A long line of Christian Brothers accused of child sex abuse were transferred to the order’s Wakefield Street college in Adelaide, a Royal Commission has heard.

The list of accused Brothers and their journey to Adelaide is detailed in the previously secret archives of the Christian Brothers, presented by counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse., during hearings in Perth this week.

The archived documents detail accusations made against Brothers in the period from 1919 to 1969.

In evidence to the royal commission’s hearing, the order’s former provincial head in Australia, Brother Anthony Shanahan, admitted the pattern of abuse occurred until at least the early 1990s when it became a prominent public issue through media reports.

Shanahan, ironically, was a student at Christian Brothers College Wakefield Street in the 1960s and was taught by one of the named offenders.

He gave evidence yesterday and Tuesday as the commission examined what occurred at four institutions in Western Australia – Clontarf, Tardun, Bindoon and Castledare – which were all run by the Brothers.

The records showed a Brother Dowd was accused of fondling a minor and then moved to Adelaide in 1959.

In 1946 Brother Beedon, a teacher at the notorious WA institution Clontarf, was transferred to Adelaide after complaints he handled a boy’s private parts, stomach, abdomen and legs.

In 1957, a Brother Wise, who was the subject of complaints in 1948, 1952 and 1954, found his way to Rostrevor and then to Wakefield Street in 1960 where he was a sports teacher in the primary school.

Wise was later charged and tried in 2009 on two counts of buggery and five of indecent assault relating to incidents some 40 years earlier.

Suffering ill health, Wise denied the charges and made no appearance in court.

In August 2009 Judge Clayton instructed the prosecution that it needed to prove each element of offending beyond reasonable doubt; with a 40 year time lapse the prosecution could not reach this high level of proof and the case against Wise lapsed.

In 1955 Brother Laurence Murphy arrived at Wakefield Street.

He had already been moved from WA institutions Tardun, Clontarf and Strathfield.

In 1970, when he was the subject of further allegations relating to Wakefield Street he was moved to another school, this time in Whyalla.

He eventually retired from the order and was charged with six historical child abuse offences, but died before they could be heard.

In evidence to the royal commission this week, Brother Shanahan agreed with counsel that there had been a “large number” of Brothers accused of “immorality or abuse of children”.

Counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness, also produced evidence from archived reports that showed the Brothers’ procedure for dealing with complaints was cursory.

“It was your understanding that: … during the period 1947 to 1967 a common procedure was to put the complaint to the offender. Where the offender did not admit to the complaint, the word of the Brother was usually taken over the word of the child. Do you see that?” Furness asked.

“Yes,” Shanahan replied.

“In those cases: … a Brother was likely to receive a warning and might be transferred from a position in a residential institution or school to a day school where it was thought that there might be less opportunity for further misconduct,” Furness pointed out from the reports.

Shanahan agreed that official research documents confirmed that policy.

Later in his cross-examination, Shanahan detailed the efforts of the Christian Brothers to alert former students at Christian Brothers Colleges that they had an avenue of complaint and redress, through the Towards Healing program.

“I was directly involved in a number of Towards Healing ‘mediations’ as we call them, probably in the late 1990s, 2000, 2001, 2002 – in that period,” he said.

“But I don’t recall it having much impact or being utilised much by us for whatever reason …

” … it may have been partly in response to the communications I sent out in 1996/1997 appealing to any former students of our other schools who
had any complaints about their treatment to make contact with us, or with various other sorts of agencies that we indicated.

“There were two communications. There was one in 1996. I think it was published in places like the Catholic newspapers and maybe school newsletters and things like that.

“We tried to get the Old Boys Associations of each school to send that out to whoever they had on their contact list, and the letter had an explicit appeal to anyone who knew of a former student, who might need to get this message, ‘Please make sure they got it’, because if someone had been abused, they probably weren’t paid-up, happy members of the Old Boys Association and might not have got the letter directly.”

Furness asked Shanahan if “there (was) much of an upswing in complaints after sending that letter?”.

“The number of contacts we got after that was relatively small, as I recall,” he said.

The WA hearings wrapped up yesterday afternoon.

The Royal Commission’s website, with a list of contacts and resources, can be found here .

Christian Brothers College in Wakefield St is no longer run by the order, having been taken over by the lay-run Edmund Rice Education Australia.

*Kevin Naughton collaborated with 60 Minutes reporter Jeff McMullen in the May 1993 investigative reports on the abuse of children in the orphanages run by the Christian Brothers in Western Australia and the journey of Lawrence Murphy to South Australian schools. The Christian Brothers later issued a public apology and compensation for the victims.