In January last year the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse began a wide-ranging public investigation into the Church of England Boys Society, the Anglican Church’s equivalent of the Boy Scouts. On the fifth day of those hearings, in a courtroom of the Commonwealth Law Courts building in Hobart, a 63-year-old man known only as BYA entered the witness box and made disturbing allegations about a pedophile ring in the upper reaches of the South Australian CEBS.
BYA recalled that in 1967, as a shy and religiously inclined 15-year-old, he became leader of his local CEBS group in inner-suburban Adelaide. At about that time, he said, the chief commissioner of CEBS in South Australia, Bob Brandenburg, began sexually abusing him during sleepovers at Brandenburg’s house and on expeditions to look for campsites.
