Time for Prue Car to put things right and support Chris Dawson’s victim over NSW bureaucrats

Deputy Premier and NSW Education Minister Prue Car. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca DeMarchi

How much more evidence does the NSW Education Minister, Prue Car, and her faceless bureaucrats in a civil case revolving around Australia’s most notorious wife-killer need?

Their legal strategy is risible. They blame the woman who was 16 when groomed by her charismatic schoolteacher twice her age. They deny responsibility for the “duty of care” that Chris Dawson owed, as a person in authority, to the child in his classroom. They tell the woman whose life has been ruined that the sex she had with Dawson during her year 11 at Cromer High was “consensual”.

Because for the minister and the bureaucrats and the lawyers being instructed to run interference in the civil case, her “failure” to report the grooming and the sex with her teacher Dawson in 1980 means she was the one at fault.

In a scandal which has highlighted colossal failures and bungling spanning four decades by police, a prosecuting agency, and NSW Education officials and teachers, surely it’s now time for Prue Car to try and put some things right.

Time to admit systemic wrongdoing and pay appropriate damages to a woman whose life changed forever when she was a teenager in Dawson’s sights.

The facts are that teachers and school officials knew – and looked away – in 1980 as their charismatic footballing colleague prepared the girl from a troubled home for sex.

When he made her his year 11 “lover” in a blue and white school uniform, they turned a blind eye. They reported nothing when he made her his “date” at the 1981 school formal to mark the end of year 12; she was welcomed to the teachers’ table.

When he put her into his bed in January 1982, several teachers and the deputy head of the school suspected that Dawson’s missing wife, Lyn, had been killed. But Education officials still did nothing. To quell the gossip, the department Prue Car now leads transferred their sociopathic killer teacher to a nearby high school, Beacon Hill.

Many of the teachers knew full well that their then colleague was breaking the law in having sex with the girl.

Now that he has been convicted of carnal knowledge and ordered to serve another year on top of his murder sentence, Prue Car needs to stop the victim-blaming.

If the teachers and department she now oversees had done their jobs in the early 1980s, action would have been taken then. Lyn might not have been killed.

There’s something else. Long before a murder trial and long before a podcast called The Teacher’s Pet, the former teenager went to NSW police to report her suspicion that her husband, Chris Dawson, had killed his first wife, Lyn. It was 1990. Lyn had been missing for eight years, and there had been no homicide investigation until the day the young woman came forward.

She did not try to sue anyone back then. She did not try to press a claim of carnal knowledge against her estranged husband.

Her priority was alerting police to a probable murder of Lyn, a mother of two little girls.

If it were not for her actions in 1990 and, again, in 1998 when she agreed to help police in a second murder investigation, and, again, in 2018 when my podcast The Teacher’s Pet was unfolding, Australia’s most notorious wife-killer would not be behind bars at Long Bay. He was found guilty of murder in August last year.

If not for her courage in coming forward and sharing evidence implicating her daughter’s father in Lyn’s murder, this terrible injustice would never have been corrected. The related scandal of high school teachers on Sydney’s Northern Beaches preying on school girls for sex would not have been exposed.

She deserves our thanks. Not more victim-blaming.