But he was determined the terrible depravation he suffered at St Joseph’s Orphanage, Sebastopol, was finally heard.

“We were the drones of St Joey’s,” Mr Hill said.

“We didn’t go to school and we did all the work around the orphanage.

“Most of us didn’t even know our full names and we were just given a number. My number was 29 because that was my locker number.”

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But when he turned five, Mr Hill’s life took a sexually sadistic turn.

He was told by a nun that “Father wants to cleanse you, 29.”

Mr Hill said visiting parish priests taking confessions would sleep in two downstairs rooms he called “the horror rooms”.

He was given a drink and blacked out, waking up bleeding from “the top of my back down to my shins.

“My genitals and my bottom were the worst and they hurt like they were on fire.”

“I later discovered I had bite marks on my privates.”

He was also forced to masturbate priests while they were in the confession box hearing parishioners’ confessions.

“If I made a noise .... he would whack me across the face to shut me up.”

The abuse eventually escalated to “dungeon type” assaults when he moved to the farm boys’ dormitory.

“The horror rooms had these medieval paintings, a big wooden X cross on one wall, and I used to be stripped down, tied up and sexually abused,” he said.

He also had his teeth pulled out with pliers, whacked across the face with an engineer’s hammer, thrashed with drill sticks and put in the “dungeon” and left to sleep on a concrete slab for a month at a time.

Mr Hill was also mentally abused by the nuns who told him: “Nobody wants you. Nobody cares about you. You’re just a nobody.”

Mr Hill was hospitalised after an accident and tried to report the abuse but wasn’t believed.

He was taken back to the orphanage and strapped to a bed with cushions on his head and neck with wires coming out and a catheter put in and a tube placed in his bottom.

“It was like some sort of electric shock therapy. They wanted to know what I had told them at the hospital.”

Mr Hill was eventually sent at 14 to work on a priest’s father’s property, where he was repeatedly raped by the priest and a relative of the priest.

“One of them would hold me down and the other tied my legs up and blindfolded me,” he said.

“The priest and the relative took turns to abuse me.

“Sometimes the priest’s dad came in and sat on me while this was happening.”

Mr Hill eventually escaped to Western Australia and married, fostering 26 children with his wife and being awarded a Rotary Club Paul Harris Fellowship for his community work.

“Before my wife died, one of the last things she said to me was that she hoped one day I could tell my story somewhere,” he said.

“When I started writing my story on a computer, I could only do about half an hour at a time because it took me right back to that time and it would be very painful.”

Mr Hill said his achievements had turned him from a “pawn” to a survivor.

“I want to make sure that kids who were sexually abused are not forgotten any more. Somebody has to have a voice.

“I have now got a voice that I didn’t have before.

“Has anyone bothered to do a count on how many of us forgotten ones have died of broken hearts, from the drugs, alcohol and suicides? 

“I bet they haven’t, they would run out of paper.”

Mr Hill also called on the church to compensate victims.

“It’s time to come out from behind the ropes and pay out the poor they robbed for so long.”

Mr Hill’s testimony was applauded from both inside and outside the courtroom.

fiona.henderson@fairfaxmedia.com.au