The waves of history continue to wash up at the door of the last remaining monks in a small, historic town in Western Australia.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images of deceased people.
In recent years, the Benedictine monks of New Norcia, 130 kilometres north of Perth, have been rocked by shocking allegations of historical child sexual abuse by a number of their predecessors involved in running the town's schools for Aboriginal children.
Now fresh questions are emerging from Noongar elders and surviving members of the Stolen Generation, who are asking what became of "the kids that never came back" and where they are buried.
It is estimated more than 2,000 Indigenous children passed through the New Norcia mission schools from the 1860s until the early 1970s.
This week, the New Norcia monastery told the ABC 275 Aboriginal children, aged under 18, were on its burial register dating back to 1851.
It is not known what they died of, but diseases including measles and bronchitis are reported to have decimated the mission's population in the late 1800s.
Unmarked graves could be children
Ballardong-Noongar woman Dallas Phillips, who attended St Joseph's girls' institution, is urging the community's leaders to identify who is buried in a number of unmarked graves in the town's cemetery.
Ms Phillips believes they could be the graves of children and wants the monks to release what records they have.
“My mum’s mother used to say that there’s a lot of kids that never came back from [the] mission," Ms Phillips said.
"I'd like to see the graves maintained, with proper signs.
“Find out what they died from, how they died, when they died.
"Let's help them, they deserve the respect and acknowledgment."
The small cemetery lies in the heart of New Norcia, Australia's only monastic town and one of WA's oldest tourist attractions.
Amid dozens of headstones of monks, there are some simple white crosses scattered across the graveyard and a large area of uneven ground that appears to hold an unknown number of unmarked graves.
Plea to Pope Francis
Ms Phillips has written to WA Premier Mark McGowan, the Benedictine community and Pope Francis about her concerns, demanding the children's graves are investigated.
She is being backed by Jim Morrison of the West Australian Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation.
Mr Morrison said according to oral history, there were other possible gravesites in the town that need to be looked into, perhaps using similar technology to that used to uncover the remains of children at Indigenous schools in Canada.
"If there is suspicion of bodies there, yes why not as part of the repatriation/reparation, we get the scientific evidence to identify where the bodies are and how many," Mr Morrison said.
Mr Morrison said given that many of the First Nations children in the 20th century had been removed from their families under government policies, there was a potential role for the WA government to play in funding the research.
There are only seven Benedictine monks left at New Norcia.
None of them are implicated in the allegations of historical abuse and none were involved in the running of the Aboriginal schools by their predecessors.
Monks planning cemetery upgrades
The Abbot, Fr John Herbert, declined to be interviewed about the graves but agreed to respond to questions via email.
Asked if the community would object to the proposed research of the unmarked graves, Fr Herbert said:
"We have no objection to any reasonable steps which may assist recognition of deceased persons, provided they respect the various cultural sensitivities and practical issues involved in an appropriate manner."
Fr Herbert said the monks had been carrying out "extensive research" on the cemetery for the past decade and were preparing to install maps and lists (of the deceased) at its entrance, hopefully by the end of this year.
He shared a list of 328 gravesites within the cemetery and identified most of them but only a few appear to belong to children.
About fifty are marked as "unknown".
Asked where he thought the 275 children on New Norcia's burial register were buried, he replied: "Some are buried in New Norcia, some are buried at Moore River Native settlement (70 kilometres away) and some are unknown."
Fr Herbert said the second stage of the cemetery project would involve installing "interpretation material regarding the unmarked graves" which in many cases were unmarked because that was the Indigenous community's custom at the time of the burials.
He said he believed they belonged to adults because of the appearance of the graves.
Former detective believes graves are children's
But Peter Fox, a retired New South Wales detective chief inspector who helped prompt the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, disagrees.
He visited New Norcia with Dallas Phillips and others in late 2019 and estimates there could be as many as 50 unmarked graves in the cemetery that could contain the remains of children.
"You could still make out, over a quarter of the cemetery, the graves of what appeared to be short graves, in all likelihood children but none of them had markers," Mr Fox said.
"There was no cross, no headstone, no formality of any sort other than you could discern through the different soil surface where burials had occurred.
“And I just felt that was terribly sad."
Historical records accessed by Perth historians Neville Green and Lois Tilbrook for their book 'Aborigines of New Norcia 1845-1914' show New Norcia's population during this period, along with the entire south-west of WA. was devastated by measles outbreaks.
But very little appears to have been written about the next chapter of the mission from 1914 onwards.
Fr Herbert said that the only other gravesite the monks were aware of was under the choir area of the town's Abbey Church.
According to monastery records, the burial site was discovered during construction work in 1871 when workers found the empty coffin of an 11-year-old boy who died in 1855.
His remains were later re-buried with his father's.
'It's gone on for too long'
Ms Phillips would like to see as many remains discovered and identified as possible.
She is also demanding full disclosure of New Norcia's records on Indigenous children buried in the town, including whether their parents and other authorities were notified of their deaths.
Ms Phillips has called for the remains to be repatriated back to their traditional lands if families requested it.
"We need to get them home to their own country at the Benedictine's expense with the help of the [WA] Government," she said.
"We're sick of talk, we need action now, it's gone on for far too long."
