Chris Dawson carnal knowledge trial: tawdry picture of school life in the 80s emerges
Alleged sexual activity with teens in the middle of PE classes; naked swims and boozing: we thought we knew everything about the sorry Chris Dawson saga — it turns out we don’t.
For the unfamiliar, the breakneck horse trading that occurs each weekday morning in Sydney’s District Court at the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets in the CBD is eye-popping and – there’s no other word to describe it – unseemly.
Barristers gather in their dozens outside a courtroom on level three of the Downing Centre court complex, flapping and jostling in their black gowns, a murder of legal crows, and file in one after the other as their case is mentioned. Then within moments they shuffle out again to the registry desk, where they wait once more to have a judge appointed to their case, the final tick that moves them off that seemingly interminable list and activates their cases proper.
As one person commented on the scene: “It’s good to be in a place where even the lawyers are held in as much disdain as the rest of us.”
This is the raw machinery of the judiciary, a boiler-room view, down with the furnaces and pistons, and this week the new case against former high school teacher and convicted killer Christopher Michael Dawson, 74, found itself caught in that fray.
Dawson has been charged with a single count of carnal knowledge involving one of his students back in the early 1980s.
In the NSW Supreme Court in August last year, Dawson was famously found guilty of murdering his wife Lynette in 1982, and subsequently sentenced to 24 years in prison. His story made world headlines.
This week the Dawson carnal knowledge case joined that morning queue and was ultimately appointed to District Court LG1, a small, cramped, semi-subterranean space in the former 19th-century Mark Foy’s department store (once renowned for its flowers, costumes and corsets). Judge Sarah Huggett was appointed to preside.
Dawson has aged
Later on Monday morning, the trial’s first day, Dawson appeared in the dock of LG1 in a tatty green prison tracksuit, accompanied by two corrections officials.
In keeping with his surrounds – just as the District Courts appear poor cousins to their fancier relatives, the Supreme Courts just north of Hyde Park – Dawson appeared significantly aged since his murder trial, conviction and sentencing, his face puffed and jowly. He carried, too, a bitter countenance.
During legal argument before the start of the trial, he sat unmoving, his eyes rarely shifting, his downward gaze tethered to some spot on the carpet between the judge’s bench, and the bar table populated by Crown prosecutor Emma Blizard, and public defender and Dawson’s legal counsel, barrister Claire Wasley.
There were a few threads that connected this new case with Dawson’s epic 10-week murder trial last winter.
Dawson’s older brother Peter, a lawyer, showed up for the first day of the carnal knowledge trial with his familiar shaved head and dark outfit. During the murder case he coughed and hacked during proceedings. That same cough, though diminished, also punctuated the opening day of the District Court carnal knowledge trial.
Blizard, who played second fiddle to Craig Everson SC (now a District Court judge himself) during the murder trial, took control of this case. And, as with last year, the walkways that crisscrossed nearby Hyde Park started to feature scuds of dead leaves as autumn succumbed to winter.
In Court LG1, Judge Huggett, born in country Moree in far northern NSW and the daughter of a police officer, was swift, direct and no-nonsense. Perhaps hearing the distant rumble of caseloads in that legal boiler room, she made it clear that time would not be wasted. (She would tell the court she was at work on another trial where the jury was making its deliberations and that other pressing work loomed.)
By Tuesday, however, the first witness – known only as AB, or the accuser in this case – appeared in the courtroom via audiovisual link after some minor technical glitches.
As is so often the situation in trials, once you finally hack your way through the inevitable underbrush of legal technicalities, clarification of procedure and physical practicalities, the case breaks through to open sky with the witnesses, and the narrative begins.
The narrative from AB, in this instance, was immediately startling. And in the end wholly unnerving.
A young woman with a troubled home life
In her evidence in chief, AB took us back to 1980 on Sydney’s northern beaches and her time as a pupil at Cromer High School, not far from the famed beaches of Dee Why, Narrabeen and a string of others. In a measured voice, she explained how she had caught the eye of Cromer physical education teacher Chris Dawson, a local celebrity, fashion model and rugby league star with the Newtown Jets.
AB, now in her late 50s, painted a picture of her teenage self – a young woman with a troubled home life who was finding it difficult to juggle school work and domestic dramas before Dawson emerged as a support, an anchor, whom she would eventually marry.
As she took the court step by chilling step through 1980, her timeline exposed Dawson’s systematic path – AB called it “grooming” – to sexual activity with his pupil.
As she recounted, that path started with Dawson securing AB in his PE class in 1980. Then came the brushing against her in the classroom. Then the touching of her bare knee at a sports carnival. Then love notes deposited in her school bag. Then the offer for her to become the Dawson family’s unpaid babysitter. Then the kiss in his car after he had volunteered to teach AB how to drive. Then, in the end, sexual congress.
And from there, regular sexual contact in vehicles, in Dawson’s office at Cromer High, even at the Dawson family home in Bayview, where the teacher lived with his wife Lyn and two young daughters.
AB proceeded to paint a tawdry, almost inexplicable picture of school life on Sydney’s northern beaches. Underage drinking with teachers. Chris Dawson and his twin brother Paul engaging in sexual activity with teenagers in the middle of fitness instruction classes. Both men swimming naked with AB and another girl in a school pool.
Dawson struggling
As the unsavoury allegations mounted, barrister Wasley informed Judge Huggett that she was finding it difficult to have a meaningful discussion with her client and implied some cognitive impairment possibly induced by the long hours of travel back and forth from the courts to Dawson’s domicile in Long Bay Jail in Matraville, in Sydney’s southeast.
The judge subsequently made an order that Dawson could attend the trial via audiovisual link from jail.
By Wednesday, any momentum gathered from AB’s courageous evidence, her extraordinary recollection of the minutiae of a troubled teenage life, her poise given she had carried the burden of this personal history for more than four decades, had broken down.
The court remained closed for the hearing of sensitive evidence, on and off, throughout the day.
Then, for most of Thursday, AB endured cross-examination from Wasley, who suggested AB had made up some of her evidence. Or had transposed it on the timeline – that important and damning allegations did not in fact occur in 1980 when she was 16 years old, as AB said, but the following year, when she was 17.
It was this simple mathematics, in the end, that underscored the entire trial, and will haunt it through to the end.
Did these allegations of schoolteacher Dawson’s lascivious behaviour occur when the complainant, AB, was under 17 years, which brought the matter in its entirety beneath the umbrella of the old offence of carnal knowledge, with which he stands charged?
Or was the complainant of an age – 17 and over – at the time these tawdry activities between a pupil and a teacher almost twice her age unfolded? In which case the legislation of the day deemed such behaviour not an offence.
Throughout this trial, with its eye firmly on the 1980 and 1981 calendar respectively, with its salacious allegations, with its ability to shock even when we thought we knew in full the whole sorry Christopher Michael Dawson saga, the man himself sat entirely expressionless, barely blinking and seemingly confused as the evidence and cross-examination drew him, whether he liked it or not, into a long, dark tunnel that reached back 43 years to his younger self.
And throughout the long first week of his trial, he uttered, in a gravelly voice, just two words.
Not guilty.
