AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
Peter FitzSimons
It was satisfying to see my erstwhile boarding master at Knox Grammar, Neil Albert Futcher, “found guilty by a jury of 22 child sex charges, including eight counts of buggery” last Wednesday.
As reported by the Herald, as the verdicts were read out, the court room was filled with the sounds of sobbing. Futcher, as far as it is known, did not offend while at Knox in 1974 – and I have asked many of my fellow boarders – but wreaked a terrible trail of destruction once he moved to Trinity Grammar the following year. Bravo, to those former Trinity boys, now in their 50s, who came forward and gave their evidence that saw him convicted.
Former Knox headmaster Ian Paterson tells the royal commission he told English teacher Adrian Nisbett to be careful “with your touching habits with boys” when appointing him resident master.
The verdict came the day after the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released its findings about what happened at Knox, noting particularly that the long-time headmaster of Knox, Dr Ian Paterson, “failed to prioritise the welfare of boys over the reputation of the school”. No one who reads the report, most particularly from page 59 onwards, can doubt it.
Once again, I simply cannot put the figure that emerges from the royal commission together with the legendary educator of unimpeachable integrity I knew. But Dr Paterson’s conduct in the face of the allegations that emerged, his enabling of the culture that allowed child abuse to take place over so many years, most particularly in the 1980s, was nothing less than disgraceful.
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