On 8 August 2024, Shannon Fentiman, the then Minister for Health, announced an investigation into Wolston Park Mental Hospital, covering the period from the 1950s until its closure in 2000.  The Queensland branch of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists released a statement a few days later supporting the historical investigation. Following the election of an LNP Government, the investigation was reduced to a review, and its terms of reference were narrowed. Nevertheless, it represents the first opportunity for truth-telling and a reckoning of historical atrocities committed at Wolston Park in the twentieth century. The review, led by Professor Robert Bland, interviewed 65 former patients or their relatives and will report later this year. I gave testimony about the treatment of my late brother Randall Carrington at Wolston Park to the inquiry. I look forward to reading the report, though there is no guarantee the report will be made public.

Hiding the past protects Wolston Park Mental Hospital from public accountability and scrutiny. It’s time for a reckoning of the human rights abuses of this notorious institution during an era when Qld was at the height of police and political corruption in the 1960s through to 1980s. Just as other abusive institutions, such as, churches and orphanages have had to reckon with their past wrongs, it’s time for Wolston Park to do likewise.

My brother, Randall Scott Carrington, was an involuntary patient of the Wolston Park Mental Hospital from 1978-1979 for about 18 months, aged between 17-19.  He was first committed to Lowson House, locked mental ward Brisbane aged 17 and then transferred to Pearce House, Wolston Park. It’s unfathomable how my 18-year-old brother came to be locked up with 27 other men in one of the most brutal of locked wards at Wolston Park, described by Burdekin as one of Australia’s worst institutions for the breach of human rights.

As it turns out, there were young girls confined to Osler House, the sister locked ward to Pearce House for adult women, around the time of my brother’s confinement. Three inquiries, the Forde Inquiry, the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse and the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry heard evidence that children were sent to Wolston Park Mental Hospital, during the 1960 and 1970s. A woman identified as E, born in 1960, same year as my brother, was transferred to Wolston Park in 1972 aged just 12. The inquiry concluded:

…she had no psychiatric disorder and should never have been admitted. She was eventually discharged from institutional care in 1976.

In 2010 the Qld Government issued a public apology to children, like E who were locked up in adult mental health institutions like Wolston Park. In 2017 Betty Taylor (interviewed for this podcast) was tasked by the then Health Minister Cameron Dick to undertake an investigation. She interviewed 8 women who were confined as involuntary patients in Wolston Park as children. The Report is grim reading.

“As children and wards of the state, they were beaten, sexually assaulted, made to endure electric shock treatments and drugged.” (Taylor, 2017:6)

In 2017 the Qld Government issued an apology and a reconciliation plan to Sue Trevick and other the children detained in Wolston Park and other mental institutions in the state, acknowledging the lifelong harm on ‘them and their families’

Some were incorrectly diagnosed with a mental health illness and some received treatments that have had an adverse impact on them and their families. This harm has resulted in life-long impacts that affect them to this day. (Reconciliation Plan, 2017)

My brother, Randall Carrington did not live to make representations to these inquiries about the gross violation of his human rights in the Qld Mental Health system. In 1980, fearing he would be returned to Wolston Park after being found living with his boyfriend he suicided. Homosexuality was at that time a criminal offence and also defined as a mental disorder.

The official history of Wolston Park Hospital (located at Walcol, Qld) doesn’t mention the estimated 2800 people who died there, the 2300 anonymous headstones strewn across three cemeteries, the morgue, the hidden archives, the wrongful incarceration of children in adult locked mental wards, the long-term detention of people with disabilities, the punishment and chemical castration of homosexual men, the relentless use of psychotic drugs as chemical constraints, the administration of shock treatment without anaesthetic, straight-jackets, beatings, strangulation with towels, rampant sexual assault and isolation cells. Wolston Park was a site of immense historical human rights abuses, especially during the reign Joh Bjelke Peterson as Premier of Qld from 1968 to 1987, a time when police and political corruption was rife in the state (Fitzgerald Report, 1989). 

Dr Lesley van Schoubroeck, former Qld Mental Health Commissioner, believes that an inquiry into Wolston Park Mental Hospital long overdue:

Qld govt owes it to people abused in #Wolston and to their families, to investigate what happened there and why. Who allowed wards of the State, people with disability, gay people, to be incarcerated and forcibly treated?

Original Painting of Pearce House, By Artist Debbie Manson

One day I hope there will be a Truth Commission into the atrocities of Wolston Park Mental Hospital, which can subpoena the files embargoed for 100 years, and provide the protection for witnesses to come forward to speak the truth.