Whitehouse said Peter, when out of money and work, had appealed to stay at Austral Street and had done so ‘with the full approval of my housekeeper’.
As it turned out, the offensive senior constable had visited Whitehouse’s home just a few weeks earlier asking questions about Peter and another minor matter. Whitehouse wrote:
I told him that I was helping [Peter], as I had helped many other lads released from Westbrook. I told your constable that I did a lot to help young people from all over the State. The surf-boat crews of the Mooloolaba Surf Club train from my house every evening. I have written, in recent years, 44 pamphlets for schools in every part of Queensland to help them in their studies of geology and geography – and so on.
But all he could say was that I should not have lads like those from Westbrook here.
Whitehouse was incensed that shortly after the visit from the officer, two car loads of police turned up at the house looking for Peter. One of the officers then ‘insisted on searching the house
for [Peter], producing no warrant … I let him do it, I have nothing to hide’. He concluded:
He [the officer] then read me a curt lesson saying that I had better have nothing to do with lads from Westbrook and similar places.
And if they had guns (for which there is not a scrap of evidence) it could be very dangerous. I did not bother to reply.
If the State Children’s Department will not help these lads to be rehabilitated (as Boystown does), somebody will have to do this or they will get worse and become a menace to the State.
Well, there it is. I have given you these details rather fully, rather than get in touch with [Police Commissioner] Mr Whitrod or my solicitor, so that you may deal with the matter.
I do think you should do something about this bumptious, over-bearing fellow.
Just two months after police had not so subtly warned Whitehouse about taking in former wards of the state, he was still trying to secure the release of young Wayne. He wrote briefly to Dr Young of the Wolston Park Hospital on 29 May 1972. Whitehouse gave the history of his relationship with Wayne, and warned the doctor that he would be coming to the hospital again in the next week or so.
He wrote: ‘I come to visit him every now and then, bringing him some “dainties”. Would it be possible for me (on his next visit) to take Wayne home with me for the weekend? I have never done this before; and he, I know, would appreciate it.’
During this latter part of his life it appeared he did manage to have a boy stay with him, and at one point left the lad a typed letter of admonishment, which had also made its way into Box 23. An angry Whitehouse wrote:
This has just got to bloody well stop. I am not your servant – just to do all the chores around the place so that you can have a fine time doing nothing, and coming home only to sleep and for meals.
Your promises mean nothing. You do not keep anything. And you perpetually rat my clothes for money … this morning, as soon as you finished breakfast, you and Darryl cleared out again, without either of you even saying ‘Good Bye’ … and you took all the money from my strides.
… And don’t bring Darryl or anyone else here to sleep, after all, he has a home of his own. Let him use it. You went out without even making your bed, and leaving clothes all over the place. Clean that all up!
Just weeks before his death, F.W. Whitehouse, geologist, was still trying to secure the release of Wayne. Whitehouse said he could offer him ‘salubrious’ surrounds.
‘If you would consider releasing him to that environment,’ he asked the Medical Superintendent of Wolston Park Hospital, ‘I would be happy indeed to provide the accommodation and the oversight, under your supervision.’
Again his generous offer was knocked back.
There was a final letter in Box 23. It was a long letter, handwritten in pencil and dated 17 February 1934. Whitehouse, who would have been 34 at the time, had written it on his University of Queensland stationery, but had crossed out ‘Brisbane’ in the address at the top and scribbled in ‘Written beside the Hamilton River’, which stretches through central western Queensland.
‘My Dear Bob,’ Freddy wrote, ‘We got to Boulia without incident.’ He explained how his vehicle got two tyre punctures, and other difficulties in this journey he was on. But then on the second page he wrote:
The sooner this damn trip is over now the better. You too may be feeling much in the same way, I don’t know. Things went so rottenly on this trip that it cannot be anything but a relief to you that I have moved on.
I cannot fail to see that your feelings towards me as a result of this disastrous journey can be anything but feelings of disgust. But in case you have any shred of respect left for me (and God, I don’t blame you if you have none), can I say this?
I have had, in my life, two periods of hero-worship. And you have been the cause of one of them.
Could this letter be an apology to the ‘assistant’ Whitehouse supposedly told the police about when he was arrested in 1955? The man he had told Murphy about, the one with the large penis that had triggered Whitehouse’s obsession with male ‘members’? Were they out in the field studying Queensland’s artesian basins, as Freddy had said, and something untoward happened that saw them split up and go their separate ways?
Whitehouse died on 22 March 1973. He was cremated with Anglican rites.
By this stage, over on the southside at Mount Gravatt, Whitehouse’s champion young rower of yesteryear at the Toowong Rowing Club, Clarence Howard-Osborne, had also perfected his seduction of young boys, receiving car loads of them from a particular local private school for photographic and measuring sessions in his ‘studio’ at the bottom of his property in Eyre Street.
Those photographs and statistical physical measurements were added, almost daily, to his growing ‘life’s work’ – his meticulously kept records of every boy he had come in close contact with since the 1950s. Not only that, but it appeared that Howard-Osborne was being enabled by a network of co-conspirators, a string of paedophile associates – from teachers and counsellors in schools across Brisbane – who were regularly putting him in contact with young boys.
Photos with Clarrie
The more I learned about Frederick William Whitehouse and Clarence Howard-Osborne, the more I began to suspect that a larger, more sinister secret sat under the entire multi-generational saga of police and political corruption in Queensland. While the Three Crooked Kings trilogy had focused on the lies and deceit surrounding the key players of The Joke and beyond, I wondered if this network had provided a smokescreen for one with a much more menacing appetite, and that was paedophilia. I imagined it as a foul tank stream, hidden from sight, but powerful enough to inform actions and decisions above ground. A dark force beneath everything, weakening official inquiries into it, sending files missing, impelling alleged suicides when the truth strayed too close.
Well into my work on the trilogy I was put in touch with one of Howard-Osborne’s 2500 victims and finally, after so many years, some pieces of the puzzle began to fit together.
I spoke with the source on the telephone, and at last we met in an inner-city Brisbane cafe. Now in his early sixties, the weeks and then months that would change this man’s life began in early 1967, when he started as a boarder at the Church of England Grammar School, or Churchie, in East Brisbane. He was 12 years old.
With both his parents out of the country – although he had two sets of grandparents in Brisbane – John, as we’ll call him, thought he had embarked on a grand adventure. ‘It was the beginning of the school year,’ he told me. ‘My mother brought me back to Australia to go to boarding school. I can remember going to Myer to get the school uniforms.’
On that Sunday before the first term started, he said his mother took him to the famous old school that backed onto Norman Creek and sat on Oaklands Parade. The headmaster at the time was the venerated Harry Roberts, who’d l
ed the school since 1947. It was the one and the same H.E. Roberts who had been friends with Freddy Whitehouse back in the 1920s.
John was taken to the old headmaster’s house, which was on Oaklands Parade opposite the school. John then met the housemaster of the boarding house – Gerald House – that was to be his home for the next five years. The name of the housemaster was Harry John Wippell. ‘My mother recalls Harry Roberts telling Wippell that he make sure I had somewhere nice to go for boarders’ weekends. My mother left on that Sunday. I was excited.’
Harry Wippell, then aged about 30, was a trained pharmacist. He was keen on photography, rowing and the St John’s Cathedral choir. A Churchie Old Boy himself, Wippell had entered the school in 1951 and graduated on a Commonwealth Scholarship in 1954, when he was also a Form Captain. In his senior year he won the Canon Jones Memorial Prize (for service). He also served on the Chapel Council.
Wippell found the pull of his old alma mater extremely powerful. In 1955, the year after he graduated, he was mentioned in the school magazine, The Viking: ‘Much help has been given to the Camera Club by Harry Wippell, now an Old Boy of the School, who helps to prepare chemicals,’ it said.
In 1957, Wippell was again lending a hand. ‘During the second term members of the [Camera] Club made great use of the dark-room and enlarger. Harry Whippell [sic] has again been of great assistance to the Club, and all members wish to thank him for the help he has given.’
And in 1958: ‘As usual the Club must extend its thanks to Harry Wippell who gives so freely of his time to mix chemicals and to help any members with photographic problems.’
The November 1959 magazine Camera Club report noted: ‘We are extremely fortunate that Mr Harry Wippell has come into residence at Donaldson House [another boarding house on the school grounds] this term. He is even a greater tower of strength than before, and we all thank him for the help he has given us.’
(Church of England Grammar said Wippell volunteered as a tutor and supervisor in the boarding school from 1965 to 1974. ‘Harry Wippell’s responsibilities included general supervision and assisting boarders with leave arrangements,’ the school said. ‘Harry Wippell’s responsibilities included transporting boarders to transit connections for periods of leave.’ Churchie later agreed that Wippell had actually been closely involved with the school since as early as 1959.)
Within weeks of the start of school, John said, Wippell asked him into his rooms at night at Gerald House. Wippell had a cluster of rooms on the first level of the old wooden boarding house. The boys slept outside his rooms on rows of beds. ‘I used to go to Wippell’s room for [a glass of] Akta-Vite at night and vitamin tablets, then I’d fall asleep watching TV and Wippell would carry me back to bed,’ John said.
‘This happened once a week, maybe once a fortnight, because he had other boys. He had a black and white television set. His TV was quite a big boxy piece of furniture, gee this is going back, and it had a remote control that wasn’t a remote control, it was on a wire, and you could push the button at the tip and it’d cycle through the channels and there was a volume control on the side. It must have been quite state of the art.’
John said he remembered watching a show, the American sitcom Green Acres, about city slickers moving to the country. ‘It had a pig called Arnold. I can remember watching that,’ John said. ‘I know there was a bed. I fell asleep on his bed.’
Wippell continued to take a keen interest in John and wanted to introduce him to his friends. One of those friends was fellow photographic enthusiast Clarence Henry Howard-Osborne.
According to neighbours, Howard-Osborne had lived alone at his modest one-level house since the early to mid-1950s. He lived simply and did everything with a military precision. His Mount Gravatt neighbours remember a fastidious little man, fit and busy. None of them had ever been invited inside the house. Indeed, one neighbour saw Howard-Osborne in his backyard one afternoon and went to meet him at the side gate to the property, but Howard-Osborne moved briskly across the yard to block the neighbour’s entry.
Howard-Osborne did, however, befriend a local boy who helped out with his lawns and looked after his collection of budgerigars when he went on holidays. That boy would grow up to become probably Howard-Osborne’s only genuine friend.
Meanwhile, Howard-Osborne was working for the State Reporting Bureau as a court reporter. He was an immensely talented shorthand writer, the likes of which the bureau had never seen before. One of his colleagues at the bureau was Stuart Lawson, who joined the bureau in 1954. ‘The bureau reported all the criminal cases – civil, industrial, tribunal, industrial tribunals of one sort or another – and I had to type them up on a daily basis,’ Lawson remembered.
It was during his time at the bureau that Lawson met Clarence Howard-Osborne. ‘He was … a very, very bright, sort of a lively bloke, you know?’ Lawson said. ‘I could never understand why he always chose to go over to Thailand [on holidays].
‘He didn’t move around in a suit. He had just a shirt and tie. But he … it was good because, you know, it was good to have Clarrie there, sort of, everybody there tended to be so serious … but Clarrie sort of … livened things up. He always had a gag, you know? He was a very pleasant person to sort of deal with.’
Former journalist Tony Koch worked with Howard-Osborne as a trainee court reporter at the beginning of his career. He had different recollections of Howard-Osborne. ‘There were a few of us in the office,’ Koch recalled. ‘We were employed as trainee reporters. Male only. You had to have a proficiency of something like 100 words per minute. Clarence Howard-Osborne was the chief court reporter. He was obsessed with this little singer, a soprano. Heinjte.’ (Hendrik Nikolaas Theodoor ‘Heintje’ Simons was a Dutch singer and actor who, aged 12 in 1967, had a worldwide recording hit with the song ‘Mama’. It sold over a million copies, and his debut album would go on to sell twice that.)
Koch, a country kid, had never encountered anyone quite like Howard-Osborne. ‘I came down from the bush,’ he said. ‘I was a knockabout bloke. My dad was a copper. I was playing football. I rang Dad and said, “This bloke’s weird. All he talks about is rooting kids.”’
Howard-Osborne was also freely showing naked pictures of boys around the office. Koch and a co-worker would trigger a Public Service Board investigation into Howard-Osborne. ‘[He] was a totally friendless bloke,’ Koch remembered. ‘Some of his victims were Japanese kids coming off the ships. Cadet sailors. He used to bring them into the office. And he was picking up hitchhikers … Everyone knew he was weird. He sexually got off on young teenagers. I saw some stuff of his. He liked sucking them off. Osborne had this theory about men’s ring fingers. The way the finger bends is the way the penis bends …’
According to John, one day after school, he was taken to
54 Eyre Street. John remembered: ‘Howard-Osborne was going to take these scientific photos, that’s what I was told when I got there. There was another boy there when I arrived. He had a pair of white shorts on and I think his uniform was on the floor, I think it was a St Laurence’s [College in South Brisbane] uniform. I had my clothes taken off and had photos taken.
‘It was in a shed down the backyard. I went there for photos. Then … the other boy was watching when my photos were taken. He had his shorts off when we left.’
John said he was delivered to Eyre Street on a second occasion. ‘We went to the house in Mount Gravatt another time and something happened, he started taking photos and [then] all of a sudden we had to go,’ John said. ‘But that day I remember seeing a Churchie blazer there that had half-colours on it. The full colours were quite spectacular. I didn’t see any other boy … I never went into the house.’
On another occasion, John says he was taken to a small wooden cottage at 11 Longlands Street, East Brisbane, a short distance from Churchie. In that house John was sprayed with oil and photographed naked by Howard-Osborne. ‘I wasn’t rapt in that beca
use he was touching me, measuring me, and writing it all down,’ John said. (The house, it transpired, was owned by Howard-Osborne’s aunt and uncle – William and Kathleen Howard-Osborne, and later their children, including lawyer Mervyn Howard-Osborne, Clarrie’s cousin.)
Another time, John remembers being in a high-set Queenslander at 63 Gresham Street, also in East Brisbane, just five or six streets north-east of the house in Longlands Street. (Howard-Osborne’s family confirmed that the house was owned by Clarence’s brother, Leonard, at the time. There is no suggestion that Leonard was in any way involved with his brother Clarence’s activities.) John was also photographed there by Clarence Howard-Osborne and afterwards Clarence and two other men drove down to the nearby Australian National Hotel in Stanley Street, leaving John in the vehicle in the car park while they went in and had a drink. ‘They brought me [out] a steak sandwich and a double sarsaparilla,’ John recalled.
One weekend, according to John, he was driven into the city to the Grand Central Arcade. The arcade was a premium shopping strip that extended between Queen and Elizabeth streets, and was home to a café, a bookshop, the Grand Central Art Gallery and the fashion house of Brisbane couture guru Gwen Gillam, whose star still shone brightly for the city’s A-list in 1967.
The arcade also contained a ‘Continental’ barber shop. It had been an instant success since it opened in 1963, furbishing the heads of many of the city’s most prominent figures, including politicians, entertainers and police. John claimed when he entered the salon that the door was closed and the curtains at the front of the shop were drawn. ‘My clothes came off, I don’t know how,’ John said. ‘There were other men there – a barber and at least three others. He says he was put in a chair and had his pubic hair shaved. ‘At some stage the back of the chair went back, my legs went up …’ He claims the men laughed and joked and touched his genitals.
Little Fish Are Sweet Page 20
