Ballarat’s history of sexual abuse is an enduring wound. How can we heal together?

Ribbons tied on the fence outside St Patrick’s Cathedral to represent survivors of child sexual abuse by clergy. This week designs for a new memorial park to honour victims of sexual violence were endorsed. Photograph: Brett Keating/Alamy

Ballarat is a city of grand churches. Even without the ribbons of survivors tied on the fences, it’s difficult to drive past them without thinking of the past atrocities that, to many, they have come to represent.

Although it is not fair to survivors to describe it as a thing of the past. They’re part of a lingering wound, open and bare, susceptible to becoming infected if left untreated.