Chris Dawson sex trial hears evidence of repugnant macho behaviour in plain sight

Male testosterone. That is what has coursed through this case from the outset. Male testosterone in the late 1970s and early ’80s when, as the court has heard, teachers socialised with pupils.

Dawson appears in the Sydney District Court charged with historic carnal knowledge. Sketch: Vincent de Gouw

The moment arrived between 10.12am and 10.36am. And it all started innocuously enough.

“Are we right?” asked Judge Sarah Huggett to open day six of Christopher Michael Dawson’s carnal knowledge trial in the Sydney District Court.

Minutes later, yet another witness was called – this time a casually-dressed man in his late 50s who took the courtroom back to 1980, when he worked as a junior at the Coles supermarket at Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches. One of his co-workers was the complainant in this trial – AB.

He said AB was a “very attractive young lady” (and “probably still is”, though he hadn’t seen her in years). He recalled asking her on a date – to a weekend disco at nearby Collaroy Plateau. She declined. A short time later, he told the court, he was retrieving trolleys from the Coles car park when he was confronted by Dawson. The trolley boy was pushed in the chest and told to “stay away from her”. It became clear only later that Dawson meant AB.

This is when that moment of clarity occurred. A car park encounter. A push. A threat.

This simple story, retrieved from the shadows 43 years after the event, seemed to clarify precisely what this trial is truly about. It crystalised scattered evidence. It reefed the sail.

Male testosterone. That is what has coursed through this case from the outset. Male testosterone in the late 1970s and early ’80s when, as the court has heard, teachers socialised with pupils. Held hands with them in the playground. Left them love notes in their school bags.

Male testosterone. It has washed through almost all the trial evidence. Dawson teaching AB how to drive and kissing her for the first time in his car at Dee Why Beach. Followed by sexual activity at Dawson’s parents’ house in Maroubra.

It was present at the now infamous Lindfield Public School pool where, after teaching exercise classes in the school hall in the early 1980s, Chris and Paul Dawson would join their respective students and family babysitters, AB and CD, for a dip in the dark waters, kissing and canoodling.

Male testosterone. It was there on full display in the Coles car park on that distant day in 1980. A fit, vital, local football star in Chris Dawson, physically threatening a teenage boy, warning him to stay away from his “bub”, as he used to call her.

Dawson. A married man in his early 30s and father of two young daughters, resembling a “Chesty Bonds” man, according to the witness, and feeling the need to ward off his teen rival.

Male testosterone, this hormone that regulates a man’s sex drive. It’s all over this carnal knowledge trial, informing it, colouring it, underpinning it.

Some may argue this overt display of masculinity was a feature of 1980s Australian life – but almost half a century on, it verges on the repugnant.

Seeing Christopher Dawson via audio visual link in the court on Tuesday, sitting old and alone in a ghastly grey-green room, it was reasonable to think that river of testosterone had been so powerful, so unstoppable, that it had carried him through the decades and ultimately deposited him as a convicted wife killer in the Long Bay Correctional Complex on Sydney’s Anzac Parade.

The irony that his cell is just a suburb away from his parents’ home at Maroubra where he first had sexual relations with his babysitter – an event that triggered tragic consequences and reverberates to this day – was surely lost on nobody.