Gough Whitlam was the first politician who made a real, immediate, difference to my life. At the time Whitlam was elected Prime Minister in 1972, I was attending a rugby-obsessed, militaristic boys school in Sydney. It was like an English Public School in the Colonies. We wore woollen suits, ties, and straw boaters. The only change that had ever been made to the schools uniform was in the 1920s when the waistcoat had been abolished. I was a scrawny, intellectual, leftist, secretly genderqueer, and very unhappy kid in this conservative and gender-fascist environment. I learned a lot about normative masculinity and strategies of self-preservation. Rugby was a compulsory sport, since as our Headmaster, Basil Jika Travers, maintained: It does a boy good to have his nose rubbed in the dirt. Travers had played international rugby for England. He had gone to Oxford on a Rhodes, and had captained Oxford and the Combined Blues teams. He had also played first-class cricket for Oxford University. The man had a toothbrush moustache. Corporal punishment was very popular: the Masters would cane the boys, and even the seventeen year old Senior House Prefects (those in the Upper Sixth) were permitted to sandshoe younger boys in a capriciously disciplinary manner. My S Form (i.e. Year Eight) Chemistry Master was a serial child-abuser who seduced and repeatedly raped one of my classmates and also got this kid addicted to heroin. The boy eventually died of a heroin overdose at the age of seventeen or eighteen. This teacher has never been punished (I now no longer know whether hes still alive.) Jika Travers was also a paranoid anti-communist who held himself personally responsible for training the generation of young Australian men who would defend Gods Own Country from the Communist Yellow Peril of Vietcong and Chinese to the north. So there was also compulsory military cadet service. Every Monday we would shed our suits and boaters and head to school dressed as little soldiers in army uniforms complete with boots, gaiters, and slouch-hats. I suffered this through two years, including two week-long tours of duty at the annual Singleton Army Base Cadet Camp, the full horrors of which I have no time to discuss here now. Then the Whitlam Government was elected, and immediately abolished military conscription in Australia. A sub-clause of this law made it illegal for schools to require mandatory military cadet service! I silently celebrated my emancipation.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 22:30:02 +0000
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