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GLENN BROOME

There are many creative people, who day after day, strive to deliver their vision which combines their passion, ideas, business experience and savvy with their creativity and in a line, Glenn Broome has converted negativity into positivity. Glenn is dedicated to helping young people and he can empathise with their position big time because he’s had a very interesting history himself…. Grab a coffee and read his story. “I can’t look after him.” This was the painful realisation that brought three-day-old Glenn to the local police station. It was 1963. An unwed mother with no family support, diagnosed with schizophrenia and certified insane at 12, didn’t face promising prospects — she killed herself after soon after giving birth. With no father on the scene, Glenn was deemed a ward of the state — his life path now determined by the government. First stop, Allambie, a State-run institution for infants to adolescents waiting foster care. It seemed Glenn’s luck had turned a corner. His selection within one year was fast by institutional standards. But in what is a common hazard with fostering, within nine months they separated and Glenn was presented to family number two. According to records, it was at this time that the first signs of “anger” began to surface. The first couple spoke German, which Glenn adopted also. But it unwittingly led to a communication breakdown. “I was incredibly frustrated with my (second) foster parents because no one could understand me. I was speaking German and I couldn’t even ask for water. I was throwing tantrums on the ground,” Glenn says. All of which proved too much. By age six, Glenn had been through four families. Although his final placement held the fondest memories, it again fell victim to divorce.

“Their marriage fell apart and I started to develop a bit of complex. Everywhere I lived they’d separate. So I started wondering whether I was the cause of it,” Glenn recalls. By 16, he’d been placed in various boarding homes and institutions, each of them compounding his anger and self-blame. Psychologists believe a child facing difficult circumstances can learn to emotionally detach, temporarily “losing touch” with their surroundings and immerse themselves into a fictional world. For Glenn, adopting a kind of modern day “Huckleberry Finn trait” made escaping institutions an adventure. “I saw other kids’ parents take them away for the weekend, so I felt entitled to take my own leave of absence,” he says. This “little fella” — today he’s still only 5’6½” — became a constant absconder, earning the title: “Escape Artiste”. But with every escape and capture, a very real and brutal punishment awaited. “You were taken to Parkside, maximum security for youth, and you’d get a belting or flogging with a cane or punching with fists,” Glenn says in a matter a fact manner. The detachment process used to survive childhood may explain his casualness at detailing stories of police bashings, and a ‘career’ placing boys in a head lock, punching them till they’d pass out. To this day Glenn insists there’s no “emotion attached” to these disturbing events. Yet it’s clear they were instrumental in developing a hardened criminal. Within a few short years, Glenn and his friends stood at the top of the institutional ladder, toughened to the point of indifference. “We didn’t care about what people thought…we were recidivists who quite enjoyed what we were doing because we weren’t afraid of the risks.” And proof of that came just before his 18th birthday. With four other mates, he committed an armed robbery. But rather than returning to Turana Youth Training Centre (YTC), he was moved to notorious Pentridge. A ‘promotion’ based on the view that he was completely institutionalised, without hope of rehabilitation, and in danger of contaminating those who were. In the land of high fences and security, and even bigger men, little Glenn faced his first night petrified at the sight of an inmate hanging himself, and the sudden realisation that he was unprepared for this new reality.

“That shattered me…it still haunts me to this day,” Glenn says. “But the biggest culture shock was no one cared anymore. In spite of me being the horrible kid I was, I knew that in Baltara and Turana some people cared. It’s just I was so damaged I couldn’t reach out to them to accept it.” Unable to escape, he found new methods of disguising his insecurities. “You spend a lot of time bridging up. You wake up in the morning and put on this suit of armour and you ‘whack a basketball’ under each arm and make yourself look bigger than you are.”An act so good it had Pentridge authorities convinced he was unreformable. “I thought I was redeemable in some way but my folder had ‘institutionalised’ stamped on the front of it,” Glenn laughs. Unfortunately, labels tend to stick and gradually Glenn succumbed to his. For the next six years, he would return to prison numerous times, spending 14 months in the Notorious H Division for assaulting a prison officer. One of which, having fled Victorian borders with his pregnant wife and her two young children, landed him in Grafton prison, New South Wales. It’s at this time Glenn encountered a Salvo, Steve Nelson, a former Vietnam Vet and now Salvation Army officer who visited Glenn on a regular basis and began to invest quality time into Glenn, who later became his mentor and friend. Glenn responded to this knock-about approach by Steve and it was the catalyst for lasting change. Glenn and his family remained in Grafton and began the slow process of de-institutionalising or life outside prison; new routines, family life, the frustrations and rewards of paid work, a degree in social science, youth work, drug and alcohol and now, quite appropriately, working for Whitelion in the very Turana building he grew up in. He was in a position to search for his natural father and discovered he has a brother and sister and a host of nephews and nieces that he has regular contact with. Glenn has worked in the offenders space for the past 25 years to include those both in the youth justice and corrective services arena. Some of the people Glenn works with are the very people to whom he grew up with, and some are generations apart. Glenn has worked for such organisations as Whitelion, Kids Under Cover, MacKillop, Salvation Army, VACRO, Prison Fellowship Victoria, Jesuit Social Services and CVCP. Worked in Barwon, Port Phillip Prison, Metropolitan Remand Centre and the Melbourne Assessment Prison. In each of these roles Glenn has worked towards connected the disconnected and improving the lives of others and assisting in connecting the disconnected Glenn is available to speak to community groups and individuals about his work at Whitelion and how men in the community can make a difference to young people.