Parents Sent Their Boys to Knox Grammar to Get the Best Start in Life. Instead Some Were Abused – and It Went on for Decades
By Bridie Jabour
When Dr Ian Paterson, the man who presided over three decades of child sexual abuse at one of Sydney’s most prestigious schools, took to the stand at the royal commission into child sex abuse, he said he came to say sorry – sorry that scores of boys put into the care of Knox Grammar school were sexually abused over decades, sorry it happened under his watch, and also sorry that he did not know. “As headmaster I am responsible for all that occurs during my headmastership; there were matters that I knew about and other matters that I did not. However, without doubt I should have known and I should have stopped the events which led to the abuse and its tragic consequences for those boys in my care and their families,” the 81-year-old said in the stand, reading from a prepared statement. “ ... An apology seems totally inadequate but I do so with an awful feeling of uselessness in my heart.” In his evidence he then went on to detail how a resident master who had been convicted of molesting two girls did not undergo a criminal check before being hired by Knox in 1987 because “the times were quite different then, we judged people very much ourselves.” He explained how he did not initially believe a boy who made a complaint that a teacher had grabbed his bottom and asked him to take part in mutual masturbation because the student was a “drama boy”, and, most damning of all, how when child protection police came knocking at the school in 1996 he lied about his knowledge of child sexual abuse at the school and had the police chasing wild geese by directing them to files he knew did not contain any relevant information. He later retracted the admission, saying he was not asked specific questions by the police on child abuse at the school. As he detailed the times that a paedophile teacher was brought to his attention, and then let off with the proverbial slap on the wrist – one teacher was told not to touch boys, another teacher was suspended for six months for showing boys porn then allowed to return, two paedophile teachers were given glowing references – victims sat in the public gallery watching the former ruler of their worlds. They watched as Paterson, who was headmaster from 1969 to 1998, said how hard it had been on his family. They watched as he said that in the 1980s he had considered teachers allowing students to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol was more serious than child sex abuse, and how at one point he was more concerned about whether a teacher was gay than whether he had been molesting boys. They watched as Paterson described how a school seen as one of the best in Australia, housed what one victim referred to as a “paedophile ring” that for more than three decades allegedly saw multiple boys groomed with treats and then sexually assaulted, according to evidence heard in the commission. They were not the only ones watching. Around the world Knox alumni – referred to in the community as “Knox old boys” – were also watching the live stream and, according to radio presenter and former student Gus Worland, exchanging text messages and emails. Hugh Jackman, who graduated in 1986, watched the live stream of Paterson’s testimony from New York. “Sad, angry, disappointed” was how Worland described the email and text messages between the old boys . Today Knox Grammar school remains one of the most exclusive schools in Australia. Other Knox old boys include former prime minister Gough Whitlam, the managing director of the ABC Mark Scott, Man Booker shortlisted author Steve Toltz, and former Liberal MP and now Sky News presenter Ross Cameron. The Uniting church school charges more than $50,000 a year for boarders and up to $28,440 for day students’ school fees and has paid out at least $1m in the past six years to men who were abused while students at the school. Most of their payouts come with a clause banning the students from talking publicly about their ordeal and even Paterson acknowledges there are victims who have not come forward. For the past two weeks Australia’s long-running royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has unpackaged a carefully cultivated world of privilege and esteem. Men who were boys who were not listened to, or were too scared to speak inside that world, had a chance to describe the deep and absolute impact on their lives wrought by their parents decision to give them what they thought was the best start in life – a Knox education. “What I experienced at Knox affected me greatly, so too have all the subsequent processes, legal and psychological. I would like to stress here that by far the most resounding personal circumstances of my case were not the actual incidents of sex abuse, even though this has caused plenty of confusion in its own right,” Coryn Tambling told the commission in the first few days of hearings. “By not having a safe place at the school that I could immediately go to be heard and for the situation to be dealt with sensitively and with relevance and consequences to the perpetrators, I internalised my pain and confusion and developed a deeply entrenched blueprint of rebellion.” Tambling has spent 30 years being sacked from jobs and unable to build loving relationships. Another student turned to sex work in his 20s after the abuse because he had “habituated to providing sexual gratification to strange men as a lifestyle” and another died in his 40s after long periods of anxiety and depression compacted another illness. Allegations have been made against a variety of teachers at the school but the three names that recurred on each day of the commission were Adrian Nisbitt, Craig Treloar and Barrie Stewart. Witness after witness got up and detailed having their genitals groped by Stewart as he tucked their shirts into their trousers, with one boy going to a GP for a bleeding anus after Stewart inserted his finger into his rectum. Men told of Nisbitt assaulting them in his photography darkroom. One student told of a teacher, known for groping the boys, having memorial gates erected in his memory after his death. They bore the inscription: “He touched us all.” Tambling was groomed by Treloar as a student living thousands of kilometres from his home, Darwin, in the Knox boarding houses. Trelour picked Tambling to be one of his “special boys”. He was allowed to watch movies with a small group of other boys in Treloar’s room, they were taken to the movies and bought junk food and Treloar even had dinner with Tambling’s parents when he was in Darwin. “I considered Treloar to be a ‘cool’ teacher,” Tambling told the commission. Treloar even told Tambling he loved him. It was not long after that Treloar began showing Tambling porn. First it was heterosexual, then he started showing him gay porn, then bestality and finally porn featuring young boys. One night after he showed Tambling porn featuring young boys, he led Tambling into his room, the commission heard. He lay back and told Tambling “Kneel in front of me. I want you to suck my dick just like on the video. Undo my belt.” Tambling knelt down in front of Treloar, before realising the awfulness of the situation. He got up and protested he did not want to do it. Treloar ran away. He ran out of the room, out of the boarding house, into his car and drove away. “I thought you said you loved me, why do you want me to do that?,” Tambling shouted after him from the master staircase. Threaded through all of the sex abuse victims’ evidence was the strong emphasis that Knox placed on its reputation. It was described as of “paramount” importance in the commission, though Paterson preferred the term “very important” when he was in the stand. In 1988 a 14-year-old boy was sleeping in his bed in his boarding house when a man reached out from under his bed and started groping the boy. The boy screamed and the man jumped up. He was wearing a Knox tracksuit and a balaclava, and grabbing the boy’s bedding he draped it over his head and ran out of the room and down the stairs. He was last seen running from the boarding house. The alarm had been raised and the story of the “balaclava man” quickly raced through the student body. Paterson could not ignore it, it had been reported to teachers. Paterson conceded in the commission that it was established within weeks, possibly days, that “balaclava man” was a teacher. Paterson said he suspected it was the religious education instructor Christopher Fotis at the time but had no proof so no action was taken against him.
The sexual assault, which Paterson conceded to the commission was “serious”, was not reported to police. “It didn’t cross my mind,” Paterson said. “... It wasn’t a question of whether I thought not to call the police; I did not think about the police at all. I made no decision in my head about police.” The boy’s parents were not told of the assault at the time either. Pressed on whether he was concerned about potential damage to the school’s reputation from the reporting of such an incident, Paterson said it was not a factor. But surely it must have crossed his mind that the assault of a boy in his bed in a boarding house would not be good for the school’s standing in the wider community, he was asked. “I can assure you that the thought of advancing or controlling the reputation of the school never once entered my head,” he responded. The prestige of the school went beyond New South Wales, with Tambling’s Darwin-based parents dismissing Tambling when he told them about his encounter with Treloar years after his behaviour had become erratic and he had started to abuse alcohol. The ramifications would echo through the next 30 years with Tambling unable to respect authority and sacked from multiple jobs in the wake of this assault. “I think in part that my parents were so consumed with the reputation of Knox that they couldn’t fathom that something like that would have occurred,” he told the commission. The mother of another student gave evidence of her son’s spiral downwards after Treloar molested him in the early 2000s, about 20 years after he assaulted Tambling. Drawn in by the school’s reputation, ATU, as she was known at the commission, sent her oldest son, ATS, there in the hopes his formative years would be shaped by scholastic excellence. She watched as her “beautiful little boy, affectionate, fun loving, talented, inquisitive” began a descent into a psychotic state that would see his family living in fear of violent outbursts, him attempt suicide and be hospitalised under psychiatric orders multiple times. One hospitalisation lasted more than 200 days. “As a mother I’ve had dreams and hopes for my children. My dreams for ATS have been stripped down to mere survival,” ATU said as she wept on the stand. ATU was at the commission in the public gallery the next day when her son’s abuser, Treloar, was called to give evidence. He spoke of his fear in the 1980s when a student made a complaint about Treloar showing him porn. “I was quite distressed. I thought my career was over,” he said. But Treloar’s career was not over. Paterson dealt with the complaint by suspending Treloar without pay for six months – Treloar even chose to take the suspension in the second half of the year rather than the first half. Treloar conceded he had abused boys at the time and was terrified Paterson was going to ask him about it. But Paterson did not ask him if he had any further inappropriate contact with students. And if he had? “I most likely would have said no because I would have been too scared,” Treloar said. After he returned from his suspension he was put in Knox’s preparatory school. He continued teaching at Knox until his arrest over child sex abuse charges in 2009. He was found guilty of the sexual assault of three boys and served two years of a four year sentence. ATS was still in hospital when Treloar was released from jail, ATU noted in her statement. The motto of Knox Grammar school is “Virile Agitur” translating as “the manly thing is being done”. Tambling finished his testimony reflecting on it: “Imagine then a Roman soldier. My experience and subsequent ongoing punishments and denials of justice rendered me with no shield, no armour, no clothes, no sheath, simply a naked man flaying a sword causing much harm to both myself and others.”
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