Since the orphanage’s own records typically are far from exhaustive, the evidence of what really went on must be assembled with great care from individual memories like the fragile pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle.

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“It’s taken a long time, modern search technology, and enormous investment from state and national governments, news outlets, and many individuals to begin to grasp the scale of the story of St Joseph’s Orphanage and the other orphanages mentioned in this book,” she writes. “In some ways, the story was too big to be told before. Increased scrutiny only makes it bigger.”

Kenneally reflects that uncovering the abuses at St Joseph’s made her acutely aware of the parallel reality of systematic criminality that coexists with the everyday world to which most of us are accustomed.

“I had worked for years as a journalist and thought of myself as a relatively worldly adult,” Kenneally writes. “I also believed that the world was a singular, knowable, real place. Now I know that some people have always moved freely between the reality that is plain to see and its hinterlands: the institutions, the orphanages, the places where things happen behind closed doors and stay hidden.“

According to Kenneally, many priests “have slipped unseen between the known world and unknown places, like orphanages, where they used their immense power to bend and twist and shape the reality of the children who lived there.”

“If you grew up Catholic,” adds Kenneally, “you have almost certainly met a man who had such power. I came across such a man when I was 14 years old, though I didn’t know it until much later.“

Kenneally grew up in Melbourne in a staunchly Catholic family that revered the priesthood. As a teenager, she was given a glimpse of what she refers to as an “invisible archipelago” when she went with a friend to a youth camp at a property in Central Victoria owned by Michael Glennon, a priest who was convicted of multiple horrific offences against children committed over several decades and who died in prison in 2014.

Kenneally recounts how she refused Glennon’s invitation to go into his bedroom and, along with a few of the other teenagers attending the camp, take off her clothes in order to demonstrate “trust” and “love”.

As painstaking as her efforts to uncover the truth evidently have been, Kenneally believes the work of bringing to light the abuses in orphanages such as St Joseph’s has barely begun. “The cloistered and cruel world of the orphanage may seem utterly fantastical, but the events that took place there belong very much to reality, and their lingering traces are out there, in records and memories, waiting to be found.“

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