Australian author Craig Silvey has been jailed for seven months after pleading guilty to child exploitation offences. The 44-year-old, best known for the novel Jasper Jones, appeared in court on Monday.
Silvey was charged in January with distributing and possessing child exploitation material after police raided his Fremantle home and seized electronic devices containing numerous category one images and videos.
The court heard that Silvey had also used the username “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy” during an online conversation with another user on a pornography website.
He described himself as a “Fremantle guy” before suggesting they continue the conversation on Signal or Session, encrypted messaging applications. In later messages, he said he was “extremely open-minded and obsessed with taboos” and expressed a preference for boys aged five-plus, adding that “eight was the perfect age”.
Silvey also made a series of sexualised comments involving children and mothers, and wrote that he was “drooling” over an explicit image depicting a naked man and boy together.
Judge Hayley Cormann described the offending as “extremely serious and disturbing”.
“This offending involves children and it is destructive and it is devastating,” she said.
Silvey’s 2009 coming-of-age novel Jasper Jones is regarded as a modern Australian classic and was adapted for film and the stage. He has also written Rhubarb, Honeybee and the children’s novel Runt.
He has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, while Honeybee won the Australian Indie Book Award in 2021.
Publishers Allen & Unwin and Fremantle Press stopped promoting his books after he was charged, and most of his titles were removed from reading lists across Australia.
Silvey’s books were also permanently removed from the school curriculum. The Education Department said there was “absolutely no place in our school system for works authored by someone who is admitted to such serious crimes”.
