It’s not only the screams of tortured children at the notorious Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital that haunt Rosemary Thomson; it’s also the smells, the bewilderment and the sneering distain of unit head, psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks.

Almost 50 years on, the nightmare she endured while detained at Lake Alice remains a visceral experience for the Auckland criminal barrister.

“I’ve got to be honest with you, it’s burned into my psyche,” Thomson says. “It’s never left me. I remember every single minute of those eight days. I remember the smells, I remember coming out of a meeting with Leeks thinking ‘how could a place like this exist in the 1970s’?

“It’s like I’m burdened with it. If I talk about it at arm’s length, I’m okay, but the moment I start thinking about things it gets a bit overwhelming.”

Thomson is taking a wait-and-see approach to whether the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State and Faith-based Care – tabled in Parliament on Wednesday – provides the outcomes she and other survivors are looking for.

“Whatever the report’s recommendations, it’ll be turned over to the government for implementation,” she says.

“What we’re saying is ‘stop this mucking around, stop going around in circles. We’re at the business end now. Let’s knuckle down, accept what happened with a proper apology and proper compensation’.”

Otherwise, Thomson says, the survivors will look at taking civil action to seek redress.

The Royal Commission has spent almost six years examining the experiences of children in care, initially focused on 1950-1999, but also later hearing from people who were abused after that period.

It has taken testimony from 3,000 survivors and held 14 public hearings, conducting what Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden describes as “the largest and most complex public inquiry ever held in New Zealand”.

The inquiry estimates 250,000 children were abused in care, although it admits the true number will never be known because proper records were not kept about the tamariki involved, who were often from poor, Māori or Pacific backgrounds.

Lake Alice, tucked away from prying eyes in the back-blocks of the Rangitikei district between Palmerston North and Whanganui, provides one of the most extreme examples.

Between 400 and 450 patients, most of whom had no valid diagnosis of mental illness, passed through its Child and Adolescent Unit from 1972 to 1980, experiencing horrific physical violence, sexual and emotional abuse, neglect, threats, bullying and racism.

“The story of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit is a shameful chapter in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand,” Royal Commission Chair Coral Shaw says in a supplementary report into Lake Alice the inquiry completed in 2022.”

“It must be faced head-on, without excuses or explanations. There must be a promise given to Aotearoa New Zealand to make things better and make sure this never happens again.”

They frogmarched me off

On a spring day in 1976, Thomson was resting in her bedroom with a sore throat when a police officer knocked on the front door demanding to see her, forever altering the course of her life.

Thomson was an ordinary 13-year-old. She was doing well in her studies, excelled at swimming, had no history of mental or physical illness and had absolutely no idea why police had turned up out of the blue to grill her in her own home.

“I was sitting in bed in a T-shirt and underwear and he’s trying to barrage me with these bizarre questions. I remember thinking at the time that they were quite inappropriate questions,” she says.

“He left and I said to my Mum ‘what the hell are you doing bringing cops into the house?’. About an hour later he comes back with a strapping young constable. They frogmarched me off and that was it.”

Once at Lake Alice, convinced a terrible mistake had been made, Thomson questioned Leeks about what was happening.

“I asked him on what basis I was there and he said ‘oh, your parents don’t want you’. It was extraordinary,” she says. “There was never any medical assessment carried out… It was a mystery to me why I was there and it’s all still a mystery.”

Leeks reacted with amusement at being quizzed by a mere adolescent and told Thomson she should expect to stay for at least four months. “I was astounded,” she says. Leeks’ response reflects his absolute power at the Lake Alice unit, which he ran as a personal fiefdom from 1972 to 1977.

Under his oversight, children were punished with electric shock treatments to the head, body and genitals, or given crippling injections of paraldehyde, a sedative that causes intense pain and leaves victims unable to move for hours.

The children, who were aged 16 and under, were regularly put in solitary confinement. Unit staff sexually abused and sadistically tortured the youngsters in their care.

“I witnessed horrors that no 13-year-old should have to experience,” Thomson says. She returned home after managing to trick a staff member into letting her phone her mother, who picked her up the next day.

“My escape was nothing short of a miracle,” Thomson says. “Actually, I felt guilty once I left and was concerned about the children left behind. I tried to raise the alarm but could not get any interest in what I was saying.”

Pieces of garbage

Leeks, who Thomson says was “a psychopath on the loose”, oversaw what Thomson describes as a human trafficking network of contacts operating nationwide who sent him a regular supply of vulnerable children. He was eventually forced out of Lake Alice in 1977, although the unit remained open for another three years.

Despite numerous complaints against him, Leeks was given a certificate of good standing by the New Zealand Medical Council and moved to Australia, continuing to work as a psychiatrist until 2006, when he surrendered his practising certificate to avoid a hearing by medical authorities into his conduct at Lake Alice.

He died in 2022 and never faced charges over what happened at Lake Alice. Nor did anyone else involved. Thomson later learned the police officer who came to her house and forced her to go to the facility had sent several other children from her hometown to Lake Alice.

That officer never faced any consequences and continued to be regarded as a pillar of the community, running for political office in the 1980s. Returning home and going back to school did not end Thomson’s Lake Alice ordeal. Like other survivors, she struggled to process the legacy of her stay at Leeks’ unit.

“For me to be able to pick up the pieces and carry on to get where I am now was very difficult,” she says.

Thomson acted as if nothing had happened and her schoolmates had no inkling of what she had endured until decades later, when she revealed her experiences in a 2020 media interview.

Since then, she has become a prominent voice for survivors, whom she says still face harsh judgment from many in society for the treatment meted out on them, even though they were the victims.

“At the end of the day, nobody cared about these kids. Leeks regarded them as bottom of the barrel and that’s how everyone regarded them, as garbage,” she says.

“That perception remains, they’re pieces of garbage. That’s why I think people are so distressed when they discover I was one of those pieces of garbage that he referred to – that someone amongst them could be one of those people.”

Robbed of their futures

Thomson accepts that no one from Lake Alice will be brought to justice. “That horse has bolted. Unfortunately they’re long gone, they’re all dead or infirm,” she says.

“So the only thing now for us is compensation, that’s all that left. The only true apology will come when they pay proper compensation.”

As a group, Lake Alice Survivors have heard apologies before, from former Prime Minster Helen Clark in 2001 and from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in February this year.

Some compensation was paid in 2001 but Thomson said there has not been adequate recompense for the lives derailed at Lake Alice and, whatever the Royal Commission’s recommendations, only the government has the ultimate power to deliver for survivors.

“Not only were they robbed of their innocence and their childhood, they were also robbed of their futures,” she says. “They’re saying ‘we’ve waited and waited, we’re nearly dead and we still have no money. Are they waiting for us to die?’

“They’ve gone through the whole Royal Commission, pouring their hearts out… they’ve relived it, but for what? Is anything going to come out of it?”