Mood swings in court as nostalgia gives way to pain

The murder trial of former schoolteacher Christopher Dawson continues its relentless graze through that nostalgic nirvana that was the early 1980s.

Lyn Dawson. Picture: Justin Lloyd

The murder trial of former schoolteacher Christopher Dawson continued its relentless graze through that nostalgic nirvana that was the early 1980s.

Throughout the day in Court 9D of the Supreme Court in Sydney, the evidence evoked that era of big hair and shoulder pads, the glamour and excitement of theme parks, days out shopping and lunching in mega-malls.

The court heard, via videolink, from Toni Melrose-Mikeska, a former performer at the Dreamworld theme park on the Gold Coast, known on stage as Coo-ee the Gumnut Fairy.

She befriended JC, the former Dawson babysitter who had married Chris two years after his first wife, Lynette, disappeared in January 1982.

JC, Chris and their children moved to the Gold Coast in 1985 and lived just a 10-minute drive from the theme park.

Melrose-Mikeska told the court about conversations she’d had with JC about her friend’s marriage which, by early 1990, was beginning to deteriorate.

Outside work, the Gumnut Fairy played for an amateur indoor cricket team and encouraged JC to join. She recalled a team fundraising lingerie party and was asked in court if she remembered a conversation she had with JC about what JC bought.

“She said Chris wasn’t happy with her purchase,” Melrose-Mikeska said. “She was always scared.”

The defence challenged the witness’s memory, and suggested that she had not only formed a negative view about Dawson through critical media coverage, but courtesy of the hit podcast The Teacher’s Pet.

Later, witness RH, a former Cromer High School student in the early 1980s and a contemporary of JC’s in their senior years, was asked about his teenage part-time job. He was a paperboy, delivering newspapers on his bicycle in the suburb of Dee Why on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

RH played rugby league for Cromer, and former Newtown Jets ace and PE teacher Chris Dawson was his coach. More than a coach. Dawson was a mentor, and they discussed everything from guidance to sport to family. And girls.

That signature Dee Why watering hotel – the Time and Tide Hotel – rose up once more in evidence.

RH was asked by the Crown: Between that time in Year 11 until you completed Year 12, how many times did you go to the Time and Tide Hotel?

Innumerable, RH replied.

He too had a crush on JC and had hatched a plan with coach Dawson to put him in a position to ask her out on a date. It was “aborted”, and he walked away from the moment “confused and embarrassed”.

Near the end of the day, the court heard evidence from artist Kristin Hardiman, who was commissioned by Lynette in late 1981 to produce pencil sketches of her two young daughters.

It was one of Hardiman’s first commissions and Lynette Dawson was excited about the project. The artist went to the Dawson home and found Lynette’s daughters dressed up in beautiful pink broderie anglaise dresses, or lace interwoven with ribbons.

Within weeks the sketches were done, but by the time they were ready for delivery, Lynette had disappeared.

And again, as has happened so often in this trial, the mood in the courtroom shifted from colour and light to raw emotion, from the sometimes comic tumult of teenage years to the pitfalls of adult life. Each day, it is this pathos that flows like a tank stream beneath Court 9D.