Opinion: Paedophiles’ ‘different time’ excuse doesn’t wash

HORRENDOUS allegations that one of the nation’s most famous literary figures encouraged her young daughters to have underage sex with prominent men are being played down by some. But child sexual abuse is precisely that – child abuse – no matter what era or in what context, writes MATTHEW CONDON.

THE literary world punches well below its weight for scandals compared to those generated by movie and television celebrities and sporting figures.

But when it does suffer one, it’s usually a detonation that can be heard across the country.

Last weekend’s revelations about “the grand dame of Australian literature”, the late poet, novelist and playwright Dorothy Hewett, encouraging her young daughters to engage in underage sex with prominent men in the arts world is one such atom bomb.

Rozanna Lilley, at 13, when she performed in Journey Among Women, a film co-written by her mother, which contained gratuitous nudity.

In a feature in The Weekend Australian by journalist Rosemary Neill, the daughters, Rozanna and Kate Lilley, confirmed they had sexual encounters with many celebrity arts figures, including the artist Martin Sharp and writer Bob Ellis, when they were as young as 15.

Neill wrote: “Rozanna, now a 55-year-old anthropologist, author and autism researcher, characterises the Lilley family’s home as a ‘party house’. Her older sister, Kate, 57, a poet and associate professor of English at the University of Sydney, is far more blunt. ‘It was just – as an acquaintance says – like a brothel without payment’.”

The article added: “While the #MeToo movement has unearthed many grave allegations of sexual misconduct within the arts and entertainment business in recent months, the Lilley sisters’ story has an unsettling twist: both agreed it was their mother, a revered feminist and left-wing radical, who encouraged their early sexualisation.”

The daughters described themselves at that time as “jailbait”.

Hewett’s sons, Tom and Joe Flood, have defended their mother, saying it was “the men who were to blame”, in particular their father Merv Lilley, who “was not so interested … in protecting his daughters”.

Already various commentators have trotted out the time-worn argument that the 1970s – when the abuse occurred – was a more libertine time of sexual freedom.

Poet and playwright Dorothy Hewett.

This is precisely the argument used time and again by historic paedophiles facing the full force of the law for their transgressions. It was a different time with different cultural mores.

Just ask the victims of child sexual abuse if they feel the circumstances that destroyed their lives were all just a bit of artistic “literary salon” fun that pushed the boundaries in a long-gone hedonistic era.

Child sexual abuse is precisely that – child abuse – no matter what era or in what context.

Joe Flood, in a letter to The Australian, said: “Mum was influenced in the mid-1960s by an old school friend who had put her young teenage daughters on the pill, and she clearly decided to follow the same path to compensate for her own repressed years as a teenager.”

Press coverage of this scandal has, to date, largely focused on the famous men who preyed on the Lilley girls, who said some of their abusers were still alive. Should they be prosecuted?

And what of Dorothy Hewett? To what extent is she culpable in this sorry saga?

Her name is attached to one of the nation’s most prestigious literary awards – the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript – sponsored by the University of Western Australia Publishing.

Kate and Rozanna Lilley. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

She also has a plaque as part of the Sydney Writers Walk around Circular Quay, alongside Patrick White and Miles Franklin.

Hers features an extract from her play The Chapel Perilous: “I had a tremendous world in my head and more than three-quarters of it will be buried with me.”

Perhaps it will now be a little less than three-quarters.