“Hey mate, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

We were unloading the boat after a day on Noosa River during which we had shot up to Lake Cootharaba before coming back downstream for a long lunch at a waterfront restaurant.

The words came out measured, their tone warning me that this was serious.

I’d known him since we were kids at high school. I gravitated to him in my first class on my first day in a school with an 1800 enrolment which dwarfed the tiny bush school from which I had come.

“I’m sitting next to that kid,” I had thought the moment I walked into the room and looked up to the back to where a skinny, big-nosed head of hair was singing Neil Young’s Cripple Creek Ferry.

It proved a good choice. A bush kid himself from a town not more than 20 kilometres from where I was born, he has proved to be one of those mates that last for life.

We had not seen much of each other for a long time and still don’t but from time to time one of us will pick up the phone and carry on the conversation about life and politics that has been going on since that first day.

Whenever I hear the spray of laughter and insults coming down the line I reach for the fridge, grab a chair, and settle in for a talk that sometimes empties a six-pack.

Those conversations can – depending on the state of play – cover work, surf, kids, wives, football or old friends. But they always cover politics and why he thinks John Howard is the best Prime Minister Australia has ever had.

If you get sick of me writing about how he’s the worst Prime Minister we have had, believe me, I cop it from my end as well.

But what my mate told me that night standing beside his new boat in the carport of a Noosa holiday resort left us both in tears.

And it left me wondering why I had been insensitive to 30 years of failed attempts on his part to share a dark secret that had scarred his life and whose demons he battles to this day.

My mate has worked his guts out all his life, raised two great kids and during the years has built a couple of sensational homes for his family.

He also drinks heavily and smokes a prodigious amount of marijuana.

That night I finally understood the roots of those addictions.

He had set the conversation up, knocking back an offer to stay with us and instead booking the Noosa place and inviting me up for a day on the river and to stay overnight with him and his wife.

We stood there, me transfixed and him intense, as the pained words tumbled out about a childhood of torment and fear, and the horror of being repeatedly abused by a close relative from just before he turned nine until he was 12.

He had tried many times to tell me, hoping I was the mate he knew I was, but had always pulled back.

It was a story he had shared only with his wife until he told me, that telling putting to rest a fear of rejection he had carried throughout our relationship.

I think of that moment every time I read a story about child abuse or our reporter comes back from the courts with detail of the latest outrage inflicted on our young.

It reminds me that there will never be “justice” for the victims and that the damage caused is permanent.

It reminds me how difficult it must be for children to speak out when it took my friend three decades to tell his best mate.

And it reminds me that unless we really commit to discovering and dealing with whatever is motivating the abusers, his pain will continued to be shared by too many in our community.