Content warning: This story contains sensitive material.
As children, all Steve Smith and his brother wanted to be were altar boys.
It was the 1970s, and the Smith family was deeply involved in their local Anglican church in the Newcastle diocese, where Smith’s mother played the organ and his father was churchwarden. “The priests were good friends of our family,” Smith tells his housemates on new SBS series, Christians Like Us.
In 1971, when Smith turned 10, he was finally able to become an altar boy. One Sunday after serving at the altar, Smith was in the vestry getting changed when the priest, the “young and charismatic” George Parker, grabbed him.
“He sexually assaulted me,” Smith tells the group. “[He] told me that I was to say nothing to anyone, no one would believe me, that I was his special friend. And then promptly drove back to our place and sat and had lunch with our family.”
Over the next four years, Parker abused Smith hundreds of times, brazenly pursuing the boy in full view of his parents and carers. At his mother’s request, Smith would perform chores for the priest, mowing his lawn or washing his car. When he finished the task, the priest would assault him. Parker would also turn up to school to take him out of class, saying he needed an altar boy.
“Every opportunity he had, he’d rape me,” recalls Smith. “I was powerless.”
Every opportunity he had, he’d rape me,” recalls Smith. “I was powerless.
When Smith was 14, Parker moved to a different parish. The boy’s relief that his ordeal was finally over quickly turned to horror when Parker sent for him and his brother to serve as altar boys in the new parish.
Finally, Smith told his mother about the abuse. “It broke her heart,” he says. She immediately went to see Newcastle Bishop Ian Shevill.
She came out of the meeting “sobbing, hysterical, and unable to speak", as detailed in Anne Manne’s essay for The Monthly, ‘Rape Among the Lamingtons’.
It later emerged that Shevill had also sexually abused children. Unsurprisingly, he refused to listen to her story.
Two years later, in 1977, Smith’s mother died unexpectedly. “The Church, in its wisdom, decided she was going to have a huge funeral,” says Smith. Parker was invited to return to his former parish to deliver the eulogy. “It was a slap in the face,” says Smith, who was a pallbearer at the funeral. “That bastard was standing behind her coffin waiting for us to come in.”
He was so distressed at the priest’s presence, notes Manne, he feared he would drop his mother’s coffin.
Smith spent years struggling to overcome the trauma of his abuse, spending time in a psychiatric hospital as his mental health deteriorated. He went to the police and met with church representatives, but for years nothing was done to address his abuse.
On the path to justice
The next time Smith saw Parker was at a Port Macquarie courthouse for a committal hearing in 2000. Smith had again gone to the police, which saw charges finally laid against the priest.
The case went to the Newcastle District Court in 2001, only to have the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions withdraw the charges when the defence produced a register that it claimed contradicted Smith’s claims.
Evidence was later presented at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that the register, a crucial piece of evidence, had been altered, providing Parker with an alibi.
The failure of the case to proceed was “devastating,” Smith tells SBS Life. “It was one of the worst days of my life.”
The failure of the case to proceed was “devastating,” Smith tells SBS Life. “It was one of the worst days of my life.”
It soon became clear that the odds were stacked against him from the start. “The barrister who cross-examined me was the bishop’s senior legal advisor, so he had the inside running in the Church, and the solicitor was a trustee of the diocese,” says Smith.
The presiding justice, Judge Ralph Coolahan, also had a close connection with the Anglican Church, having represented the Newcastle diocese as a lawyer in the past.
Coolahan’s antipathy for Smith and the case against Parker was soon made very clear. The judge called Smith “ridiculous” and questioned why the matter was in court so long after the alleged incidents had occurred.
“He said it was a disgrace that I hadn’t revealed or told the story when I first turned 18,” recalls Smith. “He said I attained my majority [the legal age of adulthood] 20-odd years before and why didn’t I do something about it then. He gave me a flogging.”
Smith has since sought an apology for Coolahan’s comments from the New South Wales Attorney-General’s department but to no avail. “Everyone who’s ever read the transcript of what was said is just appalled at the way Coolahan treated us,” says Smith.
Smith left court defeated. His resolve rekindled, however, when the diocese registrar Peter Mitchell wrote an article for the Anglican Encounter, since retracted, that was highly critical of Smith. “They called me a liar,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘righto, you blokes want a fight, I’ll give you a fight.’”
In 2014, Newcastle Police launched Strike Force Arinya-2 to investigate allegations of historical child sexual assault in the Anglican Church. In 2016, police re-laid the four no-billed charges from 2001 against Parker, who was then dying from cancer in Ballarat, and charged him with an additional 20 offences.
“I was ecstatic when they recharged him,” says Smith. “We knew he was ill, but we hoped we’d get him to committal. Three weeks later we got the news that he died. I felt shattered, but also relieved in a way that it was over.”
Vindication at last
The royal commission, established in 2013, sought to lift the lid on decades of shameful child sexual abuse in Australia.
Smith, identified as ‘CKA’, gave evidence at the royal commission, which exposed Parker (‘CKC’) and many of his contemporaries in the Anglican Church’s Newcastle diocese as child abusers. “It was a validating experience, but it was very daunting,” says Smith.
He was personally insulted when prominent figures jumped to the defence of George Pell when a court lifted the suppression order on the Catholic cardinal’s conviction of child sex abuse. Former prime minister John Howard was one of 10 people who submitted character references to the court on Pell’s behalf.
“It gives you an understanding about how these people have been able to operate as they have over the decades when they’ve had the support of politicians of the calibre of Howard and [Tony] Abbott,” he says.
Today, Smith believes the church’s place is in the community helping the underprivileged, not in political decision-making. “The average churchgoer is a good person, with good intentions, but I think they’ve all been let down badly over the years by their leadership,” he says. “That culture really needs to change.”
Those seeking information or support relating to child sexual assault can contact Bravehearts on 1800 272 831 or Blue Knot on 1300 657 380. Lifeline is available 24 hours a day on 13 11 14.
Christians Like Us airs over two nights at 8.35pm, Wednesday April 3 and 10 on SBS.
