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.
Last updated: 7 August 2023
Cite this: https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/ref/qld/bib/QP0000187.htm
First published by the Find & Connect Web Resource Project for the Commonwealth of Australia, 2011
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