Brett Linton Pettersen, 28, pleaded guilty to possessing a collection of more than 1100 videos and images of child pornography, the majority of which depicted children under 10 years old.

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison with a nine-month non-parole period for one charge of possessing and one charge of producing child pornography.

The production charge related to Pettersen copying nude pictures of a 14-year-old Bendigo girl and her school friends that he stole from a computer he was fixing while working as an IT technician in 2007.

Pettersen was repairing the computer when he found and copied a folder full of explicit pictures the computer owner’s daughter had taken of herself and friends in various states of undress.

Detectives later uncovered the files on Pettersen’s computer in a raid on his parents’ White Hills home, where he lives.

Members of the Victorian sexual crimes squad said the collection of 1171 movies and images were the most graphic they’d seen, with some films showing children as young as a few months old.

Pettersen said he had been downloading the collection of child pornography for a number of years and that he looked at the images and movies every week.

Defence lawyer Martine Marich said her client had been on a “slippery slope”, looking at material online that was increasingly graphic and intended to shock.

The Bendigo County Court was told that despite breaching the trust of his employer by copying the pictures of the 14-year-old girl from a client’s computer, Pettersen had continued to be employed at Forrest Computing in Epsom. 

In her sentencing Judge Wendy Wilmoth said the offending deserved a penalty that reflected the seriousness of the crime.

Ms Wilmoth said she was able to apply some leniency because of Pettersen’s lack of criminal history and her belief that he had no “paedophilic tendencies”.