A SYDNEY journalist who lived in Newcastle as a child - and who returned to the city as an adult to look deeply into the clerical abuse that shocked the nation at the Royal Commission - has lost his life to prostate cancer on Christmas Eve at the age of 57.
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David Brearley began his working life as a copy boy for the Daily Telegraph and spent much of his career working for The Australian, where his output included a weekend column, The Last Word.
But as friends and family attested yesterday, the issue that drove him most in life was the scandal of clerical child sexual abuse, and particularly the way it impacted on the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese.
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His sister Kate Brearley and his wife Simone Henderson-Smart said David had been working for years on a book on the subject, which included a lot of material that he had gathered in personal interviews with one of the diocese's most notorious paedophile priests, Vince Ryan.
"It really affected him," Ms Henderson-Smart said yesterday. "It was the way it had affected a lot of people who he knew growing up in Newcastle. He saw his friends beaten and abused and he saw how damaged some of them had become.
"It was a testament to his journalistic ability that he wanted to understand the whole scenario. He wasn't trying to condemn or to destroy, it was more that he wanted to understand how this could happen."
Simone said the book was finished earlier this year and family and some of his journalist friends were determined to see it published posthumously.
The Brearley family moved to Newcastle from Stockport in the northwest of England in 1970.
A young David enrolled in primary school at St Joseph's Merewether at The Junction. He left just before primary school ended to be a boarder at St Joseph's Hunters Hill, another Catholic school that would later be shown to have harboured paedophiles. The family stayed in Newcastle, with father Sam working as a computer engineer at BHP and mother Mary a high-school teacher.
Sister Kate said he was "someone I was very proud of".
"David's family has been overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and grief from David's friends and colleagues," Ms Brearley said.
David Brearley was at school with Gerard McDonald, whose abuse as a 10-year-old by Ryan was detailed at the Royal Commission and profiled in the ABC series Revelation.
"Whenever he came up here he would stay at my place and we would sit up all night talking about what went on at school," Mr McDonald said yesterday. "He was a gentle giant, I love him and I'm happy he's not in pain any more."
Mr McDonald said he was at Newcastle Court House when he heard his name called out.
"I hadn't seen him since I was about 12, when he was a little Pommy kid with glasses," Mr McDonald said.
The co-founder of the support group Clergy Abused Network, Robert O'Toole, said Brearley had helped the organisation and taken part in its meetings, especially in its earlier days.
"David contacted me when Vincent Ryan was serving his first sentence [ending in 2010]," Mr O'Toole said. Ryan would be charged and convicted again in 2016 and given a suspended sentence. He was again convicted in May 2019 and sentenced to three years and three months with a non-parole period of 14 months, and released in July 2020.
"I knew a bit about him at the time, being a Newcastle lad, and he wanted to tap into what we were doing. He knew some of Ryan's victims - including Gerard - and then met others along the way.
"I've read a few snippets of what he had written for the book, and I think he was focused on Ryan in particular."
High-profile ABC journalist Louise Milligan, whose awards include a 2017 Walkley for her George Pell book, Cardinal, said she met Brearley when she was a cadet reporter at The Australian.
"We kept in touch particularly in relation to the Catholic abuse issue," Milligan said yesterday.
"He was a pretty exceptional man - although not without his demons - a lovely writer and a deep thinker with a strong sense of empathy and kindness. He was always kind to me and would check in, particularly when the stakes were high.
"The last thing he said to me, when he was dying, was: 'Soldier on, Dear Louise.'
Brearley lived in the Sydney suburb of Newtown, and he was at Chris O'Brien Lifehouse cancer centre when he died. His funeral will be private but Ms Henderson-Smart said anyone wishing to remember him could donate to the Clergy Abused Network (CAN).
CAN's website is here
Its email is clergyabusednetwork@gmail.com
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