AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
IAN KIRKWOOD
18 Nov 2016
THE defrocked former Anglican dean of Newcastle, Graeme Lawrence, has begun his long-awaited stint of evidence before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Taking the stand under oath after the lunch break, an at-times combative Mr Lawrence was taken through his relationships – professional and social – with the other main Anglican figures named in this section of the commission’s investigations.
Having been mentioned so frequently during this inquiry, Mr Lawrence’s evidence was always going to be pivotal, and he clashed from early on with the counsel assisting the commission, Naomi Sharp.
Although he was forced by the revelation of documents to modify some of his early evidence, he insisted that while he was dean of Christ Church Cathedral from 1984 to 2008, he had only ever heard one allegation of an Anglican clergyman abusing children, that of priest CKC accused of abusing a person code-named CKA.
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