I wish to thank Debbie Manson the Brisbane based artist who has bought my brother, Randall Scott Carrington back to life through her art.
This painting pictures my brother Randall Scott Carrington with his blond-tinged sunburnt hair, shirtless standing in the driveway sporting Sunglasses, board shorts and black thongs. That was his uniform – even to school. Randall was left-handed, flat footed, and had a quick wit, not the characteristics that enamoured him to schoolteachers. He was also a poet, a lyricist, and loved David Bowie.
Almost everything about Randall’s abbreviated life was taboo in the 1970s, being a gender-bending queer kid from a single-parent family. Aged just 17, still a child, he was incarcerated in Pearce House a locked ward in Wolston Park Mental Hospital, for the forensically insane with 27 adult men, where he was sexually assaulted, drugged, given electric shock treatment and chemically castrated. Debbie Manson has painted many of the locked wards at Wolston Park, including Pearce House (for men) and Osler House (for women).
Below Debbie Manson’s painting recreates the drugged bodies strewn across the caged yard where my brother was penned.
My brother Randall Scott Carrington committed suicide on 7 October 1980 aged 20.
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