Child Abuse "Ignored" at Australian School Praised by Prince Charles
By Jonathan Pearlman
It is the exclusive, 160-year-old private school in Australia long described in glowing terms by its most famous old boy, Prince Charles, who “loved it” despite being called a “Pommie bastard” and enduring 70-mile hikes. For the young Prince, his two terms at Geelong Grammar in 1966 – mostly at the 325-hectare Timbertop campus in rural Victoria - appear to have been character-building but rewarding. It “was hell,” the prince recalled during a return visit to the school in 2005, “but despite all this, I loved it all”. Though the Prince was no doubt unaware, some of his fellow students at the school were experiencing far more horrific forms of abuse. The school – whose other notable alumni include media mogul Rupert Murdoch and novelist Peter Carey – has been publicly shamed this week, as it emerged that staff failed to crack down on rampant child sex assaults lasting several decades.
A royal commission into child sex abuse has heard tragic accounts of a chaplain who hypnotised students before assaulting them and of a student expelled after reporting that a staff member fondled his genitals. "In my opinion, the power and prestige of the school served to discourage victims from breaking their silence about the abuse they experienced," former student Robert Llewellyn-Jones, now a psychiatrist in Sydney, told the commission this week. The allegations of cruelty and severe treatment of students have extended to Timbertop, which was described as a “brutal” environment whose conditions were likened to those on the island in Lord of the Flies. Just a year after Prince Charles attended, the remote campus was the site of horrific abuse, including multiple rapes by Reverend Norman Smith, a chaplain who has since died. A student, named only as BKU, this week recalled being raped twice in three days by Reverend Smith. "The first occasion I was abused by Reverend Smith another boy was present. He was a much smaller boy," he said. "Reverend Smith chased us around his private quarters. He would try to draw us on his lap so he could fondle us. He would try and draw both of [us into] his lap and we had to fight and push him away … The environment at Geelong Grammar was so heavily steeped in a punishing culture devoid of pastoral care that I never raised the issues while at school.” It was a far cry from the experience of students such as Prince Charles, who has long described his “fond memories” of his two terms as a 17-year-old in the tough environment at Timbertop. “I have gone through my fair share of being called a Pommy bastard," he said during a speech in London in 2011. "But look what it has done for me. By god, it was good for the character. If you want to develop character, go to Australia."
The claims of physical and sexual assaults revealed at the commission this week have dated back to the 1950s and involved numerous staff members, some of whom were eventually jailed. A witness, named BIW, on Thursday described waking one night in his boarding house in 1989 to find a man fondling his genitals. The man turned out to be Philippe Trutmann, a boarding house assistant who sexually abused some 41 students in the 1980s and 1990s; when he was finally arrested, he pointed out his numerous victims in the school’s year books. But the commission heard this week that staff at the school repeatedly turned a blind eye to reports of bullying and abuse and was intent on avoiding a public scandal. BIW told the commission that when he told the school’s deputy principal that he was worried about further abuse by Trutmann, he was expelled. "I remember the vice-principal exploded and he grabbed me by the back of my collar, lifted me out of my seat and dragged me up to the office," he said. "At times, I feel I minimise the abuse I suffered at Geelong because I feel there are other children there who suffered more than I did. I felt terrible guilt that I had left other children at school at the hands of a sex offender." The royal commission, launched in 2012 by former prime minister Julia Gillard, has heard horrific accounts of abuse across the country at some of the nation’s most prestigious schools, as well as at children’s homes and institutions run by religious organisations and charities such as the Salvation Army. The commission has already been extended for another two years by the ruling coalition and is not due to issue its final report until December 2017. The commission’s hearings into Geelong Grammar continue.
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