More than fun and games in the old schoolyard

Cat Stevens’ Old Schoolyard must have been playing in the minds of some of those in the gallery watching Chris Dawson’s former students line up to offer disturbing testimony.

Chris Dawson. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella

That shocking earworm of a song, Old Schoolyard by Cat Stevens, must have played in the minds of at least a few in the public gallery on Monday at the resumption of Christopher Dawson’s carnal knowledge trial in the Sydney District Court.

Former Cromer High School students, one after the other, were swiftly paraded as witnesses, ­either in person or via audio visual link. They came and they went, these middle-aged people. They may have recognised each other from their old schoolyard, or they may not have. Age can touch us all differently.

And they may not have nurtured memories akin to Stevens’ where everyone skipped around, had toast for tea and laughed a lot. No, the recollections of the Cromer alumni, as offered to the court, were a little more disturbing.

One former schoolboy recalled seeing AB, a playground “celebrity” a few classes in front of him, joining PE teacher Dawson on playground duty. AB was Dawson’s “sidekick”, he said. So physically close did the couple appear, he remembered, that they seemed to be performing playground duty together.

Another contemporary of AB said she once had occasion to give an absentee note to the PE department and had walked into Dawson’s office, finding AB sitting on a desk and the teacher standing ­between her legs, “about 20cm away”. She too had seen Dawson and AB holding hands in the school playground. She told the court it “wasn’t hidden”.

And yet another of AB’s classmates and friends recalled being shocked at seeing AB and teacher Dawson sitting by a brick wall down near the school carpark, their bodies close together. “I saw them touching each other,” she told the court.

Earlier, another student, CD, appeared on the court televisions from what appeared to be a home office replete with a whiteboard, desk and computer, somewhere outside Australia.

CD, with short blonde hair and wearing a collared polo shirt, was for long stretches of questioning remarkably measured, given the weighty evidence she was offering.

It was CD, a student at Forest High School in Frenchs Forest, who revealed she had been a babysitter for her own PE teacher, Paul Dawson, Chris’s identical twin brother. And through that ­relationship, she got to know Chris Dawson and his babysitter, AB.

CD and AB would accompany the Dawson twins when they taught their after-hours fitness classes at Lindfield Public School, in north Sydney. And ­according to CD, after classes the four swam in the school pool. In AB’s evidence last week, the four would swim naked and there was sexual activity.

But on Monday CD said, in a more discreet vein, that she saw Chris Dawson and AB in the pool with their “bodies together”.

But under cross-examination from defence barrister Claire Wasley, CD’s previously neutral temperament showed a flash of steel. Her memories around the exact dates of events might be hazy, she said, but she was crystal clear about what had occurred ­between the twin teachers and herself and AB. “I’m sure of what happened,” CD said firmly.

“I have very strong memories of when I was there with those people.”

The witness’s ire rose again when Wasley suggested other people – from the fitness classes – were present during the swimming pool escapades.

CD leant towards the camera in that small white office and said in no uncertain terms that there were “zero other people” in the pool when they were “kissing and cuddling and whatever”.

She mentioned being “groomed”, just as AB had peppered her evidence last week with the same word.

CD even adopted some of her own legalese, and in response to a question returned volley to Wasley: “I put it to you …”

Wasley soldiered on with a query about CD working as Paul Dawson’s babysitter and then quickly withdrew the question. The witness replied, not quite under her breath: “Good idea.”

It became clear in Court LG1 that the old schoolyards of the northern beaches weren’t all populated with kids laughing and smiling and savouring the simplicity of life.

As Cat wrote, they used to cry a lot too.