School of Mine

I'm generally quite proud of my school, despite the fact that it is unlikely to be proud of me. But this fact is neither here nor there - I'm proud to have been a part of it, proud of the outstanding education they delivered to us, and immensely proud of the school's broader ethos, which unlike so many others, has evidently carried over into the later lives of its alumni, even in my case, where the uptake of its values was delayed until far too late in my life.

I was not an easy child. Underhanded, sneaky, dishonest, vindictive, occasionally violent, and sometimes flat out criminal. I remember my first detention was handed out in my first week of year seven, for lighting a fire in a bin. I'm pretty sure the only reason they held onto me for as long as they did was my academic ability. But this is not to say that the school was without its own problems. There was a distinct issue with bullying, in which I both participated and was a victim of. Elitism and arrogance are the besetting sins of all schools like mine, and there was quite a bit of our student culture which would now be condemned as toxic.

And it's not as if my memories of school are un-mixedly happy. Failures on the part of staff and other students to understand certain aspects of life which I felt to be obvious, and critical failures on my part in the area of character, made for a generally troubled and turbulent school life. Every time a form master appeared at a classroom door, there would be a chorus of, "That's for you, Lake," - and just like in Greek tragedy, the chorus was generally unerringly accurate.

For all that, however, I still think it was a sterling institution. Whenever I speak to our alumni, a fondness comes over their faces when we talk about the old school. This is in stark contrast to the boys who went to other schools in our cluster - the Knox and Trinity and Riverview boys, who wax contemptuous about their school culture, faculty, impacts on their subsequent lives. For the vast majority of the old Aloysians I speak to, the days of our schooling exist as a pure and bright cul de sac of time-softened recollection. A place where values mattered, and where the old connections are still upheld to an extent I have never encountered anywhere else apart from the military.

Tutor Group, with Idiot circled in red

So it was with pardonable complacence that I heard the news of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse. My own personal memory could only conjure up a handful of incidents, disturbing enough in themselves, but relatively innocuous. A form master who once disciplined a student by strapping his bare backside - the strap was an ubiquitous punishment in my day, and I personally was strapped an average of twice a week, on the hands. A dubious relationship between one master and a student who, when it comes down to it, weren't that dissimilar in age. Dark rumours of faculty sauntering through the showers insisting that boys should be comfortable being naked in front of each other, but no corresponding action. Just the normal idiocy and weakness one expects in an institution, and which I'd always assumed was rigorously policed to prevent harm.

So it was with a mixture of quite unexpected emotions that I heard, through an old boys group, of the sentencing of two of our faculty for serious sexual offences. One was worse than the other, and both appeared to have taken place outside of our school at affiliated Jesuit institutions, but even this extremely peripheral view of the cancer of paederasty is disturbing enough. I remember the men in question. One was a Brother, actually wider than he was tall, so fat was he, who had a grating nasal voice and a habit of petty tyranny combined with the somewhat ridiculous habit of falling asleep at his desk in front of the class. It didn't take us long to figure out that leaving silently to pursue our own leisure was, in fact, the perfect crime. The other one I principally remember for a scathing thirty minute critique, mostly justified, of my character and morals, delivered at volume into my face in a small room. It's interesting to think of this in the context of the thousands of pornographic images of children he was subsequently convicted of possessing.

A picture of me, clearly thrilled to be in Concert Band, and unaware of the camera.

And that's the thing - the corrosion of my memory of the school has left me furious. Sure, I wasn't exactly its proudest son, but how dare these maleficent petty tyrants taint all of our recollections with their own sordid evil. How dare they. Not only have they done incalculable harm to their victims, for whom I cannot express enough sympathy, but they have also pissed on the childhood memories of thousands upon thousands of boys. Their gross betrayal of the credo that they themselves were the foremost in promoting is entirely unacceptable, and coupled with this is the chilling inference, given the delay in exposure and conviction, of the steps the school and church authorities both took and signally failed to take.

There has to be something positive to take from this, and to my mind it's a simple lesson, applicable across all areas of society, the state, and at every level. Never wink at evil to protect any institution, however great. This is not the first mass exposure of predatory behaviour in large and well respected institutions (though it might be the biggest), but it's down to all of us - every single one of us - to make it the last. If we're to learn anything from this, we must, I think, learn that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to stand.