Nobody Was Ever Convicted. The Law Changed Anyway.

A law lecturer who could not swim, an open finding, a Scotland Yard report that stayed in a drawer for thirty years, and a parliament that answered a death with a courtroom defence. The dates are worse than the story you have been told.

Told by Paige Turner · 1 September 2026

People love to say a death changed everything. It is the tidiest sentence in the language and it is almost never true, and the reason I am short with it is that I have the dates and the dates are humiliating. Adelaide, 10 May 1972. A man is thrown into a river and drowns. South Australia does not decriminalise homosexuality that year. Or the next. Or the one after that.

So here is the question this answers, and it is a colder one than the anniversary pieces ask. When did a death last force an Australian parliament's hand, and what did forcing it actually look like from the inside?

Three years, three defeats in a single sitting, and a compromise so mealy-mouthed it left the offence on the books and handed you a defence to run once you had already been arrested.

10 May 1972

George Ian Ogilvie Duncan was born on 20 July 1930. He was a law lecturer at the University of Adelaide, and he had only just started. He returned to Australia on 25 March 1972 to take up the post. He had been in the city six and a half weeks.

On the night of 10 May 1972, at the Torrens, in an area known then and now as a place gay men went, a group of men threw people into the river. Duncan was one. Roger James was another, and he came out of it with a broken ankle, crawled to the road, and was picked up by a passing driver. A third man was thrown in as well and has never been identified.

Duncan could not swim. That is the whole of it. He did not die of an assault, an injury, or a weapon. He died because he was put in water and could not get out of it.

The coroner returned an open finding on 5 July 1972. That is the record. Some accounts describe the inquest as having found death caused by violence inflicted by persons unknown, which amounts to the same practical outcome and I am not going to pretend the phrasing is settled when the two versions circulate side by side. Nobody was identified. That much is not in doubt.

What the file says, and what it does not

Suspicion moved quickly onto the vice squad. Three officers declined to answer the coroner's questions. They were suspended, and they resigned.

The pressure was heavy enough that detectives from New Scotland Yard were brought out to investigate. Their report was not made public. It sat, and it went on sitting, and it was not tabled in the South Australian Parliament until 2002. Thirty years.

In 1985 a former vice squad member spoke publicly and the case reopened. On 5 February 1986, three former officers were charged with the manslaughter of George Duncan. Two of them went to trial in 1988. Both were acquitted on 30 September 1988, having declined to give evidence. The third man never stood trial.

I am going to be exact here, and exact is not the same as timid. Two men were tried and acquitted. An acquittal is an acquittal. Nobody has ever been convicted of anything arising from George Duncan's death, and this article does not name the men who were charged, because the record does not support any conclusion about them and because a strand called Receipts that starts insinuating has stopped being about receipts.

In 1990 a police task force reported to the South Australian Parliament that there was insufficient evidence to charge any person. In 2015 a two hundred thousand dollar reward was offered. Crime Stoppers South Australia still lists the case. The reward still stands.

Fifty four years on, this is an open homicide.

Thirty years in a drawer

I want to sit on the 2002 date for a moment because it is the one that makes me genuinely angry and it is the one nobody puts in the headline.

Scotland Yard came to Adelaide in 1972. Detectives from another hemisphere were flown to South Australia because the public would not accept a local investigation of local police, which is itself an admission with a date on it. They did their work. They wrote it up. And the document then went into a drawer for three decades and was not tabled in the South Australian Parliament until 2002.

By the time the public could read it, the coroner's open finding was thirty years old, the men who had refused to answer him had lived thirty more years, the manslaughter charges had come and gone, the acquittals had been entered, a task force had already reported that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone, and any witness who had been thirty in 1972 was sixty. Repeated calls for a royal commission have not been taken up.

There is no allegation here that anybody withheld the report improperly, and I have not found one I could stand behind. What I can say is what the calendar says. A document that might have mattered in 1972 was available to the public in 2002, and by 2002 there was nothing left for it to do.

If you want a working definition of how a state manages an embarrassment without ever refusing anything, that is it. Nobody says no. Things simply take thirty years.

The bill nobody quite passed

Now the part that gets skipped, because it is procedural and dull and it is the only part that answers the question.

On 2 August 1972, eighty four days after Duncan drowned, Murray Hill, a Liberal and Country League member of the Legislative Council, introduced a private member's bill to decriminalise private sexual acts between two consenting men over the age of twenty one.

It did not pass in that form.

An amendment moved by Ren DeGaris changed what the bill did. What passed the Council on 25 October 1972, and received assent on 9 November 1972, did not decriminalise anything. It created a defence. The act remained an offence. If you were charged, you could go to court and attempt to establish that what you had done was private, consensual, and between two men over twenty one, and if you succeeded, you would be acquitted.

Read that again slowly, because it is a genuinely remarkable piece of legislative design. The state kept the power to arrest you, kept the power to charge you, kept the power to put your name in the paper and your job at risk and your family in a waiting room, and then generously offered you the chance to win. Later.

That is what a death forced out of a parliament in 1972. A defence.

Think about what a defence costs to use. To run it you have to be arrested first, which means a cell, a charge sheet, and in 1972 a good chance of your name in the paper. Then you have to get to court, which means a solicitor you can afford. Then you have to stand up in a public room and establish, on the record, in front of anybody who wandered in, that the act you are accused of was private, was consensual, and was with a man over twenty one. Which means saying it. Out loud. In a building full of clerks.

The 1972 amendment did not stop a single arrest. It did not stop a single charge. It did not remove the reason to blackmail a man, because being blackmailable does not require a conviction, only exposure. What it did was give a parliament a form of words that could be described as reform in a newspaper, three months after a man drowned, while the vice squad went on being the vice squad.

That is not me editorialising past the record. The record is that the offence stayed on the books for another three years.

Three more years

In September 1973 a newly elected Labor member of the House of Assembly, Peter Duncan, no relation, introduced a wider bill. He was after a code of sexual behaviour applying to everybody, one age of consent, no separate category. It was defeated on 21 November 1973.

He came back. The State Library of South Australia's account of the 1975 passage is one of the great short paragraphs in Australian legislative history, and I will not improve it. The bill was introduced, defeated, reintroduced, defeated, reintroduced a third time, and passed.

The Legislative Council passed it on 17 September 1975. The Governor, Sir Mark Oliphant, gave assent on 2 October 1975. South Australia became the first Australian jurisdiction to fully decriminalise male homosexuality, and it did it with a code that applied to everyone rather than a carve-out that applied to us.

The Australian Capital Territory followed on 4 November 1976. Victoria on 23 December 1980. New South Wales, where the 1978 arrests happened, not until 22 May 1984. Tasmania not until 13 May 1997, by one vote in the upper house, twenty two years after Adelaide.

Adelaide. Adelaide got there first, and it got there because a law lecturer who could not swim was put in a river, and because one member of a conservative party stood up eighty four days later and put a piece of paper on the table.

Note who is in that sentence and who is not. The premier of the day was Don Dunstan and the attorney-general who carried the 1975 reform was Peter Duncan, and Labor gets the credit in every retelling because Labor was in government when it landed. Fair enough. But the first bill after the death came from the other side of the chamber, from the Legislative Council, from a Liberal and Country League member, and it came fast. Murray Hill moved before anybody had decided what the acceptable opinion was going to be.

I have no time for the version of queer history where the good people were all on one side and helpfully labelled. The archive does not support it and it makes for worse arguments now.

The five things, separated

Established fact. Duncan died on 10 May 1972 in the River Torrens. Roger James was thrown in the same night and survived with a broken ankle. The coroner recorded an open finding on 5 July 1972. Three vice squad officers refused to answer the coroner and resigned. Scotland Yard investigated and its report was not tabled until 2002. Three former officers were charged with manslaughter on 5 February 1986. Two were tried and acquitted on 30 September 1988. A 1990 task force found insufficient evidence to charge anyone. The case is unsolved and a two hundred thousand dollar reward stands. The 1972 amendment created a defence, not decriminalisation. Full reform received assent on 2 October 1975.

Reported allegation, tested and not proven. That members of the vice squad were responsible. This was investigated by Scotland Yard, put before a coroner, charged in 1986 and tried in 1988. It produced two acquittals and no convictions. That is where the law left it and that is where I leave it.

Historical interpretation, widely held. That Duncan's death is the direct cause of South Australian law reform. Well supported by the timeline, and by the fact that Hill moved within three months, but a parliament is not a single object and reform had advocates before May 1972.

My interpretation. That the 1972 defence was not a step toward reform, it was an attempt to end the conversation. It gave the appearance of movement while keeping every instrument of harm intact, and it took three years and three separate defeats to undo it. Anybody who tells you incremental change is always progress should be made to read the 1972 Act aloud.

Unknown. Who put George Duncan in the water. Whether the Scotland Yard report, sat on for thirty years, would have supported a prosecution if it had been released in 1972 instead of 2002. Who the third man in the river was. He crawled out of an Australian river in 1972 as a gay man and understood exactly why saying so was not survivable, and we have never learned his name.

What now

The direct read-across is obvious enough that I will not insult you with it. The useful one is smaller.

If you want the shape of an official response to a queer death, this is the template and it has not changed. An open finding. An outside investigation. A report withheld. A gap of years. Charges that arrive when the people involved are old. Acquittals. A task force that finds insufficient evidence. A reward that is really a shrug with a number on it. And running alongside all of it, entirely separately, a law that changes because someone decided the timing was finally survivable.

The law reform was not justice. It was what a parliament could do instead of justice, and it was worth having, and it is still not the same thing.

If you are in Adelaide, the city is small and its scene is smaller, and what is left of it is in our Adelaide guide. It is one club and it opens two nights a week.

And this. He was fifteen days short of two months in Adelaide. He had a flat he had barely unpacked, a lecture list he had barely started, and a whole life queued up behind him that a group of men in a park decided was optional. Fifty four years later a state still keeps a reward on a desk for anyone who wants to say what happened, and the boxes I keep in my flat are full of men who never got a reward, a report, or a bill with their name near it.

George Duncan got all three. It is the least useful kind of luck there is, and I would still rather he had been able to swim.