• Harry Holland, aka Colin Nugent. File photo

SELF-DESCRIBED Mt Lawley paedophile Harry Holland is appealing a child pornography conviction, arguing his Rockspider magazines have social history value.

Police found three issues of the magazine in Holland’s house in 2010.

Also known as both Colin Nugent and Emu Nugent, Holland has owned the magazines since the mid-1980s.

While the publications have no images of children being abused, they include stories describing sex with boys aged between 10 and 16 and illustrations of naked boys.

Under WA law, written material is included in the definition of child pornography, which is material that depicts a child engaging in sex or in a sexual context “in a way likely to offend a reasonable person”.

Convicted

Holland was last year convicted of possessing child pornography and was fined $3000.

He is appealing to the supreme court, saying the magazines were published during the gay liberation movement era and were designed to promote discussion of paedophile issues such as the age of consent (21 for males at the time), treatment, and negotiating legal issues.

He says the publications have social history value and the law provides a defence for material “of recognised literary, artistic or scientific merit” and “that the act to which the charge relates is justified as being for the public good”.

Holland’s attempt at last year’s trial to present three expert witnesses attesting to the magazines’ scientific value was denied by the presiding judge.

This week, prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo told the Supreme Court the stories in the magazines “are child pornography without any scientific merit whatsoever”.

“It’s not as though they are theories or have some medical value to them, they are simply stories that are child pornography.”

She said the State would seek to have the magazines destroyed.

Justices Graeme Murphy, Robert Mazza and Wayne Martin are considering whether to allow Holland’s appeal.

————————-

TERRY LEAHY from the University of Newcastle, whose PhD is in child-adult sexual relationships, says the magazines “are very likely the only copies of this publication remaining from that time and as such are a significant part of Australia’s historical and social record”. “The period covered by these journals was unique. The sexual revolution as it was then called…was being claimed for paedophilia. Not just in Australia but internationally, paedophiles linked their own problems to the repression of children’s sexuality and supported the rights of children to sexual expression…”.

STEVEN ANGELIDES from La Trobe University said Rockspider was “part of the social and political sexual liberation movement that swept right across western societies in the 1970s and early 1980s”. He said Rockspider “is an historical artefact of a very different social and political period”. “I recognise that copies of the magazine Rockspider have literary and scientific merit and that it is in the public interest, and for the public good, that Rockspider be available to be studied. To destroy such historical records would make important scholarly work impossible.”

GRAHAM WILLETT from the University of Melbourne said, “however shocking some might find this material, it is of inestimable importance to historians, sociologists and all those interested in understanding our society and its past in all its diversity”. Of the naked drawings, Dr Willett said, “clearly no child was harmed or exploited in the production of these images”. “While it is possible that some readers may find some of the stories and images sexually titillating in the context of the magazine as a whole and in the context of the historical and political period, this aspect is simply insignificant to the assessment of the value of the magazines.”

by DAVID BELL