Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  Howard-Osborne attended the State Commercial High School, and later successfully attained an associate certificate of accountancy from the University of Queensland. During wartime, he joined the civilian militia.

  In 1940, the Howard-Osborne family hit the newspapers. It was reported that Clarrie’s older sister, Anna Elizabeth, was leaving Queensland for Salt Lake City in the United States to marry a Mormon elder, as was her cousin, Dorothea Darlene Orth.

  Anna’s mother refused to comment on the nuptials to the Brisbane Truth. ‘My daughter is too dear to me to discuss her affairs in public,’ she ‘protested pleasantly’. ‘I would really rather not have anything to say.’

  Ultimately, Howard-Osborne become an accomplished shorthand writer. His skills attracted the attention of the Pitman college in London, which often deferred to him for advice. By the 1960s he was a top government court reporter. On the side he bred budgerigars and remained a fitness fanatic.

  During the 1970s, Howard-Osborne was a familiar face around Parliament House. Political staffers remembered his outgoing personality, and his obsession with holidaying in Thailand. Co-workers claimed he often talked about ‘picking up young hitchhikers’ on drives between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. He would show colleagues at work photographs of the boys he went with. It became such an issue that complaints about his behaviour were lodged. Two secret inquiries were held by the Public Service Board in 1973 and as a result Howard-Osborne was moved to the Hansard bureau at Parliament House where his contact with young people was monitored.

  Then, in 1976 Howard-Osborne travelled out to the University of Queensland campus and paid an unexpected visit to criminologist Paul Wilson. He had taken with him paperwork and photographs, including transcripts, tape-recordings and his manuscript documenting his own life. Wilson said Howard-Osborne was worried that a pornographic film of men having sex that he had purchased by mail order from Denmark had been seized by Australian Customs, and that if the police got involved, they might seize his ‘research’.

  Wilson and Howard-Osborne would meet on several occasions in the following months and Howard-Osborne continued to offer Wilson details of his ‘life’s work’. Wilson would later use transcripts from these meetings as the basis for his book.

  In the meantime, according to Wilson, Howard-Osborne by chance came to the attention of Queensland police, and was found dead the day after he was questioned by investigators in September 1979.

  In the winter of 1980, almost a year after Howard-Osborne had gassed himself, a JAB detective in the city branch headed down to the storeroom to retrieve a fresh police notebook. The detective had had several years experience in the JAB in North Queensland and was known as a straight, reliable and effective investigator. That detective was the man who had approached me at the recent book event. He could not know that that trip for some stationery would change his life.

  In the storeroom he noticed dozens of boxes on the shelves marked ‘Osborne’. Curiosity got the better of him, and he opened some of the boxes and read the material. He couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Within those boxes were all these index cards … I recognised names … it was quite obvious there were members of the judiciary, the legal fraternity, there were politicians, it was the top end … there were no bloody truck drivers and brick layers among them,’ the retired officer told me.

  ‘I remember making an off-the-cuff comment to one bloke that if this ever became public the whole of George Street would just slide into the river, you know. It would just bring the whole government undone. It was all there.’

  The officer, respecting protocol and the chain of command, approached a superior. ‘I went to this inspector and I said to him – I’ve just come across all this stuff in the Clarrie Osborne exhibits,’ he recalled. ‘I said it’s like Pandora’s Box, you know, is anybody doing anything about it? I said, I’ve read some of the stuff very briefly and it’s just a goldmine of information.’

  The inspector replied that he was to do nothing about it, ‘Just sit on it and use it later on to further your career.’

  The officer was nonplussed.

  Regardless, he began to secretly return to the storeroom, read the files and smuggle out copies of photographs. The following year, another young detective was transferred into the JAB. The officer developed a trust and rapport with the newcomer, and they were soon digging through the Howard-Osborne files together. ‘But we both realised we had to do it on the quiet, we had to sneak the stuff out,’ he said. ‘We found magazines. There were German-issue magazines. There were American magazines. And the thing that was very disturbing about them was that the Brisbane kids [photographed by Howard-Osborne] were appearing in the German magazines … then we’d find a copy of the same magazine in English … it was almost like a tourist guide for paedophiles. They could come to Brisbane and meet these kids. And this was all arranged through bloody Clarrie. We discovered that the motto of the paedophile group over there was – “Sex before eight [years old] before it’s too late.”

  ‘One of the German magazines was named Spartacus and it was the code name of an international underground paedophile network. It was run by a bloke called John Stamford out of Amsterdam. He originated from the UK and I think sort of got himself in a bit of strife there and went over to Amsterdam. And he was running this network, and Clarrie Osborne was part of that.’

  Spartacus was in fact published by former British Catholic priest and paedophile, Stamford, who had fled the UK for Amsterdam in the early 1970s after being convicted of sending obscene literature through the post. Stamford also ran the Spartacus Club, part of the British-registered Spartacus International. The company described itself as ‘general publishers of trade and business directories, periodicals, newspapers and journals’.

  Through the 1970s Stamford also appeared regularly in the press as an advocate for gay rights, and was a leading member of what was known as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). It was founded in 1974 as a pro-paedophile activist group. In addition, PIE had a ‘Contact Page’, a bulletin where members placed advertisements. They were required to quote their membership number, their general location and their sexual predilections. PIE managed the replies through a private post office box.

  As Howard-Osborne was allegedly sitting down with Paul Wilson out at the University of Queensland on the other side of the world,

  PIE was causing a storm in the UK. Several members were charged with conspiring to corrupt public morals, and details of the outfit emerged during court proceedings. It was described as ‘sick and a force of evil’.

  Media coverage of PIE intensified through the late 1970s, as did the group’s attempts to push its message, which included the abolition of the age of consent. Its contact point in Australia was Howard-Osborne.

  ‘Clarrie had been operating for so long, that he virtually became the guru of paedophiles,’ the officer said. ‘All of the paedophiles that we looked at were in there [in the Howard-Osborne files], and that was only scratching the surface. They all came from Osborne’s system.’

  These revelations from the former JAB officer shocked me. As I continued to dig deeper into Howard-Osborne, a source in the UK sent me an extract from a European PIE magazine from the 1970s that featured an update on how the ‘Exchange’ was setting up in Australia.

  AUSTRALIAN PIE, it was headed: ‘We have had a letter from the member organising the local PIE scene in Australia. From all accounts, he is taking up the cause there with great enthusiasm.’

  The Australian PIE organiser reported that they had members in every state of the country except the Northern Territory. He said he had sent an article of paedophilia to Forum magazine and that he was keeping in touch with a psychologist tutor at La Trobe University who had made a few comments on TV ‘in favour of a real change of attitude’ in relation to paedophilia. ‘One thing is sure, we’ve got something going which is really strong down here … Australia is a BIG loca
l group.’

  In the end, the officer and his partner were on the brink of launching a major sting. Through a contact, they planned to open a post office box in Fortitude Valley and infiltrate the international paedophile ring. ‘[The contact] was going to open a post office box for us so that we could use Clarrie’s code number and start communicating with Stamford in Amsterdam, to get more code numbers and contacts and stuff like that,’ the officer said.

  ‘We were getting to the point … like I said we didn’t know who to trust … it was making you feel you were being scrutinised, that people were watching you. The tension was just unbelievable.

  ‘We took some of the Osborne files one day and we read them on a hill in Dayboro [46 kilometres north-west of Brisbane], that’s how bad it was. We couldn’t get caught with it. It got to the point where we actually said to each other, don’t be surprised if they find one of us dead in the Brisbane River … that’s how bad it was getting.’

  The officer also found a bullet in the drawer of his desk at the JAB. He took it as a death threat.

  In the end, having met with constant obstructions his investigation petered out. His attempts to crack the Howard-Osborne case would haunt the rest of his police career, and he would retire ‘medically unfit’ at only 46.

  More than three decades later, the impact of PIE continued to play out in Britain via its Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, announced by Home Secretary (and now Prime Minister) Theresa May in mid-2014 following the scandal surrounding entertainer Jimmy Savile and his abuse of hundreds of children. The statutory inquiry, expected to take five years, announced twelve separate investigations as part of the overall inquiry. The terms included child exploitation by organised networks, and allegations of child sexual abuse linked to Westminster, or the UK parliament.

  In January 2015 a file, compiled in 1980–81, was released to Britain’s National Archives that revealed the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not want named a senior diplomat linked to PIE and paedophilia. The late Sir Peter Hayman had been accused by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in parliament in March 1981 of sending pornographic material through the post.

  Hayman had come to the attention of police in 1978 after a package of sexually explicit correspondence, addressed to a Mr Peter Henderson of Notting Hill, was found on a London bus. Henderson was Hayman’s pseudonym with PIE. Hayman died in 1992.

  The Independent newspaper later wrote of Dickens:

  Eighteen years after his death … the backbencher’s reputation as a political lightweight is being revised in the wake of a Scotland Yard investigation which is exhuming a scandal long buried in the Westminster of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

  New evidence suggests that Dickens stumbled upon an Establishment paedophile ring in the early 1980s – and that his efforts to expose a cover-up left him in fear of his life. Dickens told fellow MPs that after warning of the existence of the network, he had received threatening phone calls and been burgled twice. He also claimed he had been placed on a ‘hit-list’, he told the House of Commons in a little-noticed speech.

  Incredibly, a part of that same massive ring had taken root in Brisbane, Queensland, courtesy of Clarence Howard-Osborne. Equally astonishing is that the extensive Howard-Osborne files were never properly investigated, despite the best efforts of a handful of honest officers. The boxes of material sat for years in the JAB storeroom under lock and key. Their whereabouts are currently unknown.

  In Howard-Osborne’s wake, a number of serious questions remain. Why did the Queensland police never look into the expansive Howard-Osborne material given that his notorious activities were known to some officers prior to his suicide in 1979? How did the Howard-Osborne material, given its global reach, manage to evade the serious scrutiny of various subsequent inquiries, including the Fitzgerald and Kimmins inquiries? And why hadn’t Australia’s recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse examined historic links with government and institutions like the police?

  For the officer who lost his career over the Howard-Osborne material, there’s nothing left but regrets. ‘It would have gone worldwide,’ he recalled. ‘The connections were there. If there was a proper team put in place, there’d be arrests, there’d be bloody suicides all over the bloody place. In the end we could do no more. I think they were glad to see the back of us anyhow.

  ‘And it all happened in our own backyard.’

  Doc

  Austral Street in St Lucia in Brisbane’s inner-west runs off Sir Fred Schonell Drive that leads to the University of Queensland, and ambles gently downhill until it hits the Brisbane River. It ends at a No Through Road sign and the Austral Street canoe ramp, a strip of bitumen that becomes a tongue of concrete that leads into the water. There is still an old boat safety checklist sign nearby, erected by the Lions Club of Indooroopilly. The list instructs the water-goer to check the weather, make sure you have fuel or oars and a fire extinguisher. Don’t overload, it reminds you. And finally – ‘Tell someone where you are going!’

  Directly beside the canoe ramp is the palatial St Lucia Quays development. As one property specialist company described it: ‘There’s something almost magical about living so close to the water. The river has a calming, inspiring effect that permeates every area of life; uplifting and rewarding your existence.’ It’s a magnificent complex and symbolic of modern Brisbane.

  Decades earlier, this spot – 26 Austral Street – was home to a man called Dr Frederick William ‘Doc’ Whitehouse, an academic at the University of Queensland, who resided here in an old wooden Queenslander at least from the 1940s until his death in 1973. This spot offered everything that interested Doc Whitehouse. A single man, he was a short walk away from the campus, where he was professor of geology, and of course a stone’s throw to the river and his other great passion, rowing.

  As I began to investigate the paedophile Clarence Howard-Osborne, and as more people came forward with information and documents were uncovered, Whitehouse’s name kept coming up over and over again, intersecting, however briefly, at several points along the Howard-Osborne narrative.

  Brisbane writer Archie Butterfly – through his blog ‘It’s Not Normal’ – had started publishing a series of stories about Queensland paedophilia in early 2016 and the previously shadowy figure of Doc Whitehouse began to take shape.

  Butterfly, through his enquiries, research and electoral roll and property searches, became increasingly convinced that Whitehouse was an historical abuser in the early to mid-twentieth century who had, in fact, passed the metaphorical baton of child abuse onto Clarence Howard-Osborne, who grasped it and elevated paedophilia in this country to an unprecedented level.

  I began to suspect that just as The Joke and its practitioners could be linked back at the very least to corrupt former police commissioner Frank ‘The Big Fella’ Bischof as its unofficial founder, the paedophile thread might have its own, earlier Bischof figure, its own progenitor. Could this be Whitehouse?

  Doc Whitehouse was the son of another F.W. Whitehouse, who made his name throughout Queensland as a caterer based in Ipswich. Doc’s grandfather, yet another Fred Whitehouse, was a baker who started Whitehouse’s Cafe in Ipswich in the 1860s. According to the Jubilee History of Ipswich: ‘As the years went by the name of F. Whitehouse as a caterer was recognised far and near, in proof of which the catering for most of the public functions in Brisbane, Ipswich, and elsewhere was intrusted to him, and on every occasion he was complimented on his success.’

  Fred Whitehouse died in 1904 and the business was taken over by his son and Doc’s father, F.W. Whitehouse, in 1909. Under Fred the younger, the business in Nicholas Street expanded. The caterer boasted Governors of Queensland, and at least one Governor-General, as his clients.

  Doc Whitehouse was born on 20 December 1900 in Ipswich and later was a boarder at Ipswich Grammar School, the first grammar school in Queensland,
sitting on Grammar School Hill. It was here that a curious meeting of minds occurred. In the 1918 school photograph, featuring Principal R.A. Kerr, four boys in the school of 30 would go on to great things. It was an intellectual constellation not repeated before or since. In that group were a young Freddy Whitehouse along with Herbert Burton, Robert Hall and Ambrose Foote. Whitehouse would become an academic high achiever. Hall, Burton and Foote would be anointed Rhodes scholars and lead extraordinary careers. Another friend of Whitehouse, Inky Stephensen, would also be awarded a Rhodes scholarship and go on to teach briefly at Ipswich Grammar before setting out as a radical writer and publisher.

  Freddy avoided the family catering path, instead graduating with first-class honours in geology and mineralogy from the University of Queensland. He shared an honours award on graduation with Henry Emmanuel ‘Harry’ Roberts, the esteemed scholar formerly of Brisbane Grammar School. Freddy also won a government gold medal and took up a university foundation travelling scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he successfully completed a PhD on marine crustaceous sequences in Australia.

  At some point while he was studying in Cambridge from the early to mid-1920s, his friend Harry Roberts had a brief teaching stint in Yorkshire. Indeed, there is little doubt that they met up while abroad, given that in April 1925 H.E. Roberts was photographed in Paris along with Robert Hall, Herbert Burton and Inky Stephensen. The old friends were back together.

  Whitehouse left Cambridge with a PhD, the first awarded by the Earth Sciences Department of that distinguished university. His subject was Queensland Cretaceous faunas. He was appointed government geologist when he returned to Queensland in 1925, and soon began lecturing at the University of Queensland. He was extremely young to hold such lofty positions, yet he was tenacious and ambitious, and like his father, he enjoyed the finer sides to life. Whitehouse was attracted to prestige and position.