On one occasion, Owen said, Anderson held him over the side of a bridge and threatened to "drop me into the fires of hell if I didn't do what he required me to do".
Conditions at the orphanage, run by the Sisters of Mercy, were harsh beyond belief. As punishment, or sometimes just arbitrarily, children were beaten with whips, belts and lantana branches. They were locked in rooms and cupboards, kicked while they slept and starved of food and water.
Bedwetters were made to stand in the communal dining-room with their soiled sheets draped over their heads. Runaways were publicly flogged.
Yet when Diane Carpenter, now 62, told a police sergeant that she had been molested by Father Michael Hayes in the Catholic Church presbytery in Rockhampton, the officer abruptly ended the conversation. Another policeman whom she tried to confide in, when she was 17, told her bluntly to "go to the courthouse".
Owen - who told the royal commission he had never married because "I worried that I'd take out the cruelty that was done to me on my wife" - reported Anderson to an inspector from the Queensland Children's Department, a Mr Paterson.
But Paterson, it transpired, was a friend of Anderson's, and the pair frequently dined together. When Owen showed Paterson his "bleeding backside", the inspector "became very angry" and told him to keep quiet.
Carpenter, too, tried to complain to an inspector responsible for children in state care. She was beaten by the nuns when they found out.
The royal commission, which has just entered its third year, is investigating how the Sisters of Mercy, the Catholic Church and the state government responded to the allegations of physical, sexual and mental abuse.
Neerkol is the 22nd institution to be scrutinised by the Commission, which is holding hearings all over the country.
Carpenter was one of a number of Aboriginal children who passed through the home and were "ministered to" by Hayes. Her five siblings were sent to the same orphanage, where they were all kept apart.
She was abused for the first time when she visited Hayes, she said, hoping for comfort following her father's recent death.
Instead, Hayes sexually assaulted her, in an attack witnessed by another priest.
At the orphanage, Carpenter was once locked in a room so hot she was "forced to drink my own urine to stay hydrated".
On another occasion, a nun ordered a girl to scrub Carpenter with a hard brush.
"I still have scars on my back today, because ... it was like somebody was cutting me with a knife," she recalled.
Another woman told how she was gang-raped at 14, then gave birth to a baby which the nuns immediately removed, telling her she was "having the devil taken out of me".
Hayes died without ever being charged. Durham was charged in 1997 with 40 sexual offences against six children, but served only four months in jail. Anderson is dead.
Baker faced several trials but was never convicted.
Yesterday the former bishop of the Rockhampton diocese, Brian Heenan, who dismissed the abuse allegations as "scurrilous" when they began to emerge in the early 1990s, took the witness stand in the city's courthouse.
He regretted reacting in that way, he said, and he agreed that he had been more concerned about protecting the church's reputation than about the impact on victims of abuse.
