NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / New Zealand

Marylands School abuse: How a tiny religious order in Christchurch became an outsized scandal

Isaac Davison
By Isaac Davison
Senior Reporter·NZ Herald·
18 Feb, 2022 04:00 PM6 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Alan Nixon told police he was being abused at Marylands when he was a student, but was not believed. His abuse was not recognised for a further 30 years. Photo / Royal Commission of Inquiry

Alan Nixon told police he was being abused at Marylands when he was a student, but was not believed. His abuse was not recognised for a further 30 years. Photo / Royal Commission of Inquiry

Abuse of children at Marylands School in Christchurch was so rife it was described as a state-supported, church-run brothel for paedophiles. But so far the spotlight has focused on a handful of individual abusers. An inquiry this week tried to find out how deep the rot went.

Alan Nixon nearly had to burn a church down to get noticed.

After Nixon racked up 400 convictions including arson, vandalism and burglary, his lawyer eventually asked him why he had targeted church buildings.

Nixon told a story he had already told many times: He had been sexually and physically abused at a Catholic school, Marylands, in the 1970s. Any building with a steeple reminded him of the school in Halswell, Christchurch, which he attended from age 8 to 14.

He had told police the same story 30 years earlier after they caught him running away, but later found in their records that they thought he was a liar and "not a very bright person" (Marylands was for students with learning difficulties). Social welfare and other state institutions also dismissed his story.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

After Nixon told his lawyer in 2002, something finally happened. The Hospitaller St John of God religious order, which ran the school between 1955 and 1984, met him. He was paid $1500, and promised long-term support. Yet that promise was never fulfilled.

Nixon was in and out of jail for 30 years after he left the school. He now lives outside Christchurch with another survivor of abuse. He has Parkinson's disease, which prevents him from working.

"I'm coping, trying my best to enjoy life, although I still struggle with PTSD symptoms," he told a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care last week.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"It's still hard. If I had the accommodation, transport and counselling support that the St John of God Order had promised me, life would be so much better."

The abuse at Marylands has been publicly known for 20 years. It is particularly infamous because many of the victims were disabled. They were removed from broken homes and broken again by abuse, many of them doomed for life.

Former Brothers Bernard McGrath and Roger Moloney were jailed for sexual offending in the early 2000s and Raymond Garchow and William Lebler were charged but never went to trial because of their ill health.

Marylands School was run by the Order of St John of God from 1955 to 1984. Photo / Supplied
Marylands School was run by the Order of St John of God from 1955 to 1984. Photo / Supplied

The St John of God is a tiny religious order in this country, barely a footnote in the history of the Christchurch diocese. But it has had an outsized role in abuse within New Zealand's Catholic Church - 14 per cent of all recorded abuse since 1950 occurred at the hands of its members.

Discover more

New Zealand|crime

White supremacist Philip Arps' phone abuse trial adjourned till June

18 Feb 03:45 AM
New Zealand|crime

Gang terrorise KFC staff over needle in burger

17 Feb 10:00 PM
World

'I saw her fall': Video is death row mum's last hope

17 Feb 10:32 PM

Hearings in the past 10 days in Christchurch aimed to go a step further than the criminal prosecutions and investigate the role of the order, the Church, and the state in the abuse at the school. Some victims were speaking for the first time, up to 50 years after they were abused.

The commission heard from Dr Michelle Mulvihill, a former nun in Australia who became a psychologist and helped St John of God respond to sexual abuse claims. Her extraordinary testimony, based on years of inside knowledge of the order, showed that Nixon's experience was not isolated - it was typical.

She visited New Zealand 13 times with Brother Peter Burke, the regional leader of the order, to track down 70 victims who had reported abuse at Marylands School.

They found the victims in prisons - in Hawke's Bay, Invercargill, Paparoa and Rolleston. Others were homeless. One was sniffing glue and during their meeting vomited all over the table. Up to 95 per cent had mental health problems.

They met a man in Invercargill in a shared flat whose total possessions were a single bed with threadbare sheets, a side table, lamp and a chair. The house was freezing, but he proudly displayed a heater he had borrowed for the visit.

Burke, the most senior member of the order in Australasia at the time, and Mulvihill sat on the floor and heard the former student's story of abuse and its toll on the rest of his life, his lost relationships and the removal of his children.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"This was typical of the kind of victim that we met in New Zealand," Mulvihill said in her written submission.

Burke gave the man $50, arranged another payment, and promised he would be looked after, Mulvihill claimed.

"He was never followed up or contacted again."

This happened again and again. Mulvihill indicated that Burke was sincere in his wishes to support the men, but was steamrolled by the order's leadership.

"After many years of trying to assist the order in understanding the depth of the problem of sexual abuse by perpetrators inside their own order, it became clear they were unwilling or unable to take any steps to remedy the situation," she said.

"There is still a culture of hiding information, of not trusting the police or victims or their families."

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Brother Timothy Graham, the head of St John of God in Oceania, rejected his former colleague's claim that the order was in "organisational denial".

''The brothers feel the pain and anger of the victims very deeply," he told the commission.

St John of God is a lay congregation, meaning its members are not ordained. But victim advocate Ken Clearwater, who has represented Marylands survivors for 20 years, said the broader Catholic Church could not wash its hands of the abuse. It recommended the order establish itself in Christchurch and was responsible for overseeing its activities, he said.

Catholic Archbishop Paul Martin downplayed the accountability of the Church in a hearing this week, saying bishops could not be closely involved in everything going on in their diocese.

Nixon felt the state had also got off the hook for the abuse at Marylands. Social welfare placed him there, ignored his complaints and failed to monitor him. He was eventually paid $40,000 by the Crown ("chump change") in a settlement he begrudgingly agreed to because he had been fighting the claim for 12 years.

"I want those in authority to own up to their wrongdoing — particularly the St John of God Order but also the Ministry of Social Development," he said.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"They need to be more transparent and take care of the people who were hurt, rather than just protecting their own people. They need to take responsibility for what their people did — they can't just brush it under the carpet any more."

Save

    Share this article

Latest from New Zealand

Christchurch

Car submerged in Christchurch river, fears people could be inside

07 Jul 08:19 AM
New Zealand

Health NZ board re-established by Government

07 Jul 08:03 AM
New Zealand|crime

'The man I once trusted violently raped me': Man jailed for attacking ex-wife next to sleeping child

07 Jul 08:00 AM

From early mornings to easy living

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from New Zealand

Health NZ board re-established by Government

Health NZ board re-established by Government

07 Jul 08:03 AM

Current Health NZ commissioner Lester Levy has been placed in charge.

'The man I once trusted violently raped me': Man jailed for attacking ex-wife next to sleeping child

'The man I once trusted violently raped me': Man jailed for attacking ex-wife next to sleeping child

07 Jul 08:00 AM
Premium
Tech Insider: UK tells retailers to use NZ’s Auror crime-fighting software

Tech Insider: UK tells retailers to use NZ’s Auror crime-fighting software

07 Jul 07:00 AM
'Do it now, run him over'. Teen who ran over mother's partner twice can finally be named

'Do it now, run him over'. Teen who ran over mother's partner twice can finally be named

07 Jul 07:00 AM
Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky
sponsored

Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP