Tim Reeves plots the course of a watershed crime and its aftermath

2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, known as Ian. He moved to Adelaide for a position in the Adelaide University Law School six weeks before his body was retrieved from the muddy waters of the River Torrens. The riverbank, which runs behind the university, was host to Beat Number One at the time of Duncan’s death. Tim Reeves is the foremost expert on Duncan’s murder, which is significant to histories of queer life and law reform. What began as an honours thesis became the basis of a powerful oratorio commissioned for the 2022 Adelaide Festival – Watershed – and this book – The Death of Dr Duncan. The oratorio’s title signals the extraordinary impact of Duncan’s murder, which ultimately led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia, the first Australian state to make this move and the first jurisdiction in the English-speaking world to eliminate a distinction in criminal law between homosexuals and heterosexuals, including the age of consent. That Duncan’s death should be so firmly linked to this law reform makes it especially striking that no one has been made criminally accountable for causing it. However, Reeves makes clear that at least three of those responsible have been, at times, familiar names to police, the Adelaide queer community and readers of major SA newspapers. But they remain free. In the absence of sufficient evidence for convictions, Reeves’ book is a testament to painstaking work with every lead, published and unpublished accounts, and interviews with those who helped tease out the events leading up to and reverberating from Duncan’s death. On the night of 10 May 1972, members of the SA Police Force’s vice-squad left the King’s Head Hotel on King William Road and headed to Beat Number One to rough up its visitors, throwing three men into the river. One victim, Roger James, broke his ankle but managed to get out of the river and escape further violence. James became the key witness in the case of the drowning of their next victim, Duncan, whose body was discovered the following day. Reeves argues that the social status of academics and the involvement of Duncan’s new colleagues in promoting investigations were crucial in influencing community attitudes and, in turn, legal history. As Reeves pointed out in a recorded conversation with David Marr (Adelaide Writer’s Festival Podcast, Episode 22), if Duncan had been a welder from the northern suburbs, fewer people would have cared.