Just to be absolutely clear, smashing convicted paedophile and child rapist Dennis Ferguson over the head with a medicine ball is not the ideal way to respond to his presence in a city gymnasium.
That said, Ferguson’s presence in a city gymnasium is not an ideal situation either.
Especially when he just sits there, dressed in a business suit, not even exercising at all, but outside at the pool where he can gaze at dozens of primary school kids who are learning to swim. Especially when he times his visits to coincide with the swimming lessons, either the primary school kids in the mornings, or the high school students when he visits in the afternoon.
Especially when the parents who take their kids to the gym are totally unaware of his presence there, because pool management has tied itself in legalistic knots over the fact that Ferguson, now a free individual, has just as much right to be there as the next man.
The key flaw with this line of argument is that the next man probably has never kidnapped and raped two children, and spent the remainder of his miserable existence on the run from civilisation, popping up at an ever-increasing series of locales across Australia where he strikes perfectly understandable fear into every normal member of that community.
I use the word normal quite deliberately because there is nothing remotely normal about Ferguson at all.
As The Daily Telegraph reveals today, Ferguson has now popped up again, this time as a member of the Cook and Phillip Pool just on Hyde Park in the city.
He’s been a member for several months.
The troubled gym and pool staff, under instructions from management not to alert parents to Ferguson’s presence there, are so rattled by the whole situation that they’re telling them on the quiet to make sure they accompany their kids to the change rooms and toilets at all times.
But with his distinctive appearance and his manic behaviour, which runs to an assortment of nervous tics which make him the paedophile straight out of central casting, Ferguson has been readily identified by several parents.
On one occasion he was attacked with something called a kettle ball – which is a medicine ball with a handle on it used for exercising – by a bloke in the gym who recognised him from his many appearances on the news and took the law into his own hands.
You could never condone what his assailant did. It’s a similar kind of vigilantism to what we saw last year when Ferguson turned up in the solid suburban suburb of Ryde, and was met with the menacing implied violence of a neighbour going to the trouble of making a wooden coffin for Ferguson and leaving it on his porch, so the sex offender could make good on his vow that the only way he would ever leave Ryde was in a box.
But the big problem with the never-ending Ferguson case is this – it’s the law which puts the law-abiding and decent and civilised in the totally unjustifiable position of having to modify their behaviour, to fit in with the behaviour of Dennis Ferguson.
It’s the kind of situation which has been labelled an “extreme rights” position where the entire weight of the law ends up being directed towards accommodating the needs of someone who is totally alien from civil society.
When the Sydney Morning Herald obtained a photograph of Ferguson happily laying out of his towel on an eastern suburbs beach, it was as if Ferguson was saying: here I am, world, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
There’s the basis of a good symposium here on civil liberties and the vexed question of rehabilitation, perhaps an hour’s worth of thoughtful chat on Radio National about how we don’t want to succumb to the ugliness of the mob in denying Ferguson his right to free movement now that he has paid his dues for his crimes.
It strikes me as a load of pseudo-intellectual wank. If Dennis Ferguson unfurled his towel next to me and the kids at the beach I reckon I would go bananas. And if I was teaching my young son how to swim at the Cook and Phillip Pool and saw him sitting next to me in the canteen wearing a business suit and munching on a sandwich as he watched the kids swim, I’d probably go bananas too.
The person who alerted us to this new story about Ferguson’s frequent visits to Cook and Phillip Pool is not even close to being a vigilante-style rabble rouser. She’s a smart professional woman with a couple of young kids, one of whom was having a swimming lesson at the pool last month when she recognised Ferguson sitting there in the café, listening to his iPod and wearing a black beanie as he watched the kids swim.
“I feel a bit conflicted over the whole thing because I certainly don’t want to be seen as being part of the mob, but it really was a jaw-dropping moment sitting there in that café and suddenly realising ‘Oh, hello, there’s Dennis Ferguson’,” the Mum told me when we first discussed the story.
“It was just creepy and bizarre to see him in that setting, with all the kids running around in their budgie smugglers.”
“It’s hard to imagine a less appropriate setting for the man.”
The legal retort to this kind of sentiment is that Dennis Ferguson has to live somewhere, has to exercise somewhere, has to relax somewhere.
The popular retort to that is – yeah, and so do we.
It’s not up to parents to work out a solution to this recurring problem. That’s why none is offered here. It’s a straight expression of popular sentiment that this bloke should not be allowed within coo-ee of young children – and a forlorn hope that government, the courts, and corrections can stop fobbing off legitimate mainstream concern as hysteria, and finally do something to stop these creeps popping up in the middle of our generally happy lives.
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