WELCOME TO MY VERY FIRST BLOG ON MY BRAND NEW AUTHOR’S WEBSITE – SO EXCITING!

Welcome to my very first blog on my brand new Author’s website – so exciting!

Last night I joined Ian Hunter MP and colleagues via Teams from the Torres Strait. The meeting was held in Parliament House in South Australia. Ian was the first openly gay sitting MP (and Cabinet Minister) in Australia to marry his partner, in Spain, in December 2012. We were planning the 10^th May 2022 Memorial, marking the 50th Anniversary of the drowning death of Cambridge University-educated and Adelaide University law lecturer Dr George (Ian) Ogilvie Duncan, Dux of Melbourne’s Church of England Grammar School. Dr. Duncan suffered tuberculosis as a child, contributing, no doubt (along with his inability to swim) to his drowning death. His death was later found by police investigators from New Scotland Yard to be “a frolic gone wrong” by a member or members of South Australia’s Vice Squad. These same New Scotland Yard officers were subsequently found guilty of fraud and corruption. The Inquest only achieved an open finding. The pathologist was the disgraced Colin Manock. Dr Duncan was gay. He had been in Adelaide for 6 weeks. At the time, police in the Vice Squad customarily intimidated and entrapped gay men near the River Torrens. They threw gay men into the river as part of their “teaching poofters how to swim campaign”. Homosexuality was illegal at the time. No officer was held to account. No prosecution has succeeded over the years since his death, despite the fact that ex-Vice Squad officers Brian Hudson, Francis Cawley and Michael Clayton were charged with manslaughter and Cawley and Clayton went to trial. Emanating out of this tragedy was the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in South Australia, the first jurisdiction in the Westminster system around the world to do so. The details of the unsolved Dr Duncan case may be found in my book: Free Radical – a Memoir.

 

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