Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  After another discreet visit to the barber shop, John recalls being driven back to school in a black American-style car. ‘We went down to the Story Bridge, and there’s an underpass type thing, and … there were police at the bottom doing something, and the siren got flicked on for a blast … just a quick blast – the car had a police siren in it.’ According to John the driver was wearing a khaki uniform.

  By May 1967, these boarder weekends had escalated into sleepovers. John claimed that he was taken on a number of occasions to stay overnight at another man’s apartment. Several weeks into this arrangement, John claims he was sexually assaulted by Harry Wippell and another man.

  The next day John was returned to the school, and by the following morning, he started to digest what had happened to him. He was ropeable, ‘probably manic’, and he had one task in mind –

  to set fire to housemaster Wippell’s rooms in the boarding house. ‘I stayed back from school that day, I said I had a stomach pain or something like that,’ he recalled. ‘I knew where Wippell kept his key, on a ledge like an old-fashioned picture rail, and I went into his room … I couldn’t find any matches so I went up into the baggage room in the attic, which was never locked, to see if I could find matches because the kids used to smoke there, but I couldn’t find any. Then I found this bottle of pills [back in Wippell’s rooms]. I took [swallowed] the bottle of pills and I don’t remember what happened after that.’

  John ended up in a small sick bay. ‘One thing I can remember … they were trying to get me to vomit up the pills into a silver dish … the next thing I recall is being in [Headmaster] Roberts’ lounge room. I told them what happened, Harry Roberts and his wife, in their house, in their living room. I can still see the floral carpet they had on the floor, grey-green floral carpet. I told them what they’d done to me. I mentioned Harry Wippell.’

  John was permitted to stay in the Roberts’ house that night and the following day he ended up in the school’s main sick bay, a small cottage on Oaklands Parade not far from the headmaster’s house. ‘I was there for the whole of the rest of the year,’ he said. ‘There were no more boarders’ weekends. That was it. There was no more abuse once I moved into the cottage. I didn’t tell my parents.’

  During that first week, removed from Gerald House but still going to classes each day, John was told by a house prefect that he was wanted in Roberts’ office. He said he was warned that he was going to be caned for telling lies about Wippell.

  ‘I’d never been caned,’ he said. ‘I put on all the underwear I had.’ John says before he was caned, by both Roberts and Wippell, they made him take his underwear off.

  The possibility of an incident of this nature occurring was refuted in an article published in Quadrant Online on 12 August 2016 by Churchie Old Boy, Geoffrey Luck. The article claims that: ‘Prefects did have limited caning rights when I was at school in the 1940s, but in 1950 under new disciplinary protocols Roberts established, caning by prefects was prohibited.’ The article, in defence of Roberts’ tenure as principal, goes on to say: ‘School captains, prefects, probationers and senior boys I have spoken to are adamant that no caning on bare buttocks ever took place. It would have been sensational news around the whole school. They are now furious that these scandalously unsupportable allegations are being flung about.’

  John said the week after he reported the assualt to the headmaster he snuck away from school and walked down to the police station at Woolloongabba but nothing further was done. He remained at the school until the end of 1969, having moved off campus and into the home of his grandparents. In his twenties John was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a Filipino woman he had lured to Australia, and on whose life he had taken out a $400,000 insurance policy as sole beneficiary.

  As for Wippell, he remained associated with the school despite the grave allegations against him. I asked Churchie if the school had become aware of Wippell allegedly indecently dealing with a boy [John] from Gerald House in the late 1960s. And if so, what action was taken by the school?

  They replied: ‘Yes, the School did become aware of such concerns. The Headmaster at the time asked Harry Wippell to leave the Boarding House. He was allowed to keep his room for the remainder of the term although he was not allowed to sleep in the room. He continued to have access to the School until 1983.’ Churchie conceded that Harry Wippell had been secretary of the school’s Old Boys’ Association between 1959 and 1975, and then its President from 1983 to 1984. Churchie later confirmed that Wippell had in fact been involved with the school until 1993, a full 26 years after the reported assault in 1967.

  In late 2009 after some amateur detective work, John made the decision to track down Wippell and found him at his home in Maygar Street, Windsor. He made a formal complaint to police, as did several other ex-Churchie boys, in relation to Wippell’s abuse of them in the 1960s. As a result, Harry John Wippell, 73, was charged with five counts of indecent treatment of boys under 16 between 1963 and 1969.

  In April 2010, after a four-day trial, a District Court jury found Wippell not guilty on all counts. John’s case was dealt with separately. Wippell was ultimately committed for trial, again charged with indecent treatment, but died before the matter returned to court.

  Harry Roberts retired as headmaster at the end of the school year in 1969. One of the last acts of his tenure was to open a new building at the school, the Roberts Centre, a facility boasting a language laboratory and research and teaching spaces. Already the recipient of an OBE, Roberts was awarded an honorary D. Litt by the University of Queensland. The following year he would follow in Frank Bischof’s footsteps and become Queensland’s Father of the Year.

  In 2015 the Church of England Grammar School began major construction of a new building, the Roberts Centre for Learning and Innovation, on the site of the former Roberts Centre. But the prospect of continuing to honour their old headmaster was a sour note for John and other boys who had allegedly been abused at the school during Roberts’ tenure.

  School chairman, Dan O’Connor, issued a letter to the school community when the decision was made to revise the name of the new building. He announced that Churchie would no longer be naming the new building after Roberts. ‘While Mr Roberts removed the staff concerned, he took no further action. The council accepts this may have been an adequate response at the time, but it does not accord with current community standards.’

  Just days after O’Connor’s announcement, Quadrant Online carried a scathing assessment of the decision, expressing concern that the name change was part of a ‘hysterical pursuit of scapegoats’ and ‘a cruel and panicked exercise in revisionism’.

  The article also stated: ‘O’Connor said there were multiple cases of sexual predation, many more than known publicly. A lot of claims had been paid some time ago, but others were still under negotiation. “You would be surprised at the number,” he [O’Connor] said.’

  Indeed, the last time the school had tried to name a building after a revered teacher – in this case Frederick Roy Hoskins in the early 2000s – ex-students rang Churchie to tell them they had been sexually abused by the man. (A school spokesman confirmed, ‘the school’s own record in attempting to address claims of sexual abuse commenced in the early 2000s, well prior to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In 2002, an open letter was sent by the school to the Churchie community, past and present, inviting anyone with allegations to contact the school so they might be properly, independently and transparently dealt with.’)

  Hoskins, who taught at the school from 1947 until the early 1980s, had been a boarding master at Churchie Prep. In 2004 Hoskins, 80, pleaded guilty to a series of sexual assaults against boys from 1947 to 1955. He was gaoled for 16 months.

  In 2002, following Churchie’s appeal to past students to come forward with any sexual allegations against teachers, former maths teacher Hamilton Willi
am Nation Leslie was arrested and charged with multiple counts of indecent assault against pupils. Leslie, 77, pleaded guilty and was given a 12-month suspended sentence. Also in 2002, the former assistant bursar at Churchie, John Litton Elliott, was sentenced to seven and a half years gaol for molesting and sodomising boys between 1970 and 1973.

  Similarly, in 2003, former Churchie gymnastics coach from 1989 to 1992 - William Whitelock – was sentenced to three years gaol for sexually assaulting students. Whitelock was a convicted paedophile when he was employed by the school.

  In 2006, former Anglican priest Robert Sharwood pleaded guilty to multiple sex offences against boys and was gaoled for almost three years. He was employed at Churchie from 1985 to 2001. And in 2010, former Churchie boarding master and maths teacher Christopher Klemm pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a student between 1985 and 1988. He was gaoled for five years.

  If Frederick Roy Hoskins was to be considered the first formally convicted paedophile that was associated with Churchie, the statistics show that there had been at least one paedophile on staff at Churchie at any given time between 1947 and 2010.

  In the case of headmaster Roberts, he presided over four – Hoskins, Leslie, Dr Frederick William Whitehouse, rowing coach from 1948 to 1949 and later convicted of indecent dealings with youths, and as the school now concedes, Harry Wippell.

  A Churchie spokesman reiterated that the reason the school council decided to remove Roberts’ name from the building was directly linked to the failure of Roberts to make sure Wippell had no further association with the school post-1967, and that in fact Wippell was still involved with the school into the 1990s.

  In 2016 the new building was named the Centenary Library.

  Busy writing the final volume of the trilogy, All Fall Down. It’s been an eventful few months for a number of reasons. I’ve been approached by people from the public and former police officers relentlessly this year and they continue to come forward.

  I have heard nothing from Lewis since the second book came out, though I did get some text messages from one of his children about extraneous material that I had failed to pack into the boxes and send back to him. I can only surmise that Lewis has read Jacks and Jokers and concluded that the horse has left the stable. There is no need for further cooperation.

  I receive a phone call from John Cummins, who was in the Drugs Squad in the 1970s and was also heavily involved with the Police Club. Cummins warns me that there are some people ‘out there’ who want to dump on me for the contents of the first two books. He asks twice about when the third book is due and what’s in it. He means well, I think. He says my detractors want to criticise me in upcoming ‘books’ and believe I have used journalistic exaggeration in the first two books of the trilogy. It wouldn’t be the first time that criticism has been used against anyone writing about the era.

  I also receive an email from Greg Early, beginning with a little chitchat then forwarding on details of an event coming up – a meeting of the Queensland Retired Police Association’s Gold Coast branch. The event will host a number of special guests, including Tony Murphy’s children who will speak about ‘a book written by Des Sturgess titled Tony Murphy: An Honest Cop – a corrective history about Murphy and his career’. The email invitation points out that the book was written ‘in reply to recent novels by Matthew Condon who was very critical of Tony Murphy’. The author of the invite also points out that ‘I believe Des Sturgess and Terry Lewis may be attending this meeting’.

  Another legal threat, from a former police officer, has arrived at the publishing house. The ex-policeman claims he has been painted as corrupt. He need only go back to the transcripts of the Fitzgerald Inquiry to be told that.

  On the way back from Byron Bay I drop in to see Kym Goldup-Graham, who was in the Paedophile Task Force with Garnett Dickson in the late 1980s. She has agreed to talk to me for the purposes of the paedophile thread in the final book of the trilogy. She says she consulted former police friends before she did so. They warned her to ‘be careful’.

  Kym is in her mid-fifties, a very pleasant woman with copper-coloured hair. She has a clarity and directness that comes from her days as a police investigator. She outlines how she and Dickson, during their two years in the task force, were getting some extraordinary intelligence involving, among other people, Supreme Court judges, lawyers and politicians before the task force was prematurely shut down.

  She relays an all too familiar story of how, after that, she was basically drummed out of the force, her life made hell.

  Kym tells me how, in the late 1990s, she was dragged before the Kimmins Inquiry into Allegations of Misconduct in the Investigation of Paedophilia in Queensland. The terms of reference included, among other things, looking at whether former commissioner Terry Lewis allegedly kept secret files on possible criminal sexual behaviour by senior public officials for blackmail purposes. In his ultimate final report, Kimmins found that in the course of his nine-month investigation, ‘not one allegation had substance in fact’.

  Goldup-Graham says she has, in storage, some important documents from the period of her investigations and has promised to pass them on.

  The Marauder

  In the spring of 2015 I found myself signing copies of the final volume of the Lewis trilogy at a bookstore at Post Office Square in Brisbane city. All Fall Down had been launched at an event at the Old Museum where I was interviewed by Brisbane-based radio journalist and presenter Paul Barclay in front of a live audience. It was only after the interview that friends told me about two women who had been circulating copies of another book, Tony Murphy: An Honest Cop, to people mingling in the crowd. I was told they had labelled me an ‘evil liar’ to anyone who would listen and were disparaging my work in the trilogy. It was for this reason that I may have seemed a little perturbed when, a few weeks later at the bookstore signing, I was approached by a tall, elegant woman who was passing by. I was seated at a table out near the footpath when I saw her stop, turn and approach me.

  When the woman introduced herself as Kerry Brinkley, the daughter of the legendary Queensland cop Vincent John ‘Vince’ Murphy, I started to relax. Vince Murphy had enlisted in 1950 and retired four decades later, his career coinciding with almost the entire terrain covered by the Three Crooked Kings trilogy.

  Kerry told me that she had read the first two volumes and the stories and names resonated with the life she had known growing up with her tough, cheeky and incorruptible father, Vince. He was head of what became famously known as ‘Murphy’s Marauders’, a small team of officers picked by then Commissioner Ray Whitrod in the early 1970s to clean up Fortitude Valley.

  Years later, Ray Whitrod reflected on the formation and work of Murphy’s Marauders in an interview. ‘… the local director of Myers, a large emporium in the Valley complained to me there was a lot of lawlessness in the streets of Fortitude Valley, which was upsetting the custom at his store,’ Whitrod reflected. ‘He said he’d spoken to the local inspector of police at Fortitude Valley and had received no response whatsoever. And so he asked what I could do to improve the … orderliness of Fortitude Valley.

  ‘And I thought about this and it seemed to me that if I couldn’t use my inspector in Fortitude Valley I needed a little independent, loyal group to me. So I formed a little team of ten or twelve men. I picked … one of the green Mafia, one of the executive who had always opposed me, a man named [Vince] Murphy, who I thought was a better calibre than the rest, and I thought if I could put the challenge to him he might change his ways and support my reform efforts, and he did.’

  Whitrod said Vince Murphy came up with an ingenious strategy to attack the problem without being seen as unnecessarily ‘reformist’ by the rank and file, and especially the enemies of Whitrod. He suggested they start with a clamp down on drink-driving.

  ‘So he, [Vince] Murphy and his team … started concentrating on the sly grogs and the gambling joints and ch
ecking the drivers of cars as they came out at ten, eleven o’clock at night, and made a number of arrests and the number of road accidents and fatal deaths dropped considerably in the Valley,’ said Whitrod.

  The Marauders impact was felt throughout the Valley on general crime. Vince Murphy and his men had disrupted the status quo. He told the Sunday Sun in 1990:

  The squad started as a result of complaints made to Whitrod about people being assaulted and robbed. Whitrod moved me from Mobile Patrols to the Valley with four young fellows. Gradually the squad was built up in strength to nine.

  Vince Murphy said his squad was proving so effective that he received complaints from other police that his men were impinging on their territory, ‘including a then-Inspector Terry Lewis’.

  Whitrod praised the Marauders, and official commendations flowed. But then Whitrod was gone, and Lewis became Commissioner. Vince was quoted in the newspaper:

  This was the time when if Whitrod said anything nice about you, it was like the kiss of death. When Whitrod left we knew we were in trouble. When I was transferred to Innisfail by Lewis, I wasn’t prepared to accept it … I was determined to last. They [corrupt police] weren’t going to drum me out of a job or frustrate me into resigning. I decided to weather the storm no matter what happened.

  His daughter Kerry said reading the books was like going back in time. Then she told me something extraordinary. Her father, later in life, had struck up a correspondence with former commissioner Whitrod. They wrote each other letters, recalling the past and ironing out a few creases in their professional histories. ‘You’re welcome to read them,’ Kerry said.

  Some months later I had Vince Murphy’s letters to his old boss, Ray Whitrod, in my hands. There were four letters in total, all neatly typed and single-spaced. Vince started sending his letters in January 2002. By this stage he was retired on the Gold Coast and Whitrod, who had settled back in his former home of Adelaide, would have just eighteen months to live.