YouTuber stunned by Victorian ‘pervert park'
In rural Victoria, a two-and-a-half hour drive from Melbourne, live dozens of the state's most dangerous sex offenders.
They are not locked up because they have served their time behind bars. Instead, they are free to come and go from accommodation in Ararat.
Behind an electric fence and largely obscured from view by a large hill, convicted sex offenders share supervised living quarters including one, two and three bedroom homes.
Pictures from inside are hard to come by and those who live there do not mingle with the public at nearby Ararat.
Naturally, there is great interest in the facility and what goes on there.
In a resurfaced video, a YouTuber did his best to find out. Aussie Max Caruso, who has 39,000 subscribers, made the long journey to Ararat from Melbourne with a camera and a microphone.
'I don't know if this place still exists. But we're going to head to Ararat,' he tells viewers in the 11-minute clip.
Caruso describes the village as 'Australia's trailer park for predators' but admits information is hard to come by. It does not appear on any map and even locals he spoke to were unaware of its existence.
'Apparently there's a park not far from here full of child (sex offenders),' he told a man from nearby Stawell.
'Really?,' was the response he got back.
Caruso did in fact locate the facility but was greeted by electric fences and security guards.
'I'm not going to lie. I thought it would be like a super accessible place and that you'd just be able to like walk in,' he says. 'Turns out that's not the case but it exists. I knew it exists.
The fence is right there. Behind that fence, see those roofs, that's where all these dudes are living. My original plan was to jump the f***ing fence. That's kind of dumb. I'm pretty sure this fence is electric so we are not going to jump it.'
At one point in the video, a white van pulls up next to the YouTuber.
'What's going on?' the driver asks.
'We're just filming a bit of a doco on our friends' farms and stuff. Is that alright?'
'What are you filming for?'
'We have our own individual YouTube channel.'
Caruso reveals that he was told to leave and 'realised we can't go any closer without getting charged'.
'I'm not satisfied though. I will return soon and find what I'm looking for,' he says. We travelled five hours for a f***ing wall.'
'Just so we all remember, these dudes are not in prison. They've finished their prison sentence, this is just like a holiday park for them where they can just hang out with their own kind and pretty much be protected from the rest of society.
'So I just want everybody in Ararat and around there to know that they've got a f***ing trailer park full of nonces just getting let into their society because since they're not in prison, they can walk out whenever they want.'
Corella Place, the official name for the village which houses the convicted sex offenders after serving their sentence, was set up in 2005.
Since then, it has been home to notorious ex-inmates including child rapist Andrew Darling and Robin Fletcher — who blamed multiple rapes on witchcraft.
Sean Price, who raped and murdered Masa Vukotic when the 17-year-old got off public transport in Doncaster in 2015, was released into the community a year earlier and spent time at Corella Place.
Price had been detained in the Village of the Damned over prior convictions, including sex offences against seven girls and women aged between 13 and 45 in 2002 and 2003.
He was supposed to be under a supervision order and subsequent electronic monitoring at the time of Ms Vukotic's murder.
Victorian Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry said he had tried, but failed, to understand the catastrophic decision to release Price, a convicted rapist, into the community in 2014 after he was placed on a 10-year supervision order in 2012.
'In a catastrophic example of mismanagement, whether on the part of the Department of Corrections or the Adult Parole Board, the decision was made to release you into the community and then the order ceased to have any protective event,' Justice Lasry said.
'You were given the freedom to commit these offences in circumstances where that should never have occurred.
'How you were permitted to be released into the community ... is astonishing.'
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