AUSTRALIA
The Australian
SEPTEMBER 26, 2015
Hedley Thomas
National Chief Correspondent
Brisbane
A child-sex abuse scandal and ensuing cover-up at two elite Brisbane schools that contributed to Australia’s governor-general quitting 12 years ago is being reinvestigated by the royal commission into child sexual abuse.
Some 100 boys were abused over many years by a counsellor, Kevin “Skippy” Lynch, at Brisbane Grammar and, subsequently, St Paul’s. The wrongdoing was shielded from public scrutiny because leaders in both the Anglican diocese and the schools at the time kept the matters quiet.
The scandal was exposed by investigative reporting in Brisbane in the early 2000s, which showed senior figures including Brisbane’s Anglican Archbishop, Peter Hollingworth, were aware of evidence of the abuse, before Dr Hollingworth was appointed governor-general. He resigned in 2003 over his handling of a series of sex-abuse scandals.
The abuse was not reported or acknowledged by the church or the school until after a former Grammar student suspected of having been one of Lynch’s victims, Nigel Parodi, shot three people in a rampage that ended with the loner’s death in a police shootout in Brisbane.
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