Families of suspected LGBTQ+ hate crime victims from rural Australia are cautiously awaiting answers from a special commission of inquiry due to wrap up in Sydney this year.
More than 30 cold cases between 1970 and 2010 were subjected to decades-long investigative delays in New South Wales.
But a world first inquiry headed by Justice John Sackar examined the factors affecting the LGBTQ+ community and heard detailed submissions about these deaths. It also reviewed investigative standards, long-overlooked evidence of homophobia and critical missing records.
Before Sackar’s report – due next month – Guardian Australia reports on some of the people from regional NSW whose cases were considered as part of this inquiry.
‘I wish I had known him’
Retired London-born teacher Gordon Hughes met his Australian wife, Cathy, in the UK before the couple migrated in 1992. They now live at Shellharbour in the Illawarra region.
Unbeknownst to Gordon, he had a cousin – John Gordon Hughes – who preceded him to Australia in 1956 at the age of 11. Gordon learned of his cousin in a letter from his father 20 years ago.
“He gave brief details of the family background and enclosed a photo of John Gordon as a young boy,” Gordon says. “He also informed me at that time that he had been murdered.”
Gordon found out about John’s sister, Liz, at the same time, and recalls the lateness of these discoveries as upsetting, considering Gordon and Cathy had visited Sydney regularly before John’s death and could have met his cousin.
In February, the inquiry heard a submission about John Hughes’ death. The 44-year-old was found strangled and bound at his Potts Point residence in May 1989. A suspect living in Bathurst – Hughes’ former flatmate Ian Jones – was charged with his murder but later acquitted.
Kathleen Heath, counsel assisting the inquiry, submitted there was “compelling evidence” of homophobia behind Hughes’ death, in contrast to NSW police’s 2018 strike force Parrabell report that stated there was “insufficient information” to establish any gay-hate bias.
Gordon learned through Liz that John had been sent to the Fairbridge Society’s “farm school” at Pinjarra in Western Australia, under the United Kingdom’s child migration scheme.
According to Liz, her parents adopted John as a one-year-old, by which time he had been in 11 different foster homes.
“John was sent to Australia because my mother had adopted him late in her life and she was unwell with rheumatoid arthritis plus other illnesses, and she was unable to cope with his behaviour,” she tells Guardian Australia.
“She honestly thought he would have a far better life and opportunities on a farm out there with plenty of fresh air and the chance to learn farming skills.
“We all know now the reality was very different.”
The 2018 report of an independent inquiry in the UK described the child migration program as “a deeply flawed policy that caused lifelong damage to many children”.
Heath submitted to the inquiry that it should make an open finding with regards to Hughes’ death, with the “strong probability” being that he was killed by Jones, who has since died.
Gordon says he is relieved the inquiry was established but is “not quite sure what justice would look like”.
“If John and all the other victims of these crimes are rescued from anonymity and their lives and experiences brought into focus, and the loss of their stories and humanity restored, perhaps that is justice,” he says.
“When I look at the photo of 10-year-old John I see so much joy, enthusiasm and potential. I wish I had known him.”
Liz says she is glad her brother’s death is being looked into. “We need closure,” she says.
‘A place of his own’
Peter Russell and his partner, Donna Hannah, now live at Lake Macquarie on the NSW central coast. But they still keenly recall a decades-old dream of relocating to 38 acres at Wollombi in the Hunter Valley, a plan that involved Peter’s brother, John.
“I was just in a new relationship with Donna and we got a flat down in Bondi Beach, but John was going to move up to Wollombi and build a kit home up there with Dad … a base for the family,” Russell says.
“There was going to be a home with a veranda right around it and then, down on the northern corner on the high ground above the creek, John was going to put up a little studio shack, a place that he could go to and do his thing. A place of his own.”
That dream was interrupted when John was found dead at the foot of cliffs below Marks Park, a known gay beat at Bondi, in November 1989.
At the time, police concluded he had accidentally fallen to his death. Officers attending the scene observed hair strands in one hand that were not a likely match to John’s, but these were never forensically examined or archived.
In 2005, after NSW police’s strike force Taradale reinvestigated several unsolved deaths at Bondi, then deputy state coroner Jacqueline Milledge found that John had been thrown from the cliff in a likely gay-hate attack.
In June, the special commission heard a submission from Peter Gray, counsel assisting the inquiry, about the little-known NSW police strike force Neiwand. In 2017 the Neiwand report advised that Milledge’s findings be “disregarded” and that “other causes of death were as likely or more likely”, the inquiry heard.
Russell says his family should have been informed of the Neiwand report’s advice when it was first made.
“We’ve been through every conceivable hearing and interview and TV show and book and we’ve been through a hell of a lot,” he says.
“When you start off on a journey like this, you believe you’re going to get great steps of justice. That doesn’t happen. The journey becomes longer and the steps become smaller. It gets down to a shuffle and then along comes something else that could be a bit of hope.”
It was submitted to Sackar that Milledge’s findings about John’s death be upheld.
Russell says he believes “someone out there knows something” about his brother’s death.
“And it’s a real worry that there’s people out there that know somebody that murdered someone and they’re letting it lie,” Hannah says.
‘Give our uncle a voice’
In February, ACT-based William Towler tuned into the livestream of the special commission. He had been made aware a few weeks earlier that his uncle Graham Paynter was among those whose deaths were being reinvestigated.
Paynter, a surveyor’s assistant, was found dead at the base of a Tathra cliff on the south coast in October 1989, jeans around his ankles and jumper over his head. He was 36 years old. Police concluded he had died as the result of an accidental fall.
Paynter’s family says they were not aware if he was a member of the LGBTQ+ community, although Heath told the inquiry that, “they were open to the possibility and would have been very supportive”.
Nevertheless, in 2015 Paynter’s case was included in strike force Parrabell.
Heath told the current inquiry that she had been unable to access an investigative record on Paynter’s death, which she said was a “troubling” gap in police archiving. She added that a thorough investigation would have obtained more information about Paynter’s personal circumstances and a statement from the man he had been drinking with on the night he died.
“This may have opened further lines of inquiry,” she told the inquiry.
An independent review of the original autopsy was carried out by the inquiry, with Heath noting “nothing in the medical findings that could differentiate between an accidental fall, suicide, or a homicidal fall in which Mr Paytner was pushed”.
Nevertheless, she submitted that Paynter’s fall was likely accidental.
Towler and his brother Andrew Bird gave a written statement to the inquiry, hoping that “details surrounding his untimely death are investigated and given the proper respect, attention, time and results that anyone should expect when the loss of a loved one occurs, rather than being brushed aside or put into the too-hard basket”.
“Please give our uncle a voice that he has so long been denied,” they said.
The inquiry will hold its final public hearing on 14 November.
Michael Burge is an author and journalist from Deepwater in the New England region
Do you know more? Contact michael.burge.freelancer@guardian.co.uk
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. For LGBTIQA+ people and their families there is QLife, 1800 184 527, www.qlife.org.au; and in Victoria there is Rainbow Door, 1800 729 367, www.rainbowdoor.org.au.
