Gross moral turpitude: The Orr case reconsidered

by Cassandra Pybus

Acclaimed historian Cassandra Pybus’s compelling re-examination of the scandal involving Sydney Sparks Orr, dismissed from his position as Chair of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania in 1955 after allegedly seducing one of his female students.

First published in 1993, Gross Moral Turpitude won the Colin Roderick Award that same year and its themes remain current today both within and outside university environments.

Cassandra Pybus is an award-winning biographer, historian and novelist. Her most recent book is Truganini (2020), winner of the National Biography Award in 2021, and her award-winning biography The Devil and James McAuley (1999) is also part of the Untapped Collection.

238 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Cassandra Pybus is ARC Professorial Fellow in the School of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of many books including Community of Thieves and The Devil and James McAuley, winner of the 2000 Adelaide Festival Award for non-fiction.

Reviews

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The Orr Case reconsidered’

Cassandra Pybus won the 1993 Colin Roderick Award for this book. The award is presented annually by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at Queensland's James Cook University for ‘the best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life’.

The Orr case was Australia’s cause celebre of the 1950s and 1960s. Did Professor Sydney Sparkes Orr seduce his eighteen-year-old University of Tasmania student as she claimed, or was he framed by a sinister cabal who disliked his politics as he and his supporters claimed?

Was this a case of sexual exploitation, or an example of McCarthyism?

I found a copy of this book in a second-hand bookshop a few years ago and have only just read it. I vaguely remember this case being mentioned in the late 1960s and early 1970s during my teenage years in Tasmania. Some people thought Orr was guilty, others thought he was set up but none of us really knew anything about the case.

Now that I’ve read the book, I think the case is more complex than I had initially thought. While I do think that Orr was guilty of sexual exploitation, I do not think that the University of Tasmania handled the matter well. Orr spent much of the remainder of his life fighting against perceived injustice and the student involved no doubt regretted agreeing to her father making a formal complaint.

I hope that any similar case would be handled differently these days.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pybus paints Orr -a professor at my local university who had a sexual relationship with this teenage student in the 1950s and became an academic cause célèbre after he was sacked - as duplicitous, dimwitted and disliked. She follows the various players in this case and examines their motivations. This is unflattering for most involved: Orr is accused of taking on self-involved martyrdom as a second career and lying about his qualifications; the academic’s union who were mostly concerned with arguing that tenure should prevent dismissal, regardless of behaviour, but certainly didn’t want to see Orr redeployed to their own mainland institutions; and the student union who placed a ban on the student who made the complaint, preventing her from completing her studies.

As a side note, it was also disheartening to see Orr heavily supported by my great-uncle’s newspaper Nation.

Gross Moral Turpitude made an interesting companion to Love and Virtue, set 70 odd years apart (with The First Stone another, and far more annoying, view on similar topics).

[Kylie Moppert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the academic style this is a highly readable book about an extraordinary series of events. Pybus has researched thoroughly and provides a convincing version of this sad chapter of Australia's history. It is a tragic story. I'm grateful for Pybus for 'setting the record straight'. A blight on our past.
Well referenced and indexed, helps if, like me, you want to check what and when things happened.