I went to a posh, private, single-sex boarding school for four years in the nineteen sixties. It was my choice: I had decided that it would be a good idea and got myself a scholarship to the said school. The first two years I loved; the second two, I loathed. This was partly about my growing up, and in particular, discovering girls. But it was also something much more profound, that I, from the distance of 50 odd years, can barely believe. I somehow came to see that the whole ethos of the place – Launceston Grammar, by the way, but it could have been Hutchins, Kings, Shore, St Peter’s; any posh Anglican boarding school in Australia at the time – I came to see it as completely elitist, hierarchical and privileged. And I came to despise it. Then I got out.
I had always been resistant to arbitrary rules. In my first term at the school I was beaten so often that I had what was known as “Parker’s purple posterior”, but it didn’t modify my behaviour, and I certainly didn’t suffer anything like PTSD. I just accepted that if you misbehaved, you got punished. I must have weighed up things and worked out what was worth the risk, or really, the beating.
I always said “thank you” after a caning – I suppose it was part bravado and partly that I hoped it would annoy them, and I never, ever cried – never. Even when I had to squeeze my eyes shut to avoid it – I never let the enemy know they may have had a win.
And then there were detentions. In my first two years at Launceston Grammar, I think I was allowed out of school maybe two weekends a term – I was always on detention, sweeping up leaves or cleaning the swimming pool on Sunday afternoons. The strange thing is that I wasn’t an outsider at Grammar; not at all. I was usually first or second in my class academically, and always captain of my year’s cricket team, and I had plenty of friends.
As I went on at the school, and boys I knew became house prefects (the police of the boarders), I realised that once into the system, resistors became tyrants. I realised that a little power is a dangerous thing. Perhaps that should be better put as great power in a small place is intoxicating and really, really dangerous. I used to call these boys “little Hitlers”.
And I resisted them too. Unlike English boarding schools, our prefects were not allowed to cane boys, so they resorted to other means of control. I once had to stand under a cold shower for about 40 minutes when the temperature in the air was not much above freezing point. The shower head was one on of those like you have at the beach – about a foot wide, and aimed directly down. For a while, the jets of water coming down on your head felt like nails being driven in, but after a while you just went, gratefully, numb.
This was a boy of 16, just getting his first taste of power, trying to get an uppity little prick of 14 under control by physical punishment. By any definition, this was torture. And, by the way, the crime for which I was tortured (there’s really no other word for it) was something like “talking after lights out”. This, at a time when flagrant and flamboyant sexual activity between boys, some of which I suspected was coercive (and illegal at the time) was rampant in the boarding house and in my dormitory. And very nasty bullying – but no one cared about that – that was the culture.
Having riled the house prefects, I moved on to the more senior prefects.
At a cadet camp at Brighton, I was sitting on the step of my hut, in a down-time – not trying to pick a fight – I think I was shining my boots; you did have to keep your boots shiny, even when you were going out on “manoeuvres” where shininess would be silly. But no-one ever accused the Australian Army of intelligence – except for the retreat from Gallipoli, and possibly a couple of Monash’s actions. A cadet officer started talking to me and before long, we had a crowd around us and a really serious argument going on.
It was, for the cadet officer (who went on to volunteer and die in Vietnam) existential. I was trying to point out that all this was just really silly, and not real training for, say, Vietnam. Our rifles were WWI vintage, the tins of food we were fed, WWII vintage and the tactics taught were not much more advanced. But more deeply, the whole thing was a farce – as the school was.
It was built on a fantasy of Imperial, colonialist domination and a ludicrous idea of “bearing the white man’s burden”. One (English) geography teacher I had, actually proposed (taught) that intelligent people only evolved in the temperate zones, because hot weather was bad for thinking. Seriously. This was eugenics long after it had been disproved.
That argument on the step of my hut at Brighton Army Camp was one when I absolutely stood against hierarchy and arbitrary power. The result of the argument was an order from the cadet office to double-march around the parade ground for two hours with his rifle above his head. I had committed no actual offence, but you can’t have people questioning the hierarchy, can you? I duly had to do that double-march punishment detail, but not for two hours – someone took pity on me.
Again, I didn’t resent my treatment, and it didn’t modify my behaviour.
I then moved on to resist, question and, I suppose, undermine my teachers’ authority. One weird occasion was when I challenged a particularly flamboyant and brilliant but sadistic teacher. He was known as “Basher” because he bent over boys with their heads up against a bench in his class-room and then beat them with a heavy pencil-case on their arse so hard that their heads smashed against the bench. I realise that this sounds like something out of a dystopian fantasy, but it is absolutely true. He was not above slamming desk-lids on boys’ heads, and I think, one day, he broke one on a boy’s head. This was aggravated assault in any language, but no-one did anything.
One day, Basher (he was charming when he wasn’t belting someone) was carrying on about how some boys on a geography excursion had found a stream and named it “in honour of that eminent British geographer, Clarkson Creek”. I piped up and said, “Shouldn’t they have called it Basher Brook, sir?” He didn’t touch me. As I said, weird.
At Launceston Grammar they went on about Leadership with a capital L (and all the other letters capitalised for that matter). Even as a 14 and 15-year-old, I could pick up the bullshit. Leadership, to this crew, was the privilege of the monied to control the actions of the less fortunate. And to control them completely. It really is, looking back, astonishing to me how bad the ethos of the place was, but also how strong my reaction to it was at such a young age. Especially as I had hardly had a deprived upbringing.
But it had been an upbringing where the ideas of service and something like noblesse oblige were implanted. We were not rich and hardly aristocrats (although dad was knighted in the 1960s), but we did have a decent income – my father was an orthopaedic surgeon. My mother worked (volunteered, to use the modern phrase) on several committees for things like the Red Cross and orphanages, as did her friends who were married to professional men – this was expected. In other words, not really noblesse oblige, but you are privileged so you must give back, you must contribute to society.
The unspoken thought – perhaps even the unthought thought – here is that if you don’t give back, we won’t have a cohesive society. Most middle-class people understood that we were all one people; we were a society that relied on everyone working together, and that looking after one another was necessary.
My father, who was the only orthopaedic surgeon in Tasmania for decades. He operated on everyone, not just people who could afford his fees. He had no fees, he had a salary. The government paid him to operate on anyone who needed his services. He had little time to see “private patients”, but when one came to the house, it was a red-letter day. The dog (a particularly violently territorial springer spaniel) had to be locked in the laundry and I had to stay in my room and not play music or the radio. The is that that my father’s salary, whilst adequate, was not high, and these few “private patients” were important to the family income. At a time when his (less distinguished) colleagues in Sydney were driving Rolls-Royces, we got around in a baby Austin; later a demo model Holden; later again a demo model Valiant.
Which I eventually inherited. The AP6. What a ripper!
When my father retired from operating, he took a job in rehabilitation and started a whole new career, and he worked till he was in his early 80s. And in his late life, he confided to me that all his salary had gone on maintaining his family. The only assets he left were his house and some inherited shares. A man that was considered by his peers to be a pre-eminent surgeon had, despite a far from extravagant life-style, no savings from his actual paid work.
I am not trying to hark back to a “golden age” when we were all in harmony, but I have to point out some differences between then and now. And the fundamental one is income distribution – from that flows most of the ills of modern Australian society.
When my father was working as an orthopaedic surgeon in the 1950s and ‘60s, his income was probably about 20 times the “basic” wage. This was the wage employers could not pay less than. The concept had been established early in the 20th century in the International Harvester case. That established that a worker should be paid enough to maintain a household of a man, his wife and two children in “modest comfort”. Sounds sexist now, I know, but try putting such a concept to the “Fair Work” Commission today, and think how far you’d get.
I have no idea what an orthopaedic surgeon earns now, but I do know that someone like Allan Joyce (CEO of Qantas) earns more than 1,000 times what a baggage handler, for instance, gets; even if they get 40 hours a week. Yet the man who ran the largest enterprise ever, in the history of the world – Eisenhower, the overlord of “Overlord”, the invasion of Europe in 1944-45 – was paid about 30 times the salary of a GI. But he pulled it off with – and this is the point – millions of people working towards that goal.
One of the most ludicrous things ever said about human relations was said by Margaret Thatcher. “There is no such thing as society.” John Donne, by contrast, wrote, “No man is an island, sufficient unto himself.”
That is what we need to realise in this increasingly unequal society. When the pandemic hit, for just a moment, we saw how important check-out chicks, cleaners and other low-paid people were. But, I fear, we’re already forgetting..
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
