The shower rooms at Parramatta Girls Home in Sydney, were young women were forced to strip in front of staff and were beaten and raped. Picture Craig Greenhill

That’s the view of Bonney Djuric, a former resident of the infamous Parramatta Girls Home, where generations of Australians were violently and sexually abused.

The 62-year-old artist and mother is behind an exhibition based on the painful memories of women who lived at the prison-like institution, opening under the same roof today.

Their stories are hauntingly prescient in a week when foster care is in the spotlight after the tragic death of Tialeigh Palmer.

Ms Djuric co-founded ParraGirls, a support group for her peers, with the late Christina Riley, one of the girls whose names you can see scratched into the floor of the segregation room, where children slept beneath bricked-up windows, the only light entering through an observation hole cut into the heavy door.

“Chris was sexually abused by her foster brother from the age of five to 11,” Ms Djuric told news.com.au. “She kept telling welfare and kept running away. Police kept taking her back and saying, ‘you’re a liar’.”

Jenny McNally, 62, was broken by the system too. She was placed in foster care at seven and stayed there until the age of 14, despite reporting sexual abuse by her foster father and his friends to a psychiatrist when she was nine. When she arrived at the home, then known as Parramatta Training School for Girls, there was more pain in store for her, as she was repeatedly raped and beaten by male officers and other girls.

Former resident Bonney Djuric has curated a haunting exhibition about how the system failed so many children.Source:News Limited

Graffiti in the “dungeon” of the former home, where girls were thrown in isolation for spurious crimes and suffered horrific abuse out of view. Picture Craig GreenhillSource:News Corp Australia

Many women who lived at the home have in the past few years recounted a horrific catalogue of abuse for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. They describe a humiliating daily routine of scrubbing floors, eating porridge filled with weevils, using toilets with no doors, showering naked in front of officers and presenting their underwear for inspection. Then there was the rape, the forced “examinations” to check if they had been sexually active and beatings in which one girl described having her face smashed into a sink and having to clean up the blood.

Tragically, gangs of girls regularly raped and sexually assaulted their peers in this toxic environment. “That was my biggest fear, that I’d be assaulted by other girls,” Ms Djuric said. “You’ve got girls coming here who’ve been subjected to incest or terrible sexual abuse through childhood. We are all victims, but some were more exposed and hardened to abuse before they got here. They’d been through the system for longer.

“You’d get a bully threatening, as you do. There was nothing to stop that here. It was a nest of predators, a school of predators.”

Many of the women have given evidence to the Royal Commission into child abuse about what happened to them here. Picture Craig GreenhillSource:News Corp Australia

Their painful memories are hauntingly prescient in a week when the care system is under the spotlight following Tialeigh Palmer’s tragic death. Picture Craig GreenhillSource:News Corp Australia

It was when her sister died in 2000 and Ms Djuric took in her three children that she was finally able to face her past. “It was a catalyst, I started thinking about our childhood and the paths we’d taken. We’d shared this institutionalised history but never spoke about it.

“That’s how it is for everyone, something happens.”

That, she says, is when the now-grown women are able to return to the building and see the graffiti they left as agonised young girls all over walls, floors and doors, from the segregation room to the ominous “dungeon” where the worst abuse took place.

Twelve former residents have contributed prints and audiovisual material about their traumatic past to the Living Traces exhibition, curated by Lily Hibberd from the University of New South Wales.

Ms Djuric would like to see groups who help marginalised children using the abandoned but beautiful historic buildings on the site, turning its legacy into one of hope.

After all, many of the same problems are still evident in the care system today, although she believes they have shifted to the juvenile justice system, and the street.

Ms Djuric expects the latest art project will encourage others to come forward and face the terrible history of what happened to them here.

“There are always a couple of first-timers,” she said. “They’re shaky, it’s just the beginning of their journey.”

emma.reynolds@news.com.au

Living Traces — Parragirls Artist Book and Print Exhibition runs 4-6pm Saturday 24 September, 2—6pm Sunday 25 September and Friday 30 September-Sunday 2 October.