Former Teacher Tells Inquiry Elite Hobart School Covered up Abuses

The Guardian
November 20, 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/20/former-teacher-tells-inquiry-elite-hobart-school-covered-up-abuses


The royal commission into institutional responses is holding hearings in Hobart. Photograph: Royal Commission, Jeremy Piper/AAP Image

The father of the Tasmanian premier told a teacher to keep quiet about alleged sexual abuse at an elite Hobart school in the 1960s, an inquiry has been told.

The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse heard that sexual abuse at the Hutchins school in the 1960s was common knowledge.

Geoffrey Ayling, a science teacher, resigned in 1966 and changed careers after his attempts to raise the alarm were stifled, he told the commission in Hobart on Thursday.

He consulted his friend and lawyer Michael Hodgman, who was a Hutchins old boy. Hodgman was later a Tasmanian politician and is the father of the premier, Will Hodgman.

“Mr Hodgman’s advice to me was to me was that I should say nothing,” Ayling recounted. Hodgman died in 2013.

Ayling told the commission the advice also included a warning that the school board would become aggressive and defensive against the claims and that he could be subpoenaed and find himself in “dire difficulty”.

“I believe there was a conscious decision by the school to cover this up in the 1960s and keep this information about its teachers from becoming public,” Ayling said.

Ayling, now 75, said he no longer wanted to work at the school “because of the prevalence of paedophiles among teaching staff”.

At the time there were six teachers among the senior staff of about 16 who he believed had an interest in boys.

The sudden dismissal of fellow science teacher Spencer George in 1964 was because the colleague had been taking private “three-dimensional trigonometry” lessons, Ayling said.

“This [terminology] is intended to account for the funny positions that the school nurse had found George and one of the students in.”

Ayling said he did not raise his concerns in-house because he had overheard a conversation between then headmaster David Ralph Lawrence, which led him to believe the principal “shared a common interest in boys”.

In his evidence, Ayling said he would have lost his career and house had he spoken out.

“Although the experience of these students was common knowledge, everyone just turned a blind eye and let things be as they were,” he said. “At that time everyone wanted to carry on as if it had not happened.”