Catholic Agricultural College Bindoon
Catholic Agricultural College Bindoon is a Year 7 to 12, co-educational College for day and residential students. It is set on a 3300 hectare working farm 10 km from the township of Bindoon. The property on which the college stands was gifted to the Christian Brothers in the 1930s by a wealthy landowner and widow, Mrs Catherine Musk, for the purpose of establishing a farm school for orphaned and socially disadvantaged boys. Construction of the college started in 1940, with the official opening in 1941.
After World War II, Bindoon became home for many migrant boys from the United Kingdom and Malta. Its principal, Brother Francis Paul Keaney, set about erecting his own monument by embarking on the near impossible task of completing five large granite buildings at Bindoon using child labour.
The boys were put to work on the Christian Brothers building projects in what many now see as enforced child slave labour. The unpaid, fearful labour force were mostly child migrant boys, some as young as 10, who were also expected to clear, fence and establish vineyards and orchards on what was undeveloped farmland.
To achieve his vision, he inflicted a manic and brutal regime of slave labour on the boys under his care. They were relentlessly driven from dawn to dusk in a dangerous work environment where the risk of accident was a reality. With their bare hands they cleared the land, laid the foundations and erected the most magnificent structures for Keaney and the Christian Brothers Order. Those unable to cope with the back-breaking labour were flogged, sometimes until their bones were fractured. Education was largely denied these boys, as was an adequate diet and protective clothing. Christian love and care was distinguished not by its presence but by its absence.
The complex was renamed Keaney College, after its tyrannical overseer, upon his death in 1954. The name was changed again after a statue of Keaney in front of the college was beheaded when accusations of institutionalized cruelty to native and migrant children were brought to the public s attention.
Many of the buildings they built and lived in are now abandoned and derelict. In 1994, the Parliament of Western Australia was presented a petition with 30,000 signatures which demanded an inquiry into the emotional, sexual and physical assault that took place in Bindoon.
Other institutions run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers in Castledare, Clontarf and Tardun were also named in the petition. The child abuse that took place at Bindoon at the hands of Keaney and the Christian Brothers is recounted in the film Oranges and Sunshine.
