Author
Stokes, William
Publication Date
2010
Publisher
Pan Macmillan
Place Published
Sydney
Page Numbers
432
ISBN ISSN
9781405040075 (pbk.)
Description
William Stokes tells the story of his years at the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys, which he was sent to in the late 1950s for committing a series of petty crimes. Describing Westbrook was the most feared institution for boys in the whole of Queensland, he sees it as a brutal tyranny ruled by a sadistic warden, where boys laboured in the fields from dawn to dusk and where flogging was the answer for any misdemeanour, however minor. Inmates were systematically demeaned and cowed, in a regimen designed to break them.