Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  Something else. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of some individual claims, it has to be said that this activity is oddly depressing for another reason: one of the things about growing older is the revelation of how young everyone is, all the more so when they figure as characters involved in some long-gone incident. Most of Cooper’s claimants are now significantly older than were the accused men at the time of the alleged incidents. They might say, and many do, that what happened plunged their lives into a state of crisis, but aren’t crises by definition supposed to pass at some point, all the more so as we grow to appreciate the hurt we have caused others along life’s way?

  Cooper has every confidence she has good systems in place to winnow out the dubious claims — ‘hundreds’ of which she has declined to take up because of lack of corroboration or simply a professional hunch that a file might better remain closed — and bring about justice for those who deserve it. But she added: ‘I have to be careful too because I don’t also want to be someone who sits in judgement over someone else’s damage … I kind of have to be careful walking that line, really, because it’s not for me to judge.’

  Yet for every tale whose retelling may include some liberties there have been many other allegations of abuse or neglect that have been supported with strong anecdotal evidence and credible testimony. Such cases can even be found in the institution’s own official files. On the evening of July 30, 1976, for instance, a note was made of a visit made to Epuni housemaster Graeme Stewart’s office by a 13-year-old boy who for legal reasons cannot be identified. The boy wanted to discuss an incident that had occurred the previous spring involving one of his caregivers. The boy said he felt ashamed of himself and scared, and unable to walk past a moving vehicle without wanting to throw himself in front of it. He was still reeling from the experience, still licking his wounds, he indicated, and could no longer sleep at night. Stewart, by his written account, didn’t disbelieve what he was hearing, but also lacked the wherewithal to do anything about it. So he sent the kid to bed. The following morning a couple of housemasters found the boy hanging in his room.

  Cooper’s files include the case of a boy born to a mother confined to a mental institution and a father serving time for gang-related activities, who notched up his first run-in with the authorities at the age of seven. A predictable relocation to Epuni contributed to what a psychiatric examiner would later characterise as the boy’s profound attachment difficulties, dysfunctional relationships with the outside world, which he found unremittingly hostile, causing him to develop a lifelong pattern of narcissistic thinking, educational failure and a compelling attraction to others with a similarly desolate experience. ‘I have attacked people violently and I have hurt a lot of people,’ the former ward, now in his 40s, admitted.

  ‘I always have good intentions towards people,’ he continued, ‘but I always screw up. I don’t know how to respect other people. It is natural for me to rip someone off. I am not good at working with people, and my experience hasn’t made me respect women much, but I can’t say exactly why that is.’ He still wants to be normal, wants some shot at happiness. But he’s a lifelong gang member, so what chance is there of that?

  Instead, he finds himself in a maximum-security cell, always mulling over what happened and what could have been — the education he missed, the skills he might have acquired and the places he might have gone — had Epuni not got in the way. Bad dreams in the day, bad dreams in the night. ‘I dream all the time. I have dreams about people chasing me and me running away. I dream about demons and keys. I dream about dead people walking about.’ And he dreams about whatever violent crime might next land him back in jail during his increasingly infrequent sojourns back into the wider community.

  SONJA COOPER WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE BEING KEPT busy as 2010 drew to a close. Only a few hundred metres from her modest Wellington offices, the Ministry of Social Development also found its institutional hand hard to the plough attempting to bring some kind of resolution to many of the same cases. Indeed, the ministry’s Care, Claims and Resolution unit, which was set up for this purpose, is headed by an individual who in some respects might just as well have been cut from the same cloth as Cooper. Both are committed, likeable professionals, their backgrounds are not at all dissimilar, and both are in the prime of their careers, with each in their own way enhancing the reputation of the other’s work.

  Garth Young — a soft-spoken man who peers out at visitors from behind designer glasses set underneath a rug of grey hair — hails originally from coastal Southland. He, too, was raised in the Christian faith, in his case a staunchly Presbyterian household, and there was never a time when the social values imbued in him by the church weren’t taken seriously. Very seriously. Such imperatives, he said, have hovered above his career path, propelling him on, forcing him, like Cooper, to work hard in helping to pick up the human wreckage left by the old welfare system. For all that, however, the two central characters in the aftermath of the great residential experiment find themselves barely on speaking terms.

  The son of a farmer, Young was the middle child of five kids. His parents thought he had abilities beyond the sheep and cattle that had been a mainstay of the family for a couple of generations. Yet this didn’t necessarily make choosing his eventual career path any the easier. ‘I always felt a bit different,’ he said. ‘I didn’t particularly get along or fit in with the rural New Zealand blokes, and actually I’ve never identified as a typical New Zealand bloke, either.’ His father, a good National man, detested the socialist ideas the boy had already started soaking up at high school. The two clashed over issues like Vietnam or whether an employer’s first responsibility ought to be to their employees rather than the shareholders, and, most of all, whether the ‘blinkered vision’ of Southland was all there might be to life.

  At the University of Otago, Young read psychology — thanks to the likes of the fashionable French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Scottish oddball R.D. Laing, the subject was on something of an academic roll at this point in the mid-1970s — but got detoured on account of his childhood sweetheart falling pregnant with their first child. He completed an undergraduate degree, in educational psychology rather than clinical psychology, rounding off his early academic experience with a teaching diploma. He picked up work at a local school in Invercargill.

  Then, perhaps inspired by an older sister who was already a social worker, he successfully applied for a social-work position himself, at the local branch office of the former Social Welfare, the department with which he would remain as it morphed into what became the Ministry of Social Development. And it was here, too, that he first began working with disadvantaged kids, sometimes shunting them back and forth between Invercargill and the youth facility then operating in Dunedin, taking kids there or else picking them up.

  By this time Young was in his late 20s, but still ‘naive’ about the residential system. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I thought too much, in terms of residential care, about, you know, was it okay or not.’ Something that just was? ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘And I have to say, I don’t recall ever really consciously questioning what it was about or why we used it. I have to say my experience with Dunedin Boys’ Home was always really positive. I mean, the number of times I went there, in all honesty despite the work I’d been involved with, I can’t ever recall seeing or hearing anything that gave me any cause for concern.’

  By 1990 Young was no longer out in the field, but heading a small team of social workers based in Whangarei — he also completed a post-grad diploma during this period — before Wellington and a position in national office, in what was called the ministerial team, beckoned. And it was in this latter capacity that his current work took shape.

  A group of people who had been in Salvation Army homes in the 1950s through to the 1970s were beginning to talk publicly about the way they had been treated and were looking to make claims against the Army. A number of them had also been state wards, unde
r a department scheme that saw them placed in those homes. ‘So we were teamed to see what we could do to work with them positively rather than wait until they sued us,’ Young explained. ‘This was 2004, and at the time it was just myself and one of our solicitors who worked part-time. We did a specific bit of work. We went out and talked to all of that group of people who wanted to meet and talk with us, so it was a very sort of defined piece of work which came to a conclusion. But during that year it was becoming evident that more and more people were contemplating filing claims directly against the ministry.’

  WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS THE NUMBER OF CLAIMS in their quiver had grown to 140, with no end in sight. By this point Young was heading a fully fledged team, the Historical Claims Unit, which by 2010 would comprise five advisers and a couple of administrative staff.

  ‘Bizarrely enough,’ he admitted with a smile, he loves the work ‘most of the time’. It takes him back to his social work days, back to the time when finding a resolution for people was the main focus of what he did. ‘I know that there are plenty of people out there who are suspicious and cynical of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, but I am really very proud of the work that the team is doing in the face-to-face interactions that they have with the people who come to us with whatever complaint or claim that they have. And clearly we don’t resolve every case to everyone’s satisfaction, but for many we do, and just seeing that is significant.’

  By Young’s estimate, around two-thirds of the claims his team has worked on have ended up with some kind of agreed resolution, whether it simply be the provision of important information or the issuing of an ex gratia payment, usually at the lower end of the spectrum but in one case $30,000. By early 2010 the unit had resolved 36 such claims; a further 137 still awaited action. ‘The stance we’ve taken is that if somebody has clearly been wronged by us then, legal issues aside, we’ve got some kind of moral obligation to acknowledge that in some way,’ Young said.

  Not surprisingly, the 1970s looms as the period from which former state wards dealing with the unit tend to be drawn, with Epuni the most notable among the short-term training residences at issue. (Among the long-term residences, Kohitere and Hokio figure largest.) Which begs the question of why, given their shared sense of righting historical injustice, Garth Young and Sonja Cooper aren’t on the same side?

  ‘We should be,’ Young agreed. ‘Sonja would say that her motivations are the same things, to get justice and whatever for her clients. And that’s what we’d like to think we’re trying to do. One of the things we don’t perhaps share the same view on is how to get there.’ He also mentioned another government initiative, the Confidential Listening and Assistance Service, established in 2009 as an additional avenue by which the same goal could be realised.

  ‘Our view,’ he continued, ‘is a slightly different one in that we don’t see any evidence of systemic or endemic abuse or system failures. We see a system of care, both residential and otherwise, that most of the time worked but obviously some of the time didn’t. So I guess what we’ve tried to do is apply some of the principles of natural justice in that, you know, if there’s information there to support someone’s allegation or claim then we’ll absolutely do the right thing.’ He paused for a moment and laughed, not unkindly. ‘But we’re reasonably confident that one or two came through without being abused.’

  The types of ‘client’ Young tends to meet — those who once lived in the likes of Epuni Boys’ Home — often strike him as people who have suffered. ‘I wouldn’t want to say they’re broken individuals but they’ve certainly got some kind of issues — dreadful word, I know — going on. And you know, some are extremely needy, extremely vulnerable. So yes, you’ve got some who are functioning very, very poorly’ — he paused sadly for a moment before brightening — ‘right through to people who are as sane as you and me.’

  ‘THE PLACE DIDN’T EXIST AS AN ISLAND,’ GARY Hermansson recently said of Epuni’s continued controversies. ‘It was a piece of society. And if you think about it, the 1950s and 1960s were a steady-as-she-goes kind of time, a conservative environment. The 1970s started to push boundaries. Then, of course, in the 1980s you had all this turmoil around, the market economy and people kind of looking out for themselves. And Epuni was part of that. It was a building in which people of the time lived. So you had a representation of what was going on in society manifesting itself there, too.’

  ‘Think about it,’ the Massey professor continued, warming to his theme. ‘Probably the institution lagged behind society a bit, but not by that much. So you might have corporate chaos going on a lot more, and at the same time crime increased, brutality increased. You could argue people had less regard for each other. And some of the mores and norms that we held, you know, the glue to our environment, suddenly started falling away and it became almost like an everyone-for-themselves sort of social mentality.’ The Epuni-related litigation he sees as part of a new social environment in which ‘it’s like, okay, let’s see if we can look backwards and blame whatever for how things may or may not have turned out’.

  Tyrone Marks, the former ward who turned his life around in an impressive fashion, took a slightly different view. ‘The bigger picture here is that most of those people who went through the social welfare system are inadequate,’ he said of the residual social aftermath. ‘They left the system with nothing. They had no skills, they had fucking nothing. Their education was held back because the focus wasn’t on education. The focus of these places was on babysitting, basically. Taking these kids who were terribly, you know, dysfunctional, fucking dysfunctional people and their families are dysfunctional as well. And we couldn’t do anything with them so we kept them for years and years, then kicked them out. And what happened then? Nothing. Half the people still can’t even read and write. So how can they look after people? How can they look after their families? How can they sign forms? How can they live in the modern society? That’s the issue.’

  Sure. But it is a measure of Epuni’s significance when you see how the institution lives on in nearly everyone who intersected with it, not only so many of the thousands of boys it housed, but also the men and women who worked there and those who created the policies and conditions it operated under — and not least the one individual whose presence hovered above everything the old residence represented.

  Conventional wisdom might have had it that Maurie should have been dead in fairly short order after retiring from his life’s work in the mid-1980s. He had, after all, led a more stressful life than most, not only on account of the enormous strain of running Epuni Boys’ Home, but also in struggling over many decades to cope with his wife Margaret’s debilitating manic depression, which only really came to end with her death in 2008. But here he was in 2009, in his 84th year, still managing to play golf on a regular basis (he had only recently cut down from 18 to nine holes), notably quietly spoken and deliberate in his physical movements, but hadn’t he always been?

  The only real difference was that the slightly foreboding look he once wore had been replaced by the more benign gaze one sees in the very old, of whom there are many in the sprawling retirement village just outside Hamilton where he now makes his home. The experience of driving into the village is not entirely dissimilar to that of arriving at another institution which once stood nearly 500 kilometres south of Maurie’s current residence.

  Late one slate-grey drizzly morning in the winter of 2009, I found my former Epuni chief in his room watching a sports programme on television with the sound turned off. Introductions were made — but no pleasantries exchanged — and he waved me to an easy chair, after which we chatted over a tape-recorder for a couple of hours.

  He also seemed content, possibly relieved, to be speaking about Epuni after such a long lay-off from the subject, eager to correct the earlier record of his comments about Calcinai (‘I was completely let down by his ability to double-cross me’), venture opinion about the recent flood of Epuni-related litigation (‘I get
a feeling that there had been a group of them in prison and that they decided that they could get a lot of money’), and brimming with deserved pride over the accomplishments of his own son and daughter, an engineer and travel agent respectively. He hated the way in which the institution he had dedicated his life to improving had acquired such a controversial reputation in his own autumn years.

  Asked toward the end of the conversation whether Epuni was a subject he had thought much about in the intervening quarter-century, his shoulders slumped for a moment. ‘I think about it a lot — and I do miss it, yes,’ he responded, pausing for a moment, breathing heavily. ‘And sometimes, you know, I curse Epuni, too.’

  And Maurie said one other thing. He asked, ‘Do I know you?’

  A BOXER’S HEART

  On the morning of February 11, 1990, in the Tokyo Dome, at 1:30 in the 10th round, a complete outsider, James ‘Buster’ Douglas, threw the devastating four-punch combination — right-left-right-left — that put paid to the man and the last of the invincible legends that was Mike Tyson, effectively signalling the end of the last golden era of heavyweight boxing. Tyson never saw the final blow coming. You never do.

  I never did. On the day in question I was trying to pay as much attention as I could to what was happening while seated in a cubicle of the Evening Post office, knocking back cups of instant coffee and drinking in the sporadic announcements of a sports reporter seated nearby reading aloud from snippets coming through on the wire service. I was half a world away from the action taking place in East Asia, far from guessing that this would be the era’s final call and further still from realising this was more or less the same moment when the curtain fell on Epuni Boys’ Home.