mission have no doubt who the perpetrators of the crime are. Fear and intimidation have kept the killers out of jail – for now.

Trying to fathom such brutality is beyond most of us but one place to start is the mission. The stories of life here are hard to believe but difficult to dismiss. Too many people tell you the same things: packs of children as young as two left to roam day and night; wife beating and endemic vandalism (the children's playground is smashed beyond repair, as is a communal hall and kitchen). Drugs and alcohol fuel the misery and violence. Cars are what most of the young blokes get out of bed for each day. They steal, torch and trash them and, most nights, perfect their burnouts and wheelies in the red Mallee dirt.

Buddy Parsons is the kind of man who doesn't talk about reconciliation; he lives it. As Aboriginal liaison officer with the Dareton police, it is his job to try and build the bridges between black and white Australia that the politicians love to preach about but show little aptitude for constructing themselves. I have been warned not to go out to "Nama" alone but no one volunteers to come along. Then Parsons showed up.

As we drive slowly along the unmade road which winds around Namatjira Avenue, he admits he's worried: "It has gone on too long; it's like a simmering pot that is about to blow." It is mid-morning, the temperature already more than 40°C and the mission is silent. From a distance it looks like a housing estate – which it is – but once you turn off the highway before Dareton, you realise this is not Neighbours country.

"We know what happened, we just can't prove it," Parsons explains. "To this day, when people go for a walk up here, they poke around in the scrub just in case they come across some bones."

As we drive past a house where Joedan was last seen, a young man stares after us. "That's him, that's the bloke everyone thinks done it," Parsons says.

A little later we call in on "Foxy" Williams, who has lived in his caravan here for 21 years. His son was partying with the gang the night Joedan died but Williams says, with obvious disgust, he was too drunk to recall what happened. Williams is wily enough to keep his mouth shut but he notices plenty. Like dogs disappearing soon after a child vanishes. Since Joedan's death, he has also watched as people, fearful of the gang who call themselves "the untouchables", have fled the mission for town.

"It's not a nice place, really it's not," Williams explains. "If you go out and leave your house, it's guaranteed that when you return, your gear will be gone."

One woman – he points across the road at a brick veneer house with the curtain drawn even though it is 11am – was naïve enough to go to the police after the gang did a run-through of her home. "They came back and thrashed her and torched her place," ­Williams says. "We all got the message."

I ask Williams and Parsons about some of the stories I've heard, of women being strung up on clothes lines and beaten. They glance at each other and laugh grimly. "Listen to the wind," Williams says. Straight away, the unmistakable screams of a woman can be heard in the near distance.

It is this place that Joedan's mother, Sarah Andrews, used to come to party. She'd stay for days, leaving her three kids with her mother in Mildura or in respite care with the local welfare agency. By her own admission, Andrews is detached. Disturbingly so. In the past year, her son has been killed in horrific circumstances, she has lost custody of her two surviving boys, and her former partner and the father of two of her three children hanged himself in police custody.

Now she's trying to start over. A new boyfriend, a new baby on the way, living in Sydney's western suburbs, too frightened, she claims, to return to Mildura. We arrange to meet but she never shows. Finally we talk over the phone, the first conversation she has had with a journalist because, she admits, her version of events "doesn't sound too good". Despite the kilometres she has put between herself and Namatjira Avenue, her dead child is close by. "He's in my heart, he always will be, but I can't go back there," she says. Joedan's remains are close by, too, kept in storage at the Westmead forensic facility. The NSW coroner will eventually hold an inquiry but no date has been set.

Andrews is also trying to wean herself off amphetamines. "I was what you might call a housebound addict. I would stay home, take speed, look after my kids and not sleep for a week. I was feral."

So feral that her own mother claims she notified the Mildura child protection authorities that her daughter's boys were at risk several times before Joedan went missing. The Andrews home had become a junkie ghetto and the children were badly neglected. One document – seen by The Bulletin – which details the protective concerns held by the Victorian Human Services Department, alleges the Andrews' children were left alone for long periods, the mother used drugs, the home was unclean and the children were subject to verbal abuse.

According to other documents, Victorian child protection authorities closed the file on the three Andrews children in August 2002, four months before Joedan went missing.

There has been savage brawling over the case between the department and the Mildura Aboriginal Corporation, which had also become involved in the Andrews family – with both seeking to shift blame onto the other.

"If MAC was so concerned, then why did they not refer/notify to protective services," states an internal Human Services Department memo. Further, the department charges, a worker from MAC, which runs a family preservation program, was present at a meeting when the decision to close the file was made, but did nothing.

Sally Sherger, who heads up the MAC program, is contemptuous of the department and defends her organisation's role. She is a woman who knows too many dirty family secrets in Mildura for her own good and, she admits, has an uncanny capacity for "pissing people off". None more, it seems, than senior child protection bureaucrats. "You don't substantiate child abuse allegations by ringing the parent and telling them you're coming to visit," Sherger charges. "Obviously, the parent denies it but you've given them time to clean up their house and their act. This is how these people operate. The mother refused to take part in our parenting program – something that should have been of great concern to the department – but instead, they closed the file. We had no say in that decision. That is the department's responsibility and they can't run away from that uncomfortable truth."

Andrews' mother, Veronica, explains: "She'd go out and leave them alone for hours. I found a needle and powder in Joedan's jacket and we found the baby playing with a syringe." Like many indigenous women, she knows all about violence but was not ­prepared to watch as her grandchildren fell into the abyss.

Making the decision to report her own daughter to the hated "welfare" cannot have been easy but not nearly as hard, she says, as trying to live with the department's response. "They did bugger all," Veronica Andrews says.

It is late afternoon and we are sitting on the banks of the Murray River. It has been a gruelling day. Earlier, a memorial service had been held in the community hall where family and friends gathered to share their grief and stories. There has been no funeral because the handful of Joedan's remains that have been found have not been released to the family.

At the service, there was not one white face in the room except for myself, The Bulletin's photographer and two journalists from the local newspaper. The men sat silently, staring at the floor, while one woman after another got to her feet and talked about their love for Joedan, their need for justice and their desperate pleas for the violence to end.

Many people south and north of the NSW-Victoria border wonder whether Sarah Andrews has told all she knows about Joedan's death. The kindest interpretation is that she was too stoned and drunk to recall what happened.

She is aware what people are saying; that she is a bad mother, a druggie and, worst of all, a woman who is prepared to protect her child's killer to save her own skin. "You know when you think too hard, you make a story up and try and believe it? That is what I do all the time," Andrews explains quietly.

According to Andrews, she went out to the mission to party for the weekend with her then boyfriend. She left her other two children, Jaymin and Mikey, with her mother but took Joedan along. "He was a mummy's boy; he sooked if he wasn't with me," she says. It was in a house in the mission where Joedan was last seen alive and it was the rubbish dump behind this house where the partial remains of the toddler were found three weeks later. By his mother's own admission and accounts from others living on the mission, it was a wild night, although nothing out of the ­ordinary for "Nama".

Lots of booze, drugs and the almost ritualistic displays by the men of lairising in cars. Andrews claims she last saw Joedan at "3am or 4am" when she gave him a bottle and lay down next to him to sleep. She woke at 10.30am to find him gone.

Andrews is a woman on the run from her past. The police are waiting for her to talk but it doesn't seem likely. "They've offered to put me in witness protection, help me get my kids back, if I talk, but I've got nothing to say," she says.

But grief is patient, lurking in the shadows of life, and Andrews knows this intuitively. "I am taking it too good, I know I am, but I haven't got time to grieve because I've got to keep up ­appearances so I can get my other boys back."

That may not happen. Her mother, who has cared for the boys since Joedan disappeared, is petitioning the Family Court for permanent custody.

Joedan's family don't want to play the race card in this tragedy; they just want those responsible behind bars. But they are frustrated by the lack of action and angry at what they view as the passive collusion that has enveloped the mission community.

Veronica Andrews knows all about mission life: she grew up on Namatjira Avenue and her father, Bert Murray, is still there, living near the rubbish dump where parts of Joedan's pelvis were found. "These days you have to be drunk to sleep there," she says. But, she insists, it wasn't always like that. "When I was a kid, you didn't have to worry about being raped: there were no cars, no drugs, no guns. In those days, no one would have stood by and let a child murderer go free."

Murray is dying but he fears it won't necessarily be disease or heart attack that finishes him off. An elder in the community and once one of the strong men on the mission, he is tormented by those he claims are responsible for his great-grandson's death.

"I'm riddled with cancer but, mark my words, I'm going to do some damage before I go for my little great-grandson," Murray shouts – loud enough for the suspect to hear. At 64, he is still a fierce-looking bloke and his barrel chest and clenched fists suggest that in his day he was not to be crossed. But his time is past; the young people in this community have no regard for elders like him. So he sits in his dilapidated house, has a few grogs on pension day and, when he's up to it, goes fishing with "Foxy" Williams.

The other morning, he went out to find his car was gone. He knew before he trudged off down the road that he'd find it: it wasn't a theft, it was a warning. Sure enough, it was trashed beyond repair. A few days earlier, someone had fired shots over his house while he was sitting at his kitchen table eating his dinner.

Joedan's family believe isolation has worked against them. Every­one in the country has heard of the Gondola on the Murray and the region's renowned wines but nowhere in the travelogues does it talk of the Aboriginal underclass and the savage killing of one little boy. "We're nowhere, not close enough to Melbourne or Sydney to make waves," says Joedan's aunt, Darlene Thomas. "You don't see banners outside shops with Joedan's picture on it, do you? There's no reward for information leading to the capture of the killers, just silence. If it was a white kid, there would be top detectives from Sydney on the case, the media would be all over it just like Jaidyn Leskie. But our baby's skull is still out there and no one seems to give a shit."

The case is being run out of Broken Hill and headed by Detective Sergeant Mark Rowney. He understands the family's frustration but years of policing tells him the slowly, slowly approach will ultimately catch Joedan's killer. "People are saying we're doing nothing but it is not true," he explains. "We knew after the first 48 hours we were in for the long haul. People on the mission are frightened of certain individuals and so have been intimidated into silence."

The police have considered a reward but believe it will simply encourage people to come forward with theories: something that happened at the beginning of the investigation and led to police wasting time chasing bogus leads. One tactic being assessed is to encourage the NSW coroner to investigate Joedan's death before charges are laid. That way people such as Sarah Andrews can be subpoenaed and forced to answer questions.

Veronica Andrews intends to sue the Victorian Department of Human Services for what, she claims, is negligence in allowing her daughter to continue unchecked.

There are times when grief and too much grog collide and Veronica finds herself spinning the wheels of her car in the red Mallee dirt and howling "baby killers" into the night. But she is frightened. "The baby killers have put the word out that they'll shoot me if I don't shut up and stay away from the mission." It's a threat, police have warned, she should take seriously.

Every few years, new figures are released on child abuse in this country. With every report, there is an inevitable sameness about the statistics concerning indigenous children. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which has the depressing task of pooling this information, reported again recently that the rates of substantiated abuse of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children compared with other children is higher in every jurisdiction in Australia.

In Victoria, the rate is nearly 10 times higher, significantly greater than elsewhere. Unpicking the reasons for this is critical if the cycle of violence is to end but, it seems, the task is too hard, overlaid as it is with the shadows of history and the grinding poverty that dictates the lives of many indigenous families.

Could it be that abuse is more rampant among Victoria's indigenous community? Or are the Victorian authorities that much more rigorous in identifying and acting on child abuse? Some states, notably Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory, have virtually no transparent reporting system, so their figures appear suspiciously low. But some in the indigenous community claim that Victorian authorities too often confuse child abuse with welfare concerns. As one Aboriginal welfare worker put it: "A child who has to sleep on a mattress on the floor because the family cannot afford a bed is not necessarily neglected."

The catch-all word, "neglect", is the most prevalent reason for an abuse notification concerning an Aboriginal child. The figures for sexual and physical abuse are much lower among this group than the state average, although, as any indigenous woman will tell you, sexual abuse is rife – it just goes unreported.

And now to Daniel Thomas. Like Joedan, he was a two-year-old from a family with a history of child abuse. Like Joedan, he vanished. His body has not been found but no one believes he is still alive. Daniel disappeared last October after being left in the care of Mandy Martyn while his mother Donna Thomas, who shared Martyn's home in Myrtleford, attended a nursing course in Shepparton for two days. Martyn told police she left Daniel alone for a few hours while she and her children drove into Wangaratta for a doctor's appointment. When she returned, she claimed, Daniel was gone.

But children don't simply vanish. Not in broad daylight and not in a small country town such as Myrtleford where the word community actually stands for something.

Nestled at the foot of the Victorian Alps, Myrtleford is best known for its astounding beauty and proximity to ski resorts. Last spring, just as the snow was beginning to melt, the bucolic peace of the town was shattered.

Police believe Daniel may have disappeared soon after his mother left. An asthmatic, he was wearing heavy bandages to cover severe eczema when he was last seen at Martyn's home.

Police do not expect to find the toddler alive. It is a murder investigation, led by Melbourne homicide detective Senior Sergeant Roland Legge who ran the murder inquiry into the death of Jaidyn Leskie six years earlier. In that case, the police charged babysitter Greg Domaszewicz but a Supreme Court jury acquitted him. To this day, police insist they had the right man.

But lessons have been learnt; there will be no hasty arrest in this murder inquiry. "All we know is the babysitter and her family were in Wangaratta that afternoon, Friday, and we're still working on timelines when Daniel might have been taken from the house," Legge said late last year.

Daniel's father Kevin Ruffels, who is separated from the boy's mother, is a sick man. A former Melbourne taxi driver, he no longer works due to chronic depression and heart disease. His son's disappearance has done nothing to improve his health. He looks older than his 48 years and is guarded in his remarks; he is the sort of man who doesn't like to cause a commotion, appreciates the work the police are putting in to find his son but who is slowly but surely dying inside.

Of all the things he has heard since Daniel went missing, one conversation keeps replaying inside his head. It was 3.30am and police had just given Ruffels the worst news any parent can receive. His former partner and Daniel's mother rang. "She told me a person living in the house with her and Daniel had given my son a black eye the week before." Ruffels' voice falters when he retells this horror. "I can't help but wonder what was going through Donna's mind to leave our child in that house. Poor little Daniel would have been terrified." It is a scenario unbearable to dwell on but, in the six months since Daniel vanished, Ruffels can do little else.

What hasn't been reported until now is the extensive history Daniel's mother had with Victoria's child protection authorities. The most disturbing revelation is that only weeks before Daniel vanished, the Victorian Department of Human Services received a serious child abuse notification about the toddler but no investigation began until after his disappearance. By then it was too late.

It is understood Daniel was admitted to Wangaratta Base Hospital three weeks before he disappeared. Daniel's infected skin had been bandaged in gaffer tape, presumably to stop him scratching his eczema. Doctors also discovered Daniel was suffering from malnutrition. "They said it was bad nurturing and that he needed building up, his hair was falling out," his grandmother Dorothy Ruffels says.

A child protection worker familiar with the case told The Bulletin the decision to investigate the latest abuse claims came after he disappeared. "It was a disaster," the worker said. "For some reason, the notification was not followed up even though there was a history of abuse allegations on the files."

The Department of Human Services has refused to comment while the police inquiry is continuing. The babysitter's three children have also been removed from their mother's care; like Daniel, these children had also been subject to child abuse notifications in the months before Daniel disappeared. Again, no investigation commenced until after he went missing.

According to Daniel's family, he had numerous admissions to hospital, in Melbourne and Wangaratta, for treatment for his eczema. "It was a vicious circle," Dorothy Ruffels says. "Daniel would get eczema and then his skin would become infected because it was not being properly managed and so Daniel would end up in hospital again. No one seemed to be doing anything about preventing this from happening.

"I remember visiting Daniel and I noticed the bath was full of putrid, days' old water. That was the bath he was being washed in. It's not surprising his skin never healed."

The Bulletin has also learnt that Human Services received a number of child abuse notifications concerning Daniel during his short life. At different times, social workers, doctors, nurses, counsellors and childcare workers all had cause to be concerned for Daniel's welfare.

One of the people who made these notifications confirmed this, saying that while Daniel was not being physically abused, he was being seriously neglected. "He didn't get proper medical attention, he lived in squalor much of the time, he was exposed to heavy drinking, verbal abuse and was left alone," the source said. "I rang Human Services at least three times and each time I was told they would follow it up."

It is understood that child protection workers did pursue the allegations and assistance was given to help improve Daniel's situation. But, the source said: "It didn't go far enough. Too many second, third, fourth chances were given." It is also understood that Daniel's mother had another child removed permanently from her care years earlier because of serious child abuse.

Dorothy Ruffels is in no doubt the child protection system failed Daniel badly. "He was our poor little boy, malnourished and neglected but loved, definitely loved," she explains quietly. "When Daniel came around here for tea, I'd make him an egg and draw a face on it, but poor Daniel, he'd never seen an egg before."

The Director of Victoria's Child Protection and Juvenile Justice branch, Gill Callister, won't discuss individual cases and so it is impossible to know how to apportion responsibility in the Andrews and Thomas cases. That will be a job for the coroners in Victoria and NSW.

But Callister does admit she is worried about the revolving door syndrome for indigenous children in the Victorian protection system. She defends the system's response times, claiming all urgent cases are dealt with within 48 hours. Others are assigned within 14 days, she says. And the disproportionately high numbers of substantiated abuse in Victoria? She says for the first time there has been a flattening out in notifications in the past year, something she attributes to a new targeted approach to high-risk groups, including indigenous communities. "A lot of work is being done in Victoria to identify child abuse and so the cases are being picked up," she argues. "That is possibly not happening in other jurisdictions."

It is tempting to lay the blame for all this misery at the state, whose job, after all, is to protect vulnerable children when their own parents can't or won't. But to do so lets others off the hook. Daniel Thomas was, as one family member put it, "loved to death" and, although some close to him did sound the alarm, others looked the other way.

In Joedan Andrews' case, his grandmother was made to feel like a crank by local child protection workers because of her incessant complaints about her own daughter. But as his family also argue, there were plenty of people around Namatjira Avenue the night the toddler died and none lifted a finger to help him. They still haven't.

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