Identifying victims of child sexual assault and abuse

  • Download audio
  • show transcript
Tuesday 25 November 2008 8:30AM (view full episode)

The Australian news media never publish or broadcast the names of survivors of sexual assault and child abuse unless they have the express permission of the victims. But what about other publications like non-fiction books and diaries?


Please note that this item contains material that is not suitable listening for children.

Damien Carrick: This week we're talking about publishing the identity of victims of sexual assault and child abuse. The Australian news media cannot publish or broadcast names unless they have the express permission of the survivor. But what about other publications? Non-fiction books? Diaries?

The identification issue is one of the themes raised in a documentary launched last week which looks at how deceased artist Donald Friend is remembered. As the documentary spells out, Donald Friend is revered as a great 20th century Australian artist. But there was also a darker side. The artist, who lived in Bali for many years, was a self-described pederast.

Man 1 [excerpt from documentary film, A Loving Friend]: There's no question that Donald's nefarious activities were very well documented by himself in his diaries, were being systematically ignored, glossed over, covered in a kind of make-up to disguise the ugly reality underneath, which of course is rampant paedophilia, a full-time career in paedophilia.

Man 2 [excerpt from documentary film, A Loving Friend]: They seduced him, and his diaries express the amazement of these boys, as they, quote, 'serviced him.' And it's hard to call that a criminal act, when the boys themselves demanded it for whatever... not for money, but for who knows what reason?

Damien Carrick: Two competing views on Donald Friend from the documentary, A Loving Friend, which was launched in Melbourne last week.

The documentary, by Kerry Negara, sets out her concerns that parts of the artistic establishment don't want to squarely address the artist's darker side as a paedophile. Any question on that score was put to rest when his diaries were published by the National Library of Australia. In recent years, four volumes have been published, the most recent in 2006. This fourth and final volume covers the dozen or so years that Donald Friend lived in Bali, in a house full of young boys and male adolescents.

As you'll hear today, it appears that the National Library of Australia, in this fourth volume, published the names of at least one, possibly a number of Balinese children who were assaulted by the artist. Documentary film-maker, Kerry Negara travelled to Bali and interviewed a number of now men who lived with Donald Friend as children. One of them is extremely angry about the publication of his identity in the diary. The publication of the man's name raises both legal and ethical questions. More generally, Kerry Negara is dismayed that in 2008 there is still a debate in the arts community over how to characterise Donald Friend's sexual relationships with children. She also maintains that the National Library of Australia, in the way that it published and promoted the diaries, celebrated Donald Friend without firmly addressing his criminal behaviour.

Kerry Negara: Well really, Damien, it's about the National Library of Australia releasing Donald Friend's diaries, where he openly talks about having sex with children in the Torres Strait, Bali, Asia generally, the National Library and other art executives who are very influential in Australia, seeing no wrongdoing. That's really what the film's about.

Damien Carrick: Seeing no wrongdoing, but they didn't censor it, they're there on the page...

Kerry Negara: Oh, that's right, and that's the problem that I have, is that they're fascinating diaries and I really welcome them being published, because I thought there were a lot of rumours in Bali about Friend's paedophilia, and I thought we can finally clear the air and get this out in the open and have it on the public record. But instead of embracing those parts of the diaries where he talks about sex with children and adolescents as young as nine, 10, 12 years old in Bali, instead they decided to go down that route of denying it and even kind of turning Friend into a nice culturally accepted paedophile, at best.

And then I was told in one of my earlier interviews about the penumbra. And I wasn't really sure about the penumbra, but it was explained to me that Donald Friend kind of existed on the white side of penumbra, that grey area around the moon, where he is on the light side of penumbra; whereas these other paedophiles in Bali, who were more your aid agency, diplomat types, are on the dark black side of paedophilia, and who are hated and despised. But Donald and other artist paedophiles in Bali are on the light side of penumbra.

Damien Carrick: How could the library have done things differently?

Kerry Negara: Well all they had to do was come out and say, 'Look, we've got these fabulous diaries, they really are important for Australia's social history and to demonstrate the life of an artist, but there is this sad aspect to the diaries, and while we don't condone it, we just think that they're fabulous diaries and they need to be out there, warts and all.' But that wasn't done; it was hidden and disguised and basically denied.

Damien Carrick: These diaries, and especially the last diary, they have descriptions of sex with minors in them, don't they? Kerry, can you read out some of the passages that you have concerns with?

Kerry Negara: Well this is one where he's talking about a nine, 10 year old who he's managed to seduce. The diary writings are very romanticized, but once you get inside the mindset of a paedophile, you realise that what he's trying to say is that the children seduce him, the children make love to him. But, you know, that's just within the mind of a paedophile. So he says in his diaries: 'And to my slightly horrified delight, he made passionate and expert love.' This is about a 10 year old.

Damien Carrick: There's also a passage from I think 8 February 1967.

Kerry Negara: Yes. So he's talking about this boy whose name I won't mention, that he

spent the night with me. I hope life will continue forever to offer me delicious surprises like [this boy] and that I will always be delighted and surprised. He goes about the act of love with a charmingly self-possessed grace: gaily, affectionately, and enthusiastically. And in these matters he's very inventive and not at all sentimental for all the caresses.

Damien Carrick: How old was he?

Kerry Negara: Nine.

Damien Carrick: The documentary poses a lot of questions about how the Australian artistic establishment turns a blind eye, or seems to push to one side, all these issues, and that for you is very important.

Kerry Negara: Yes. I don't know why they're bothering. Why would they bother when Donald Friend has outed himself so clearly as a paedophile in his diaries? Even though those child protection laws were in place in Bali in the '60s and '70s when Friend was in Bali, sexually exploiting children. I've been speaking to some of our most influential people in the world of art in Australia, who deny that he caused any harm. So basically what they're trying to say is that Donald was a nice paedophile, a culturally accepted paedophile, that everyone in Bali loved him, that the boys actually enjoyed it.

Damien Carrick: That's a myth we need to dispel...

Kerry Negara: It's an absolute myth. That's why I went back to Bali and I spoke to the boys, who are now middle-aged men, who appear in Donald Friend's diaries, and they told me quite a different story. Well, I spoke to one man who was 10 years old in Donald's house and he was absolutely confronted by the fact that... he said, 'You mean these diaries, these books have been published, and he's talking about having sex with me?'

Damien Carrick: And this person is named in the diaries?

Kerry Negara: Yes.

Man 3 [with translator voiceover, excerpt from documentary film, A Loving Friend]: I met Mr Donald Friend when I was nine years old at the Tandjung Sari Hotel. I'm a bit angry because no-one asked my permission to write sexual things about me in the book. I didn't give my approval for this and it's already been sold. It makes me feel ashamed. Maybe the whole world or maybe all of Indonesia will know about him and me. I don't want it to be published again because I am the one who is losing out here if the general public find out we had sex together. I wish that a book like this had never been published, that it could be destroyed.

Damien Carrick: This raises the issue that there is footage in your documentary of a prominent Australian artist, Margaret Olley, talking about her discussions with the National Library of Australia when they were deciding what to publish and what not to publish in terms of the diary entries. Tell me about that.

Kerry Negara: Well that's right. The National Library went to a lot of trouble to talk to everyone in Australia who [is] mentioned in Donald Friend's diaries.

Margaret Olley [excerpt from documentary film, A Loving Friend]: Oh the National Library were very good with everybody who was mentioned in Donald's diary. I mean, they came and approached and asked if I would mind reading the material. So wherever I'm mentioned, they have always sent all the material to me. I remember on one diary, when I was having the drinking problem, I read it all and I said, 'Oh, you put it all in. Just cut out of them: "She's drunk again".' I thought it was too repetitive.

Kerry Negara: And Margaret Olley was able to vet all of her diary entries and she decided that, you know, a couple of entries weren't appropriate, that Donald was talking about her being drunk on one too many occasions. So she was able to take one or two out, because they were a bit repetitive. And yet the Balinese were never approached. They're mentioned quite extensively throughout the Bali diaries and a few of them are mentioned sexually as children and adolescents...

Damien Carrick: So these men, boys back then, they're identified by name in these descriptions of sex, yet they were not approached by the National Library of Australia as far as you know?

Kerry Negara: No, and these people are not hard to find, I found them in Bali really easily and the National Library could have found them with the help of local people, as I did, just as easily. But they didn't even try. And I don't understand why. It would have been so easy. Bali's a skip, hop and a jump away from Australia, and they have as much right to be approached as the westerners.

Damien Carrick: So some of them were upset that they were mentioned by name in these diaries?

Kerry Negara: Well some of them were clearly chuffed, because their drawings are in the diaries and some of them are really lovely reminiscences, but where Donald is talking about having sex with them, clearly they're incredibly embarrassed and all sorts of childhood memories are conjured up.

Damien Carrick: In your film you also talk about the fact that there have been, over many years, criminal trials in Bali, going way back to the 1930s, involving foreigners who abused children. It wasn't a question of this being considered OK in that place.

Kerry Negara: No, it's never been OK to have sex with children in Bali. And there's a really famous paedophile in Bali, Walter Spies, an artist who through cultural tourism really has a very strong presence in Bali. He died in the 1930s. But he was a convicted paedophile; he was convicted by a court and he was put in jail. And all of those expats around Walter Spies—he was kind of the darling of the expat scene at the time—defended him. And there was a real problem with paedophilia on the island at the time, there were mass trials going on and a lot of people fled before there was a chance for them to be tried and convicted.

Damien Carrick: Film-maker, Kerry Negara.

Today, we're looking at how Australia remembers and records Donald Friend, a revered artist and, as recorded in his own diary entries, a paedophile. In recent years, those diaries have been published by the National Library of Australia. Paul Hetherington is the library's Director of Publications and Events Branch. He edited three of the four volumes of Friend's diaries. I asked him what processes were in place for contacting the identified people in the diary, especially the boys, now men, who are identified.

Paul Hetherington: The processes the library followed for all four volumes were essentially that there are many hundreds of people, if not thousands of people, mentioned in the Donald Friend diaries and we established a process right at the beginning of the project to essentially try to make sure that we contacted everybody that we could. That was a difficult task, because in many cases we weren't sure necessarily where people lived: some of them were in Australia, some of them weren't in Australia, and some of them we didn't know whether they were in Australia or not. And so essentially what we did was we tried to track people down through the normal processes initially, that is through telephone books, through associates of theirs, or if things got a bit more difficult, we'd look at what was on the public record and so on. Once we'd found somebody, or if we couldn't find the person themselves but we could find somebody associated with them who was prepared to contact them, which was one of the things that happened in some cases, we would liaise with them, give them information about what was in the Friend diaries, including transcripts, and seek their permission for publication. So we had actually very few people who declined to have material published, but where that happened, we honoured their requests.

Damien Carrick: Now in Kerry Negara's documentary she speaks to some of the now men who lived in Donald Friend's house, and one in particular, she shows him the diary and he is very, very angry that he's named in the diary and there are discussions of sex between the two. Do you regret that this person was identified?

Paul Hetherington: Well, look, one of the things about the process is that—not only some people in Bali but people elsewhere, including in Australia—we weren't able by the date of publication to be able to contact everybody and we did publish obviously also invitations for people to contact us and so on. Yes, I mean, I think it is regrettable if somebody has had information published about them and it's upset them. And it's something that we did everything we could to avoid and it's just one of those unfortunate things that's happened I think.

Damien Carrick: Given the extraordinary sensitivity of the material—this man was a child at the time, descriptions of sex between adults and children—why was he named?

Paul Hetherington: I don't know that we can go today into the complexity of the relationships between Friend and the young men and women who worked as houseboys, essentially—that's how he saw them—in the 1960s and 1970s in Bali. But essentially when editing diary material, it's very important obviously to try to keep integrity of the material and also to treat that material as sensitively as possible. What we did throughout editing the diaries, even though the diary volumes publish about a million words—we obviously edited out about another million or so—we tried to look at all those kinds of issues and we didn't want to entirely censor the diaries obviously, in terms of leaving out certain aspects of Friend's activities, otherwise that wouldn't have, in a sense, respected the integrity of Friend's own life and of the diary material; at the same time we did want to treat material of an intimate nature as sensitively as possible and all I can say is that we did that right throughout from the beginning to the end. If we have published material that is upsetting, relating to the Bali material, then that's regrettable, but it certainly wasn't our intention. And all I can say, it was a very difficult process and it's unfortunate if we've made an error in one instance.

Damien Carrick: More broadly, why did the National Library of Australia publish these diaries? How important are they?

Paul Hetherington: Well we published them because they came to the National Library in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and they came to us because they were seen to be very important diaries by a major Australian artist and a major Australian writer, and the general judgment of them was that they were one of the most important single cultural and documentary records of Australian life and expatriate Australian life. They are an extraordinarily eloquent and wide-ranging set of diaries. In fact I'd argue that they're actually the most important single set of diaries written by any Australian in the 20th century. Now I know that's a large claim, but certainly I think that diaries that even approached such a claim deserve to be published, because they represent a really invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, a whole range of people, just readers in general, about one person's view of Australia, and an important person; he was a major painter. There are some things in the diaries obviously that some people will find less attractive than others, but in publishing them, we wanted to publish the diaries as they are, more or less, with the sensitivity that I talked about earlier, because we think that it's important that people can read the material for themselves and make their own mind up about them. And it's really very much part of what a library does, I guess, is to have important material for Australian culture and Australian life and try to make that material accessible.

Damien Carrick: In the recently launched documentary there is criticism that parts of the arts establishment and perhaps the diaries themselves, don't face squarely Donald Friend's abuse of children. When it comes to the diaries, what's your view of that implication?

Paul Hetherington: Well, I mean, I don't really want to comment on the documentary, but I will say that Friend's activities and attitudes have met throughout his life and still to this day, met with a wide range of responses. And one of the interesting things about the diaries, in publishing them, is that people are entitled and should make up their own minds about what they think of Friend and these activities and his artistic work. All I can say is that I think in publishing the diaries as we have—as I said, as frankly as we can, allowing for the issues of sensitivity that were so important to us—if we didn't want to face up to issues we simply wouldn't have gone on and published this material and made it available. So I'd simply say that we've done the one thing that really faces up to this material as squarely as you possibly can: that is, to publish it, to make it accessible and available, and to provide fairly exhaustive notes—editorial notes—about the material, and introduction to the material in all of the volumes so that it's also contextualised. And I think that's an important part of the process.

Damien Carrick: What do you think of Kerry Negara's documentary, A Loving Friend?

Paul Hetherington: Well, look, I've only had a chance recently to look at it briefly and I don't think I'd like to comment on it at the moment.

Damien Carrick: Paul Hetherington, Director of Publications and Events at the National Library of Australia. He edited three of the four volumes of Donald Friend's diaries.

Dr Mark Williams is a Melbourne-based arts and entertainment lawyer. He provided Kerry Negara with legal advice in the making of her film A Loving Friend. I asked Mark Williams about what legal issues are raised by the publication of the names of some of the Balinese children, now men, who were assaulted by Donald Friend.

Mark Williams: Well, obviously the first thing would be that if it happened now, it would be right out. It just would not be permissible if these boys had been Australian nationals, there's a plethora of laws protecting the rights of the child, child protection laws and so forth. When you come in relation to discussing non-Australian nationals, things get a little bit woollier and when we're talking about events that happened 40, 50 years ago, you're entering into a very difficult area in terms of prohibition and in terms of a regime of protection. I don't think there's a very effective one exists at all.

Damien Carrick: But in our laws, there's a general principle that you never, ever identify the victim of a sexual assault.

Mark Williams: Absolutely. Once again, that's only really come in in the last few years. Once upon a time, the daily newspaper was full of it. You could think of any number of the scandal sheets that used to name children or name parents in such a way that it was inevitable that you could work out who the children were. Nowadays that's tightened up considerably.

Damien Carrick: But these laws, we're not quite sure if they're retrospective or not.

Mark Williams: I think it's true to say that in Australia, again with Australian nationals, they are retrospective, or rather a present comment about a past event that might identify a child who was the victim of sexual assault is right out.

Damien Carrick: But that's what the National Library has done. Is it possible that they have breached some of these statutory provisions which make it clear that you should never identify a victim?

Mark Williams: My own view is that it will have to be looked at. The situation is that the events happened a long time ago, they are not proven. So certainly anything that was the subject of actual court proceedings could not be reported. As a matter of whether it was an offence to do this under Indonesian law, whether it is an offence to do it under Australian law, if you look at the Commonwealth Crimes Act, the restrictions on reporting in relation to child sex tourism and things like that are actually pretty thin on the ground. So I don't think that there is a clear-cut case of an offence being committed here by any means, but it's certainly not in keeping with best practice.

Damien Carrick: Might these men, these men in Indonesia who were then children, might they have any legal recourse against the publishers of the diary, namely the National Library of Australia?

Mark Williams: There's an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. It was something that Australia ratified only in 2007 and child sex tourism legislation in the Crimes Act didn't have to be amended much in order for Australia to ratify this protocol. And the protocol says that child pornography... and what's revealed by the Donald Friend diaries might not be pornography, but it's certainly child prostitution, it's actually paying children, in kind or in other forms, for sexual favours, sexual activity. And the protocol makes it very clear that the payment doesn't have to be in cash and the proceeds of pornography and prostitution doesn't have to be in cash either. So here is an avenue, if you like, that these diaries which are being sold for profit, which contain elements—they're a tiny, but obviously extremely significant element in this four-volume publication—could amount to proceeds of child prostitution activities. That would have to be tested, of course. Then there are other questions about whether simply naming and failing in a duty of care to these people just gives rise to straight tortious liability.

Damien Carrick: Gives rise to a civil action for damages?

Mark Williams: Correct, yes.

Damien Carrick: What form might that action take?

Mark Williams: There's obviously a form of defamatory activity that could be said to be taking place here, because it is definitely liable to bring people into disrepute and considerable danger in these environments. There's inevitably a Trade Practices claim that you can run in these sorts of things.

Damien Carrick: How so?

Mark Williams: Well you could generally run actions along the lines that this is representing to the world that these people have been approached and have consented to have this particular information put out to the world. Obviously if they went through a procedure in relation to all the Australian nationals they could find, it would be a representation to the world that everyone is happy about these things—again, potentially misleading and deceptive conduct.

Damien Carrick: What protocols and processes should there be for everybody when it comes to these sorts of publications?

Mark Williams: Obviously it's a scale of seriousness. When a crime is being revealed, and these are crimes against children, even if they happened a long time ago, it is incumbent on people to find out where the victims might be and how they might be affected. It's not enough just to say, 'it's in a foreign country, and it was a long time ago.' As we know, the whole point about these offences continuing to be perpetrated is because this ethos has grown up that they're not our responsibility. So this is where antennas should have been wagging, certainly in the publication of the fourth volume, which was published in 2006.

Damien Carrick: Arts and entertainment lawyer, Mark Williams. He provided legal advice to Kerry Negara, who has just completed the documentary, A Loving Friend.

I asked National Library of Australia editor Paul Hetherington to describe Donald Friend's relationship with children.

Paul Hetherington: He loved drawing and painting youthful figures. They figure in his artwork a great deal.

Damien Carrick: I guess we're talking about there his art, but in terms of his relationships with children and young people, both sexual and otherwise, how would you describe that aspect of him?

Paul Hetherington: Well look, I really can't say a great deal about that, other than to say that he had all sorts of relationships in his life. For example, Madja, one of the boys in Bali, he sponsored to the extent that he brought him out to Australia for major operations to improve his health and enable him to lead a more normal existence because the health issue he had prevented that happening to some extent. So he did all sorts of generous things. There are other activities which perhaps were more questionable, but in the end, I think the key thing to remember about Friend is that he was a highly complex figure, and that's the important thing to remember, and that in reading the diaries, the complexities are all on show. We wanted, in publishing these very important diaries, not only to make the cultural and documentary material available, but to present a kind of self-portrait, a very complex and interesting self-portrait of a man who presents himself I think relatively accurately and with great acuity, which is a rare thing when people are writing about themselves. So I guess I would say that the best person to consult about his relationships, with everybody, is Friend himself. It's in the diaries, and it's very interesting and complex and candid.

Damien Carrick: Paul Hetherington from the National Library of Australia. That's The Law Report for this week.


Kerry Negara
Paul Hetherington
Editor, National Library of Australia
Mark Williams
Arts and entertainment lawyer


Damien Carrick
Erica Vowles