On October 27, 2012, I had written a letter about former Nationalist health minister Alexander Cachia Zammit and the Christian Brothers of Western Australia. I received three responses via this newspaper’s website.

The first said: “Enough already. Let us all move on to another chapter of history.”

The second: “This is now past history. Why dwell on it? It won’t change a thing.”

The last said, in part: “Do you have some kind of agenda?”

Since that letter, child migrants from the UK were heard at the Australian Royal Commission On Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2014), participated in a 2018 UK inquiry into sex abuse of child migrants and seen the amendment of civil liability laws in this country that allow suing churches, hitherto impossible.

Not a bad legacy for future generations and better than a concrete monument of a paper boat in Valletta harbour.

Things have certainly changed in this country.

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