What happened to baby Sandra? Survivors seek answers, 50 years on.

By Ruby Jones.

The people who knew Sandra Wardle can recall the baby’s shocking death in an instant, despite 50 years of distance.

Her brother Jimmy Wardle, now a lean, laconic 59-year-old living in the remote town of Kununurra in Western Australia’s far north, says it was a teaspoon of mashed potato that did it.

He was nine years old, living under the care of the Australian Indigenous Ministries at Darwin’s Retta Dixon home, and it was lunchtime at number one cottage.

George Pounder, a tall German man who Mr Wardle describes as “a rough looking bloke”, generous with beatings, put his baby sister into a high chair.

Elizabeth Clarke was there too. She was a little older, and like a mother to Sandra, who she says “was a beautiful baby … we all used to spoil her, carry her around, sleep with her on the bed”.

Ms Clarke had been sent to stay at Mr Pounder’s cottage for a week, while her houseparents were away, but she was already all too aware of his presence in the home.

"He used to bash me and make my ears bleed all the time," she said.

She still has hearing problems today.

According to Ms Clarke, Mr Pounder was force feeding baby Sandra meat when it happened.

"The diced steak was that big she couldn't chew it. She was flat out, and next minute we just seen her slumped," she said.

It would not have been the first time baby Sandra choked, says another former resident of the home.

Sandra Kitching was 15 when she ran away from Retta Dixon, traumatised by the treatment of baby Sandy, as she calls her.

"Most of us knew that something serious was going to happen, just that horrible feeling in your stomach and I didn't want to be there for that," she said.

Ms Kitching and her family now live in western Sydney and she has had a long career in community work.

But when she remembers Sandy, emotion colours her voice.

"He forced every spoonful into this little girl, held her nose and closed her mouth, and it was just too much for us kids to watch. Every meal time," she said.

When she tried to help baby Sandy she was punished, chained to her bed and forced to clean with a toothbrush.

Within a few months of Sandra Kitching running away, baby Sandy was dead.

A death certificate from 1964 lists pneumonia and pulmonary oedema - fluid accumulating in the lungs - as the cause of Sandra's death.

She was buried in Darwin General Cemetery.

There was no police investigation and the children say they were not told what had happened to her.

But they could not let go of what they saw.

In 2006 they wrote to the Northern Territory police.

The letter, signed "the Retta Dixon House children" describes Sandra gagging on food, turning blue, and going limp 'like a rag doll'.

It says Mr Pounder lifted her out of the high chair and tipped her upside down, and accuses him of hitting her on her back, hard.

According to their letter, Sandra never regained consciousness and the children never saw her again.

Police did respond to their plea. A two-page report reveals an officer could not locate Mr Pounder, but did speak to the former superintendent of the home, Mervyn Pattemore.

Mr Pattemore recalled Sandra's death and said she was a "sickly girl who suffered from diabetes" and that just before her death had bad diarrhoea and gastro.

Mr Pattemore said she was taken to hospital shortly before she died and the death certificate listed the place of death as the Darwin Hospital.

The police officer also spoke to five children who were at the cottage, including Elizabeth Clarke, and his report said there were several different recollections of the events surrounding Sandra Wardle's passing.

It concludes: "There is little avenue and no reason to pursue this matter further."

According to Darwin City Council records, Sandra is in an unmarked grave in the Darwin general cemetery - number 96 in the "other denominations" section.

But the plot is hard to find, the graves jump from 95 to 97.

The Darwin Council was able to find the right number but the headstone has the wrong name - an Alice Mulgar Doran who died in 1967.

The Darwin Council's chief executive Brendan Dowd says the council is investigating.

"The burial was undertaken over 50 years ago so it does require us to look at our archives and a visual inspection at the site," he said.

It is especially difficult news for Sandra's relatives, who want her remains returned to her homelands at Wave Hill, where she could be laid to rest with her family.

In the meantime a Darwin-based lawyer acting for them is filing a fatal injuries claim, suing the government over the death.

Bill Piper says he is confident the evidence backs up what Mr Wardle and others have said about Sandra's death.

"While [on the death certificate] it's not described as a choking death, a pulmonary oedema - although I'm not a doctor - is in my understanding consistent with a choking death," he said.

"So the story of the children, the adult brother and sister and other children who were there, is clearly corroborated by the objective evidence."

He says the potential for financial compensation is minimal, but it would be a form of recognition for the family.

"It's a story of not just brutality, it's a story of systemic failings," he said.

"The system let the Wardle family down. These children were placed into this situation as wardens of the state and there were no systems in place for their protection."

This post originally appeared on the ABC.

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