The book by Lord (now elevated from Sir, for his services to real journalism) Hedley Thomas on the Chris Dawson murder case has turned out to be as gripping as his podcast, The Teacher’s Pet.
It also turns out that Thomas borrowed the title from a line in The Police’s song of the same (Dawson murder) era, Don’t Stand So Close To Me.
https://genius.com/The-police-dont-stand-so-close-to-me-lyrics
The song is about, well, male teachers and female students. The lyrics are chillingly apt for the culture on Sydney’s northern beaches, aka the insular peninsula, because Dawson, as it happens, was also part of a predatory network of teachers who routinely groomed and violated their students. Apart from being a wife killer. All of this chick-sharing was pretty well-known, too. At the time.
Ah, the insular peninsula. Apparently, the rules of life change as you cross the Spit Bridge. Kevin Rudd used to talk about dueling banjo country north of Brisbane’s Pine River. Well, once you get to Dee Why and environs, it is similar, minus the banjos. The laid back, surfie culture there can be sinister. It was decidedly so back in the eighties.
Christopher Dawson turns out to be a famous (or infamous) name.
There was the great English Christian apologist, historian and scholarly writer on culture, after whom is named the estimable Christopher Dawson Centre in Hobart, run by David Daintree. Then there is the current Western Australian Governor and former Police Chief during the Covid scare. Yes, I am not sure about this Christopher Dawson, given WA’s Covid next-level lunacy. And finally, a convicted murderer, now in his seventies, who is also serving a sentence for underage sex crimes.
Without rehashing the whole compelling story, Dawson Number Three murdered his wife, or had her murdered, possibly by an underworld figure, on or about 8 January 1982. He was finally convicted on 30 August 2022.
Lyn just vanished, permanently. Dawson and his (literally) inseparable twin brother Paul had been Newtown rugby league stars in the 1970s, and were also teachers with a fetish for school girls. A fetish that was apparently shared by oodles of other high school teachers – in public schools, with not a Catholic priest in sight – in that part of the world, at that time.
Dawson’s “teacher’s pet”, Witness J – yet another Witness J – was moved into his marital home within hours of his wife, Lyn’s, disappearance. J (Joanne Curtis) then became his wife following a quick, in absentia divorce, and some years later, she herself cleared out, as her own suspicions grew that she might become “numero due” in the victim department. (At one point, she alleged that, prior to Lyn Dawson’s disappearance and while she was “dating” her then teacher, Chris Dawson told her of an occasion when he visited a “hit man” with a view to having him kill the wife. There is little reason to believe that this didn’t happen. Dawson’s former football club, Newtown, was notorious for its connections with serious crime, including those of Paul Hayward and Gary Sullivan, not to mention underworld figures like Neddy Smith, Hayward’s brother-in-law).
As Hedley Thomas recounts in gripping detail, Dawson insisted at the time that his wife had simply cleared out, possibly to join a sect, inexplicably leaving without any possessions and leaving her two, much loved small children, her much loved family, her much loved job, and her much loved friends. Never to be heard of again. Dawson still maintains his innocence and his story.
Several strong themes emerge from this horror story. They might best be put in the form of questions.
· One was, and is, how did he get away with it for nearly forty years? (His arrest and trials only occurred very recently, as a result of Hedley Thomas’s work and that of an author-collaborator, Rebecca Hazel. Dawson had lived, with a third wife, undisturbed in Queensland, for decades).
· Another is, why did no one suspect him at the time, or, if they did, not go to the police?
· Third, what were the police thinking? They simply believed the husband, despite him having motive, means and opportunity and the fact that just about everybody knew Dawson was having an affair with J prior to, and after, Lyn Dawson disappeared.
· Fourth, why, despite two coronial inquiries (2001 and 2003) which both recommended that the then Director of Public Prosecutions (Nicholas Cowdery) investigate whether charges should be laid, did the DPP do nothing?
All great questions. There are lots of secondary questions, too. There are all sorts of rats to be smelled here.
Let us focus on the dog that didn’t bark in the night, and why it didn’t. This is, of course, why the police of the day (and since) ran dead. Why they failed to mount even the most rudimentary missing person search effort. The contrast with the recent events in Ballarat, with a similarly missing housewife, Samantha Murphy, and much police and community activity, couldn’t be greater.
Yes, it is true that Lyn Dawson’s own family and friends didn’t jump up and down, at least not initially. And yes, the media coverage of these cases then didn’t match today’s wall-to-wall reportage of such things.
Dawson, who in his post-football career, appeared in television commercials, undertook modelling assignments, played local sport, and was a very popular teacher. Especially with the girls. He obviously seemed to many not to fit the profile of a suspicious husband. Only on the surface though, and an infinitesimal amount of digging would have got the police wondering.
But the police of the day didn’t just run dead on the murder issue. Oh no. They also, massively, ran dead on the blatant sex abuse going on at Cromer High, where Chris Dawson taught, and in neighbouring high schools. The northern beaches pubs would come alive on Friday nights with the heady atmosphere of girl students and male teachers “socialising”. Two coronial inquiries heard about this. The DPP did nothing. Nor did the police. (DPPs often mumble about “unlikely to gain a conviction” as a catch-all excuse for running dead on certain investigations. My response? Try harder).
The Australian reported in 2018:
Former NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery QC has been slammed for “infuriating” comments on the Lyn Dawson cold case.
Source The Australian, 11 September 2018, payalled.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported:
Before Mr Dawson was arrested, former director of public prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery QC said he declined to prosecute because the case was “weak”.
"Without a body, without knowing first of all whether in fact she is dead, without knowing secondly if she is dead, how she died; it's very hard to mount a case," he said.
As Mandy Rice-Davies once famously said, "Well he would, wouldn't he?"
Why the running dead at the time? Fans of Midsomer Murders might remember the episode involving “the Friday nighters”. These were police who availed themselves of the services of a local nympho every Friday night, in the police cells. To his eventual great shame, this activity included the copper in charge. It led to several subsequent (fictional) murders.
Well, one theory about the utter non-interest in pursuing paedophile teachers – whose activities, as Thomas’s book points out, involved some pretty awful acts by the teachers – would be that the cops were in on it themselves. Unkind? Maybe. A plausible theory, nonetheless.
What mostly gets said is that Dawson was mates with the coppers. He was widely known and popular. There were many cross-over activities and friendships, including at the Belrose football club, for example.
Then there is the theory that you don’t pursue missing persons cases and you don’t pursue other, sinister alternatives to the prevailing narrative if there is another plausible explanation of the person’s leaving. Beyond the Dawson marriage, no one probably knew about the ructions in the marriage, the bullying and the apparent physical abuse of Lyn Dawson. Certainly not many knew. Some suspected. So, police wouldn’t be expected to have questions to ask there.
Yet Chris Dawson’s explanation wasn’t remotely plausible. So that theory doesn’t fly. And further, no one asked anyone about the Dawson marriage. There was no Lieutenant Columbo here. Lyn Dawson’s work colleagues and siblings were waiting for the police to come and question them. And waiting. And waiting. They never came. And there were those close to the case who did suspect the husband. Like Lyn Dawson’s father. There were Chris Dawson sceptics who never had a voice. Were never asked.
It took nearly two decades for a coronial inquiry. Yes, there were coppers who pursued the case – to an extent – but that only really occurred in the 1990s, after Mrs Dawson Number Two, the teenaged student who Dawson groomed then married, came forward with her own delayed suspicions. It took law enforcement ten years to find any interest in the case. And even thereafter, their interest was highly circumscribed.
So, there is still no satisfactory reason for the cops’ inaction, including over the sex abuse in the state high schools. In relation to the latter, what about the old line – often trotted out, including by politicians and the Church – that “back then”, we just didn’t know it was going on, or, sometimes, we didn’t give much thought to the gravity of the crimes. Well, Julia Gillard found a few hundred million dollars to go after the churches in far more recent and supposedly more enlightened times. Still, there no retrospective interest in the public school teachers of yore. All those who liked to put the lyrics of the Police song into practice.
Let us just say that the state is very good at memory-holing things that are just a little awkward. And, of course, if ever the state did feel it as warranted to investigate past crimes on its watch, who would be up for all the eventual and inevitable compensation cases? Governments, that’s who.
Finally, in and since 2018, triggered by the arrest of Dawson, there have been former northern beaches school student emerging to seek compensation for sex abuse.
Former students who claim to have been sexually abused by teachers in public high schools on Sydney's northern beaches will seek compensation from the NSW government, the high-profile law firm representing them has confirmed.
Multiple allegations of sexual abuse are currently being investigated by NSW police, with assistance from the NSW Department of Education.
… Jane Muir, now 53, who was school captain at Cromer High in 1983, described a culture of relationships between students and teachers.
"It was a culture where teachers and the students mixed quite readily...there was a lot of underage drinking and we saw them at parties," Ms Muir told The Saturday Telegraph.
"I was grabbed by a male teacher I was babysitting for, he tried to kiss me."
A former Cromer High School art teacher, Peter Wayne Scott, was recently convicted of 13 child sex offences committed between 1984 and 1986.
Scott drugged and then molested and assaulted several teenage boys in classrooms and storerooms during school hours and in his van after school, it was revealed during three separate trials.
We can thank Hedley Thomas and Rebecca Hazel for all this, too. Great that there is belated interest from the authorities. You couldn’t accuse anyone here of being pro-active, though. It took a concerned and curious journalist to do what all journalists used to do.
There was another report from news.com.au in 2018:
Cromer High School, on Sydney’s northern beaches, was a cesspit of secrets, lies and cover-ups of sexual misconduct and abuse in the 1980s, according to several past students.
The podcast also prompted the NSW Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad to form Strike Force Southwood and investigate allegations of abuse at Cromer High after ex-students spoke on the series about the school’s toxic culture. Many past pupils alleged that teachers and students at the school were commonly involved in sexual relationships in the 1980s.
One of the most shocking allegations include that of a male teacher — not Mr Dawson — having raped a female student in 1980. Other former students have described how teachers openly boasted about sleeping with female students and supplied them with drugs and alcohol before making sexual advances, The Daily Telegraph reports.
She said teachers at the school took advantage of the teens and that one relationship in particular was “common knowledge”. She said there were teachers still working now who were involved back in the 1980s. (Emphasis added).
One thing is clear, the other twin, Paul Dawson, is very, very fortunate that this particular dog didn’t go woof in the night, and that he, too, is not behind bars. Not to mention all the other teachers involved. George Pell did 405 days in the slammer for something similar – in his case, for something that he didn’t even do. Justice, like God, clearly moves in mysterious ways.
The contrast of judicial inaction on the northern beaches (right up until 2018, nearly forty years on) with the equally blatant pursuit of the Catholic Church over decades, in particular in Victoria, culminating in the Gillard Royal Commission, the various parliamentary inquiries and the associated hounding of Pell by VicPol and the fembots, could not be greater. There was no moral panic north of the Spit Bridge about what went on in the eighties. (And when, if at all, did it end, one might well ask?) Unlike that in the progressive media over the Churches’ crimes and misdemeanours.
There was little, if any, real interest, in the Royal Commission (or anywhere else) about a culture of sex abuse of minors and those in the care of public sector teachers that was widely known in Sydney. What if the northern beaches sex culture was also occurring in other regions and cities, and not confined to one area? No one asked that. Why would anyone assume that such a culture would be so geographically confined?
A little like the blatant, widespread and well-known sex abuse that occurs (to this day) in remote Aboriginal communities. The Royal Commission ignored that too. As they did with all the rampant, creepy step-dad behaviour in the feminist, Brady Bunch blended family, post-Christian era that we no inhabit. None of these categories of sex abuse are of great interest to the progressive elites and the investigative vehicles they initiate, obviously. This is beyond odd, given the moral panic whipped up over these crimes, such that nowadays readers at Mass in certain Catholic parishes have to fill in forms and do online courses about child safety. It suggests that the moral panic is episodic, convenient and ideologically motivated.
Hedley Thomas himself noted in his book, in relation to the Royal Commission and with seeming understatement:
Oddly, public schools were all but ignored in the investigative sweep. No one lifted a finger to investigate the culture and conduct of the teachers at the schools on Sydney’s Northern beaches. Nobody from the public inquiry’s vast staff looked at how the grooming of one student by a popular teacher had led to the probable murder of a loving wife and mother of two girls (pp 223-4).
Indeed. It was a shameful episode.
VicPol actually advertised in the newspapers for non-existent “victims” of Pell to “come forward”. No NSW police ever asked students of either Dawson or of any of their libidinous colleagues to “come forward” in relation to the rampant, in-school sex practices, as far as I am aware. No one asked who knew in management what and when. Has anyone ever hauled in the school principals of the day? What of the heads of the NSW Department of Education? School inspectors (when they existed)? An astonishing lack of curiosity, at best. Too hard basket? Corruption at worst.
(Yes, Chris Dawson was “moved on” from Cromer High to another school when things got a little too close for comfort for the powers-that-be. Doesn’t that sound familiar? It puts the NSW Department of Education on an exact par with the then Bishop of Ballarat when Fr Gerald Ridsdale was doing his thing across Victoria, a similar number of decades ago).
The world demanded that Catholic Church heads roll over its own abuse scandals, even heads that had nothing to do with the crimes committed (like Pell’s) and heads (again, like Pell’s) that had done more than most to uncover, report and have the perpetrators pay for their actions. All those who knew and worked with and supervised the Cromer High perpetrators and said and did nothing deserve the same fate.
Where were the media? Louise Milligan? Four Corners? The 7.30 Report? The Saturday Paper? The Guardian?
A couple of articles appeared in 2018 after the Dawson arrest and the Teacher’s Pet series. Meagre output, indeed. With the first sniff of Catholic prelate blood in the water, the same media got into bed with the police and with the priest-chasing lawyers like Vivian Waller. They know who they are. They are mostly leftist, often ex-Catholic females who live in Melbourne and infest every Victorian institution they can locate. I am not aware of any northern beaches teacher-chasing law firms. Certainly, none apart from the flurry of post-2018 interest by one firm that I know of.
The contrasts are simply astonishing. As I say, it is memory-holing 101.
If not for Hedley Thomas and Rebecca Hazel, the world would not be any the wiser about the vile northern beaches of Sydney and of the sex-culture there. Then again, popular, surfer, male-model former footy players who cultivate police aren’t like creepy priests, are they?
Paul Collits
28 February 2024
Imagine my surprise.
“Where were the media? Louise Milligan? Four Corners? The 7.30 Report? The Saturday Paper? The Guardian?”!
It was more widespread and pervasive back then. Not just the northern beaches. There have always been corrupt cops since the rum rebellion. I grew up in the Rivererina late 60’s- 70. That was a cesspit.