‘sick of Pedophiles’ Teacher Quit
By David Killick
A FORMER teacher at Hobart’s Hutchins School has told a royal commission he walked away from his career in his 20s because he was sick of working with pedophiles. Geoffrey Ayling, 75, said he now knew that up to eight pedophiles were employed at the school during the mid-1960s — at a time when staff numbers were usually about 16-17. He gave evidence to a hearing of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Hobart yesterday. “I knew of four, including [former headmaster David] Lawrence, plus two more,” he said. “Yesterday, I heard of two more.” He said that in 1965 he overhead a conversationbetween a teacher, given the pseudonym AOC, and Lawrence, in which AOC asked to be given his job at the school back. “Lawrence said: ‘We cannot do this or the board will find us out. The parents will complain and it will come to the board’s notice. I cannot take you back on’,” Mr Ayling told the commission. “I did not hear Lawrence say the words ‘I am a pedophile’ — nothing like that whatsoever. However, from the conversation, it was clear they were both in it together. I was astounded by what they were saying.” He said the school’s old boy network would have destroyed his career if he had gone public, so he took the allegations to his friend, lawyer Michael Hodgman. “Mr Hodgman’s advice to me was to say nothing. He said if I was to go to the police to give a statement, I could be subpoenaed and I would be in dire difficulty,” Mr Ayling said. “He said that if I was to go to the board, it would beexpected they would take an aggressive and defensive approach to my allegations. “Mr Hodgman said ‘leave it to me’.” Mr Ayling said he was confident Mr Hodgman had passed the claims on to the board, but he left the school soon after. “I no longer wanted to work in the school ... because of the prevalence of pedophiles among teaching staff,” he said “I believe there was a conscious decision by the school to cover this up in the 1960s and to keep this information about its teachers from becoming public.” He said the sudden dismissal of fellow science teacher Spencer George in 1964 was because his colleague had been giving private “three-dimensional trigonometry” lessons, Mr 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.” Dr John Bednall, who was Hutchins headmaster in the 1990s when abuse allegations were raised by a former student codenamed AOA, gave evidence to the royal commission via video link from Perth. He rejected suggestions from counsel assisting the commission Angus Stewart SC that his response lacked compassion and was nitpicking and suspicious. “I think that’s an unreasonable inference,” he said. In his 1994 report to the school board, Dr Bednall raised concerns about the possibility of sexual abuse at the school 30 years before. “It seems inexplicable that despite three, possibly four, dismissals of staff for sexual misconduct in about a period of 15 years, successive boards of management appear to have been quite unaware of the seriousness of risk to which boys had been exposed,” he wrote. “If any unscrupulous individual were to become aware of these matters, there could be serious potential to embarrass the school.” But the school’s board of management rejected a draft apology to AOA later that year. The school eventually apologised last month. The hearing continues today. Relationships Australia is offering support for people affected by the hearings.
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