Teacher’s pet: girls a ‘fringe benefit’ for teachers, says ex-Cromer student

Former student of Cromer High says his old teachers are now “sh---ing themselves” as what went on there is finally exposed.

Former Cromer student Phil Webster. Picture: James Croucher

A former student of Sydney’s Cromer High has furiously unloaded on his teachers for treating sex with teenage girls as a “fringe benefit” of the job.

Phil Webster, who was in Year 12 in 1983, said the men involved were now “shitting themselves” they would be exposed for preying on students in the 1980s.

Mr Webster, who is now a teacher, spoke out after The Australian’s podcast series The Teacher’s Pet uncovered allegations a “pack” of male teachers from the school had sex with students.

“The role models I had were f..king some of the girls in my year group. That’s my experience of growing up at Cromer High,” said Mr Webster, 51. “It wasn’t just Cromer High. It’s not fair for Cromer High to cop this. It was a northern beaches thing.”

Expressing regret he did not take a stand earlier, he said one teacher involved was still in the profession and had been in contact about the podcast series, asking him “what should I do”.

“They knew what they were doing was wrong. He’s worried about his boss finding out at high school,” he says in the latest episode of the series, released yesterday.

The same teacher had earlier complained he had not been invited to a 30-year reunion, he said.

“I didn’t have the guts to say to him, ‘mate, your name is mud at the reunions. You were screwing some of the girls in our year group. Why would you think I would ask you to our 30-year reunion? You’re not welcome’,” Mr Webster said.

“People that think it’s OK to climb through their Year 11 ­student’s window and f..k them on a Friday night and then teach them on the Monday, aren’t normal. They can’t be.

“The psychological damage those men caused. They were only after their own sexual conquests, and they should have known. And yet they gave no regard for the welfare of those girls.”

The podcast series is investigating the 1982 disappearance of Lyn Dawson.

Her husband and suspected killer, Chris Dawson, was a Cromer High sports teacher involved in an intimate relationship with a 16-year-old student, Joanne Curtis.

Two days after Lyn vanished — leaving behind two daughters aged 4 and 2 — Joanne moved into the family home.

Two coroners found, in 2001 and 2003, that Mr Dawson ­murdered his wife, but the then ­director of public prosecutions Nicholas Cow­dery QC said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

The school basketball team with Webster, then in Year 9, bottom right.

Mr Dawson strenuously ­denies killing his wife.

After the first episode of The Teacher’s Pet, Cromer High’s 1983 vice-captain, Robyn Wheeler, came forward to say at least six teachers from the school were having sex with students at the time. Since then, former students have been rallying to bring the culture of the school into the open.

They have told of teachers partying with teenage students and supplying them with alcohol and marijuana.

And they have also spoken of the lasting damage to some of the women, who later suffered breakdowns.

Ms Wheeler said of the teachers: “I think they’re terrified and hiding under rocks.”

Mr Webster added: “The most important thing is the murder of Lyn, who I never met, in the context of a culture that said it’s OK to screw the kids in the school.

“The urges they had, the lust they had, they couldn’t control. It was a fringe benefit of being a schoolteacher.

“They were influenced by their own sense of entitlement and their own sense of hedonism: “Hey, we’ve got young girls on tap here, we’re young, we’re in a really good place, northern beaches of Sydney, a well-to-do area, beaches very close by, lots of girls walking around in bikinis’.

“It was a sex haven for those guys.”

Former Cromer High student Michelle Walsh, now a married mother on the northern beaches, has said there was “no duty of care”.

“It was just a free-for-all. The result of that is a person is dead. And two little girls grew up without their mother,” she said.

“Now we’ve all got kids, it’s like ‘woah’. I can’t even imagine my child going to a school like that.”

Cromer High’s 1983 school captain, Jane Linwood, while training for cross country at the school playing fields, said she rounded a corner to find Mr ­Dawson in a compromising position — Joanne, his schoolgirl lover, was straddled on his lap, kissing him.

She barely gave the incident a thought back then. “It was all around us,” she said yesterday.

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