Westbrook: Surviving Australia's Most Sadistic Reformatory

Synopsis

At the tale end of the 1950s 14-year-old William Stokes was sentenced to Westbrook Farm Home for Boys after committing a series of petty crimes. Westbrook was the most feared institution for boys in the whole of Queensland - 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 demeaned and cowed, in a regimen designed to break them. Stokes' story of his years at Westbrook catalogue the horrors endured by children and young adults at the hands of the authorities, how they managed to survive and how the repercussions continue to be felt long after their original sentences were served. Brutally honest, disturbing and compelling, 'Westbrook' will both inform and outrage readers.