AustLit

'Journalist and author Martin Flanagan attended a Catholic boarding school in Tasmania from 1966 to 1971. It was after a third priest from his time at the school was convicted of sexual crimes that he began this memoir. It was 2019, George Pell’s guilty verdict was being challenged in the High Court, and the debate around paedophile priests was raging. Everyone in the media seemed certain about what happened in schools like his and yet, for Flanagan and his brothers, none of it was clear at all. Not that he doubted the victims – in a 2007 trial, he had given evidence against one of the priests – but as a journalist he knew how unreliable memory could be. Perhaps now was the time to see what he did remember.' (Introduction)