Chris Dawson trial: Portrait of love couldn’t foretell what was to come
They would marry four years after this photo was taken. They would follow the template of their parents, and of theirs before them. But their domestic tale had a fatal flaw.
Just look at them.
It’s April 1966 and the young couple – the golden-haired Sydney Boys High prefect Christopher Dawson and his girlfriend, Lynette Simms, fetchingly blonde and also a prefect – standing on a riverbank at a GPS regatta.
It might have been the Swinging Sixties, but young Chris, just 17 and in his final year at school, is impeccably dressed in his school blazer with its bold trimming, his hair swept from a neat part left to right, as boyishly quaint as if his mother brushed it for him that morning.
His look and demeanour carry the vestiges of the 1950s about them.
Lyn, however, is a little more of her time, of the moment, in her sleeveless top, knee-length skirt, her hair shoulder-length and kicked up at the ends, even a little windswept, and she holds in her hands a pair of fashionable sunglasses. She looks worldlier than her beau.
Still, theirs is a portrait of happiness and young love and exudes innocence in the way of young couples before they step into the infinitesimal complexities of the adult lives that await them.
They would marry just four years after this photograph was taken. They would follow the template of their parents, and of theirs before them. They would settle into suburbia, work hard and start a family. The Australian way.
But their domestic tale had a fatal flaw. One as old as time. And that was Christopher Michael Dawson himself. For this was a story as old as time about male ego, vanity, sex and the absence of emotional intelligence.
From birth, the identical twins Chris and his brother Paul were special. They were golden children. Physically beautiful. Unique.
In that regatta photograph you can see that Chris has yet to understand the power of his looming attractiveness. There’s a hint in his eyes and the half-cocked smile. But the way he holds his hands behind his back tells you the boy is still there, blocking the full realisation of the man.
That would come soon, after his marriage to his school sweetheart in 1970, when he made in-roads into the local Sydney rugby scene. And when he and twin Paul featured as male models in magazine advertisements and on television.
And the man would take full bloom when he and Paul signed with the Newtown Jets rugby league team and entered some sort of low-key level of Sydney celebrity. They featured on collectible football cards. Their games were televised. Jets marketing guru John Singleton was attracting TV stars and other popular identities to the team’s home ground of Henson Park in Marrickville.
By the time the brothers star in a 1975 episode of the ABC’s Chequerboard program, a topical documentary-style show that in this episode was studying the nature of twinship, the fully realised male Dawsons are on display.
They are confident, fit, give off a sexual magnetism and display robust egos. The Dawson boys, in this instant, appear fully aware of their power as Australian males in the wild 1970s.
These glory days still had a few years to run, and by the end of the decade that boy in his high school blazer was unrecognisable to the Newtown Jet and school physical education teacher he would become.
If this were a parable, and not a tragic and sadly predictable story, some of the seven deadly sins might enter here. Pride might make an appearance, certainly lust, maybe greed and, depending on who you believe, the whole drama might end in wrath.
By the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, the stellar football career may have waned, but Chris Dawson was still a lightning rod for female attention and was revelling in it.
As a co-educational high school teacher, he had a daily stage for his male potency.
There was one problem. He remained manacled to the old template willingly established by his earlier, more naïve and undeveloped self. He was married to Lynette, and soon two young children would come into the mix.
So, two lives ran parallel. There was the family “nest” up at Gilwinga Drive in Bayview Heights, the swimming pool, the trampoline for the kids, the fireplace, the deck and the steep driveway, up on the plateau on the southern shore of Pittwater.
Then there was Cromer High, down on the Northern Beaches, not far from the famed seaside suburbs of Collaroy and Dee Why and the Narrabeen Lagoon, where Chris worked.
Two lives, one up on the plateau, the other down by the ocean.
Until those two worlds touched each other.
By 1980, teacher Dawson entered a friendship with one of his 16-year-old pupils, JC. He, the fit and good-looking PE teacher, gave the troubled teen support and advice. He asked her to be the Dawson family babysitter.
Then in October 1981, Dawson invited JC a safe haven in the Bayview Heights home so she could complete her HSC without the drama of her own personal home life.
It is this moment, this act of almost incomprehensible narcissism, that Dawson’s two lives didn’t just nudge at each other, but collided.
And it is this part of the story that was the catalyst for everything to follow.
This was the moment that Dawson’s ego, his understanding of his sexual appeal, his grasp of his influence as a man at the height of his powers in his early 30s, froze in time.
Evidence during the trial that he belittled and mocked his wife Lyn in front of the babysitter and others go to the heart of this cognitive dissonance. She had become, to him, a distraction and a nuisance.
Here, he was shaking off the manacle of that early marital template that he’d given himself over to in his early 20s. The man was discarding the vestiges of the boy.
Here, in the early 1980s, was the Adonis, oblivious to the realities that swirled around – wife, children (with one about to start school), a mortgage, and extended family. A man trapped in his own vainglory.
Dawson was oblivious to the fact that his best days were already behind him.
And his wife Lyn’s inexplicable disappearance did not in fact give him a free reign to live as his wished in the manner of his choosing.
Yes, he moved the young babysitter JC into the family home on Gilwinga Drive just days after Lyn had vanished, and went on to marry and have a child with her, but that relationship also ended in ruin.
For 40 years, Dawson steadfastly repeated the details surrounding his wife’s vanishing around January 9,1982. They had been to marriage counselling on that day. He was optimistic their marriage would survive. He had dropped her off at the bus stop the next morning. She went to shop at the markets in another suburb.
He as a part-time lifesaver went to work at the Northbridge Baths where he was joined by his daughters and Lyn’s mother Helena. Then Lyn phoned the baths and said she was off to visit friends on the NSW Central Coast for a few days to sort herself out.
The same story. The same assemblage of small facts. The same timeline. Immovable. Intractable. Frozen, like Dawson, in the summer of 1982.
But one thing kept moving forward, gathering momentum, taking on an inescapable gravity – the disappearance of Lyn.
It was her absence that has haunted Dawson into his old age.
That beautiful young woman in her sleeveless top, white skirt and sensible flats down by the river on the day of the regatta, that embodiment of joy and promise and expectations of a respected life.
Her absence persisted and grew and made her story in fact eclipse his own.
Her absence has made her powerful and important and a touchstone for millions of women around the world. Her absence has educated both men and women about respect and loyalty and friendship and faith and decency.
About many things the boy in the blazer, now an old man, never understood.
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