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What is it about the WA literary scene? First, it produced Dorothy Hewitt, who openly pimped her underage daughters to the cream of the ’70s luvvy left. In fact, she seemed miffed when one well-known Oz yartz type declined her offer to “fuck my daughters”. He was the only one who didn’t, she grumbled. I’m not making that up. Hewitt, despite the whole ‘MeToo’ thing, still has a luvvy award named after her, unlike Barry Humphries, whose name was stripped from a comedy gong simply for saying un-woke things about trannies.
Another WA literary icon, though, is unlikely to get treated with the same kid gloves as Hewitt. Maybe because he’s not morbidly obese, feminist and dead, despite committing much the same crimes, except that he was the john-by-proxy rather than the pimp touting her underage child.
Appearing in Fremantle Magistrates Court on Tuesday morning, Mr Silvey – the author of best-selling works Jasper Jones, Honeybee and Runt – pleaded guilty to one count of possessing child exploitation material and one count of distributing child exploitation material.
The fall is spectacular. Until his arrest in January, Silvey was the golden boy: critically adored and commercially successful, with books turned into films, stage plays and school staples. Jasper Jones and Runt were everywhere, beloved of school librarians, even if not so much by schoolboys forced to read him. Just months before the raid, he was touring schools across the country spruiking the sequel to Runt. Teachers’ favourite author, right up until the moment the Child Exploitation Operations Unit kicked in his garage door.
Police allege the offences happened between January 7 and 9 this year. Silvey, using the username “jimmyjimmyjimmy” on an adult site, was chatting up another user and asking for contact on Signal or Session. One production charge and another possession count were dropped, but the two he’s pleaded guilty to still carry maximums of seven and 10 years respectively.
The news of his arrest prompted an almost immediate backlash, with the 43-year-old’s books swiftly withdrawn from sale and pulled from school curriculums around the country within hours of the news breaking.
Good. At least some institutions moved faster than they usually do when one of their own is exposed.
This is becoming a tiresome pattern, as I’ve noted before, cataloguing the revolving door of ‘progressive’ cultural figures – writers, actors, educators – revealed as monsters preying on the young. The same crowd that lectures us about ‘protecting children’ from conservative values turns out to have an alarming number of members who can’t keep their hands (or hard drives) clean.
Silvey’s own family provides the perfect bookend. His brother Bret was last year jailed for 12 years after defrauding a Perth family of over $70 million. Nice pedigree.
While the literary establishment scrambles to memory-hole his work, the real scandal is how long these people get away with it. Silvey wasn’t some obscure fringe figure. He was mainstream, award-winning and curriculum-approved. His books were shoved in front of schoolkids while he allegedly indulged his darkest impulses from the very garage where he wrote them. The gap between public persona and private sickness is grotesque.
This isn’t isolated moral failure. It’s a subculture. The arts and education worlds have spent decades platforming the ‘edgy’, the ‘transgressive’, the boundary-pushing… then act shocked when boundaries get obliterated. Teachers’ pets, festival darlings and inner-city creatives routinely discover that their ‘artistic exploration’ was just predation with better PR. Then the books get quietly pulled, the pronouns updated in the author bio and everyone pretends it was a one-off.
Australian parents have every right to be furious. Their taxes fund the schools that put these authors on reading lists. Their kids sit through assemblies and English classes absorbing the output of people who, it turns out, belong on a watchlist rather than a bestseller list.
The luvvie class loves to signal its moral superiority. Perhaps it’s time they applied some of that vaunted empathy and ‘protect the vulnerable’ rhetoric to actually protecting children from the predators in their own ranks.
