THE families and victims of those who suffered systemic atrocities at a local mental asylum want a Royal Commission into what occurred there.
Wolston Park Hospital was built at Wacol in the mid-19th Century.
It was known as the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum in 1865, then renamed the Goodna Asylum, the Goodna Mental Hospital, the Goodna Hospital for the Insane, and the Brisbane Mental Hospital.
Over 155 years, more than 50,000 people were confined at the institution.
From the 1950s to the ’80s, there were widespread accounts of children being tortured, raped, and drugged behind its institutional walls.
Children – some as young as 11 – but the majority aged between 13 and 16 years old, were mixed with the adult population.
The State Government has never launched a commission of inquiry or offered widespread compensation to those who suffered at Wolston Park Hospital.
Kerry Carrington’s 17-year-old brother, Randall Carrington, was taken there in 1978.
“He was caught in a park with gay pornography, and was likely to have taken magic mushrooms,” Professor Carrington said.
“In the asylum, he was subjected to shock treatment without anaesthetic, experimental psychotic drug treatments, abused, raped, escaped, returned, punished, secluded in solitary confinement, and effectively chemically castrated.”
Ms Carrington was her brother’s sole carer.
“I had to teach him how to be a person again when they released him,” Professor Carrington said.
“He had been stripped of his entire personality and was unable to do a thing for himself; I even had to clean his teeth.
“He couldn’t hold cutlery or dress himself; he was like a zombie.”
Randall soon afterwards committed suicide.
Professor Carrington has been fighting to have her brother’s records released to understand what he endured.
“Nothing but the truth is good enough,” she said.
“The archive of patient notes and cache of medical records are closed to the public for 100 years.
“I have been denied access to my brother’s records by the State Archives even though he died 44 years ago.”
The State Government previously undertook the Forde Inquiry in 1999 into the abuse of children in Queensland institutions but only eight female survivors of Wolston Park Hospital were compensated under a redress scheme.
The Bligh government issued a formal apology, and a reconciliation plan was rolled out.
A spokesman for Premier Steven Miles said the Forde Inquiry had acknowledged harm done at Wolston Park and there had been “a heartfelt apology”.
However, former Queensland Mental Health Commissioner Lesley Van Schoubroeck said Wolston Park Hospital survivors of abuse had been snubbed by the government.
“The Forde Inquiry did not look for people who were deceased, and therefore it did not address intergenerational trauma,” she said.
“A final reconciliation plan applied only to the small group of women who self-identified.
“A commission of inquiry with full investigative powers is necessary.
“I heard stories of a policeman who was told by his father, who worked at Wolston Park, about when there was ‘fresh meat at the hospital – girls’.
“Many people who worked there would be happy to give evidence under oath.”
Meanwhile, journalist Lisa Herbert’s investigations found that around 200 people interned at the asylum were buried in Goodna Cemetery.
The whereabouts of anther 2,600 corpses remains a mystery.