Melbourne Grammar in the 1960s

Schoolboy dissent at Hogwarts Melbourne

A tale of two headmasters

Weston Bate and Helen Penrose, Challenging Traditions: A History of Melbourne Grammar (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2002)

Part of the appeal of the Harry Potter series is its brilliant dramatisation of the hothouse world of the traditional English boarding school; it is the apotheosis of the schoolboy novel, a genre initiated by Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the mid-nineteenth century, but extended by Rowling into new realms of fantasy, politics and satire. For Americans and others to whom the public school is as strange as the biota of the oceanic depths, the stories enthral as a window onto a remote and exotic world, teeming with weird life forms and bizarre rituals; for those who experienced its unique blend of excitement, boredom, anxiety and terror, they are a nostalgic evocation of the familiar. Magic aside, the Hogwarts professors are well-known types, embodying the range of teaching styles found among the staff of any old-style public school: strict but fair (McGonagal); maintaining rigid discipline by sarcasm, ridicule and fear (Snape); eliciting hard work by enthusiasm and encouragement (Flitwick); down to earth and cheerful (Sprout); winning the pupils’ trust by sensitivity and kindness (Lupin); or their admiration by dramatic display (Mad-Eye Moody). Floating above the specifics of classes, homework, discipline and sport is the remote figure of the headmaster, whose Olympian manner inspires awe and whose interventions in the daily life of the school gain significance by their rarity.

Perhaps it was my pleasure in the Potter stories that set me thinking about my own schooldays, and thus led me to the recent (2002) history of Melbourne Grammar by Weston Bate and Helen Penrose. Naturally enough I turned first to the years that coincided with my time there, and was plunged at once into the authors’ discussion of the rise of anti-war and other dissident opinion among the boys in the late 1960s and early 70s. Among other evidence, they refer to poems published by Don McPhee and Tim Isaacson, and to an article by me on conscientious objection to conscription during the First World War, all published in The Melburnian, the official school magazine, in August 1970. This was the special edition to mark the retirement of headmaster Sir Brian Hone at the end of Second Term, and thus a fitting place for the expression of such sentiments: for contrary to the author’s suggestion that disaffected ideas were “infiltrating” the school “from the universities, especially Monash”, my recollection is that they arose naturally and organically from the liberal education provided by the school under Hone’s enlightened leadership, and particularly as a result of his encouragement of critical and independent thought. I doubt if any of the boys named above had been impressed by Monash firebrands such as Albert Langer, let alone been influenced by them; but in Form V we had all studied the Bluestone Anthology, a collection of British poetry assembled by the school, notable for including a selection of the War Poets, beginning with Rupert Brooke’s naïve idealism and concluding with the disillusion of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others I cannot remember. Nobody in our classroom at the Lodge could have forgotten the recording of Owen’s “Anthem for doomed youth” that Mr Keogh played for us – “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” – and I still recall the thrill of heartfelt concurrence when we came to his “Dulce et decorum est”:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

At sixteen and seventeen, we had only two years before facing the prospect of being conscripted for the war in Vietnam, and it was precisely the slogans mocked by Owen that were being deployed, yet again, by another generation of Old Men to justify sending us there. Did we also study Owen’s “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”? Perhaps not, but that same appalling image of the vain, obstinate old man slaying his trusting son lay heavily on our minds, and pervaded the writing that we boys produced at that time. It is little wonder that, at the height of the Vietnam War, those searing poems from an earlier conflict had such an impact, and led many of us to change our minds about the legitimacy of war, the morality of mindless patriotism, and the truth of politicians’ promises.

Exposure to ideas of both the Right and (cautiously) the Left was part of the “coercion into new experience” that was part of Hone’s educational philosophy, and this brings us to Ivor Greenwood, right-wing Attorney-General in the McMahon government. Those who remember that time may recall him as notorious for frequent references to the need to preserve laura norda against the rising tide of anti-war demonstrations, and that he was rumoured to be sympathetic to Ustashi terrorists – so much so that he discouraged ASIO from investigating their activities in Australia and even turned a blind eye while it quietly assisted. As Bate and Penrose remark, in First Term 1970 he gave a talk to a meeting of the Upper Sixth in which he deplored the Moratorium marches as a pointless nuisance and an unacceptable disruption to people’s daily business; protest was healthy, but should be confined to letters to the press or MPs, and the ballot box at election times. He did not quite repeat the comment of Victorian Premier, Henry Bolte, that the moratorium was a case of political bikies pack-raping democracy, but it was clear that Bolte’s colourful metaphor was one he would like to have coined. There was quite some dissent from this view, however, and as the Melburnian coolly reported, Greenwood’s talk was followed by a “lively and heated” discussion in which he was unable to establish a clear distinction between the Moratorium and Anzac Day marches. I have no memory of that meeting at all, but judging from a scribbled note in my schoolboy handwriting somehow preserved among my papers, it is likely that I was one of the boys who gave the Senator such a hard time. The note reads:

Do you say that a march commemorating deaths is more commendable than a march seeking to prevent deaths in the future? “Moratorium will obstruct people going about their daily business.” Yes, but so what: Anzac Day, St Patrick’s Day procession and Moomba all do the same. And what if it does? What about the Vietnamese peasants: have not their daily lives been interrupted; have they not been killed “going about their daily business”? Australia is not an especially thoughtful country – the silent majority must be condemned by their very silence. Their inebriate apathy was well expressed by Tanner. There are, however, those who do worry, and who are prepared to commit themselves in order that good may result. If other people are hindered, this is desirable, not otherwise. Without running into danger or being forced to believe in anything, they are given stimulus to think, to throw off their torpor, and ask themselves what is going on, and where they stand. How can we say “business as usual” when such terrible suffering is but a few thousand miles away?

“You are imposing your opinions on others.” Not at all: merely exhibiting them. Many who will march have few other ways of expressing their ideas. Even those who are conscripted to go to Vietnam do not have the vote. People are not compelled to take part; shops will remain open; the marchers will not seize people and force them at the point of a gun to embrace their cause. A demonstration is – as it name suggests – an exhibition, a declaration of belief, not an imposition of belief on others.

I suspect that I wrote down the questions at the meeting and filled in the argument later. Although I could usually find flaws in an argument and formulate tricky questions for a speaker, I was timid about standing up before a large group and left it to bolder spirits to do the talking. On this occasion it is quite probable that I wrote down the questions that were asked by one or more of the other dissenters. It’s not nearly in the same league as Harry confronting Dolores Umbridge with the truth about Voldemort, but the note is still evidence of a well developed capacity for advocacy and a tribute to the quality of the education its author had received.

The incidents mentioned by Bate and Penrose are only the tip of the radical iceberg drifting around the school at that time. To finance an upgraded edition of the school literary magazine Miscellany, of which I was one of the editors in 1969-70, we screened Lindsay Anderson’s movie If, a violent story of repression and rebellion at an English public school that climaxed with the rebels setting fire to the school hall on Speech Day and gunning down the headmaster. Our own headmaster raised no objection to the display of such  subversive entertainment and made the all-but-sacred space of the War Memorial Hall available for the purpose. As I recall, we charged boys 50 cents entrance and nearly filled it to capacity. Such a liberal attitude was entirely typical of Hone’s educational philosophy, which extended to tolerating criticism of his own pet ideas. One of these was the School Committee, an advisory body consisting of the prefects and some elected members which could make recommendations about matters such as dress or the award of sporting colours, and discuss a variety of harmless topics – ants in lockers, the need for more rubbish tins, changes to lost property procedures etc.

In the history of Hone’s headmastership that I wrote for the commemorative issue of the Melburnian I described the committee as “an experiment in democracy” and “an interesting attempt to give the school something of a democratic character”. These were lazy assumptions and far from the truth: as a more clued-up classmate pointed out to me later, the real purpose of the institution was to give boys experience of the formal procedures and informal workings of committees – a very useful skill in the world that most of us would soon be joining. In the less rigorously supervised space of Miscellany I published an article that mocked the powerlessness of the School Committee, describing it as reminiscent of the Roman Senate during the rule of the Emperors. Hone’s only comment when he commended us for the magazine was to remark slyly: “I see you have a few digs at me in that article”. He seemed more amused than offended.

It is unlikely that Hone’s successor, Nigel Creese, would have been so permissive. Bate and Penrose describe him as “Steady as she goes”, building on and consolidating the Hone heritage, but this was certainly not the impression he made in his first few months. In the course of my research for the commemorative history I heard it said (or heard that some people were saying) that there were still Old Boys, members of the school council and possibly even some teachers who still regarded Hone as excessively liberal and a dangerous innovator, and hoped that his retirement would give them the chance to appoint a successor who would turn the clock back and restore the good old days of his predecessor, the disciplinarian J.T. Sutcliffe, when football was king and boys were kept in their place. It is hard to know how I could have derived this impression unless from the staff members whom I interviewed for the project, so I naturally drew the conclusion that I was meant to praise the Hone regime and contrast it with the darkness and stagnation of the period before.

As it turned out, this was not at all what was wanted, and I still possess my original handwritten draft, covered with alterations, instructions and rewritten paragraphs from Mr Brooksbank, one of the semi-retired masters who had been delegated to exercise political supervision over the text.  He made it clear that there were to be no comparisons with Sutcliffe’s headmastership, that there should be more passive and fewer active constructions, that the eulogising of Sir Brian Hone was to be severely toned down, and there was absolutely to be no advice given to the new headmaster about preserving his legacy. I rewrote as instructed, reflecting that the apparent change in line must register ongoing battles among the same forces of progress and reaction that had previously been brought to my attention. Many years later I read Chester Eagle’s memoir, Play Together Dark Blue Twenty, covering the period 1946 to 1951, and rather got the impression that my original understanding had been correct: that Hone had indeed been the warm breath of the Enlightenment, blowing gently into the frozen wastes of the Ancien Regime.

This is speculation: it is just as likely that the conservatives felt that the increasingly permissive mood of the late 1960s required a firm hand in place of liberal accommodation. But whether it was fear of the future or nostalgia for a long-lost past, Creese was their man – a conservative Englishman from provincial New Zealand who would immediately be sharply at odds with the Age of Aquarius, then thought to be dawning. It was, after all, the period characterized by Donald Horne as the “Time of Hope”, when Aboriginal embassies, bra burnings, sit-ins, demos, green bans, and the local publication of Portnoy’s Complaint signaled the dissolution of the Menzies era. One of Creese’s comments after arriving in Melbourne was to the effect that Australian boys were a lot more grown up than New Zealanders – as we no doubt were in those days, even at Hogwarts Melbourne.

Symptomatic of Creese’s desire to set his stamp upon the school was his immediate attempt to reintroduce Divinity as an occasional subject in Form VI, taught by himself. This aroused great indignation in my class, for although there had always been periods when we discussed religious (usually moral) issues, Divinity had never been a formal and examined part of the Senior School curriculum in my time, except in Form III as part of Ancient History, and many of us felt we were being forced back to primary school. Since we were about to sit the grueling HSC exams we also regarded it as a criminal distraction, and the incident now reminds me of Professor Umbridge’s infantilisation of the Hogwarts students – imagine teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts theoretically from a ministry-approved textbook, and not by the actual use of spells! I recall that in one class Creese instructed us to study and write an essay on the Crucifixion. I focused on the last words of Christ on the cross (“My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?”) and, as the devout atheist I had by then become, interpreted them to mean that Jesus was under a delusion as to his divine nature and that he had indeed been ignored by the non-existent god whom he had expected to rescue him. This argument greatly annoyed Creese, who commented that better minds than mine had wrestled with the problem and had reached very different conclusions. I got my revenge by selecting as an end-of-year prize the recently published Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in which the author argued that Christianity grew out of a phallus-worshipping cult based on consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms – the beautiful Amanita muscaria, which, when it first emerges from the ground, does indeed resemble an erect, though cruelly circumcised, penis.

The event that completed the rupture between Creese and myself was the second Moratorium march in September 1970, early in Third Term and only a few weeks after the new headmaster had taken up his appointment. I and several friends had already taken part in the first Moratorium, back in May, but that was during the school holidays. Hone had referred to the event in the last assembly of First Term, but only to say that if any of us joined the march we should not be afraid to run if it looked as though trouble was brewing. He evidently expected some boys to take part and, just as evidently, felt that they were perfectly entitled to do so. The September Moratorium was in term time, and Creese had made it clear that any boy who wagged school in order to take part would be in trouble. I was in two minds about my own participation, and more concerned with preparation for the looming exams than anything else, but none of my friends was planning to take part, and I had pretty much decided follow their lead when I was approached by some of the younger boys who were determined to demonstrate. They argued that if they were alone they could be punished severely, but that if I was with them the headmaster would be presented with a more difficult situation. As a Sixth Former about to sit an external exam and leave the school for good, I had a fair degree of immunity from discipline, since I could simply walk out any time without seriously compromising my future. This meant that any punishment imposed for wagging school would have to be mild enough for me to regard it as worth accepting for the sake of remaining at the school for a couple more months. But since the penalty would have to be the same for all offenders, the same mild punishment would also have to be imposed on the boys in lower forms, meaning that my presence would protect them from the rigours they might face if they acted alone. I was impressed by this argument, and when the day arrived our small group of four or five walked coolly out the school gates as the march passed by along St Kilda Road. Although I recall the tense interview next day in the headmaster’s study – where I was struck by the enormous size of Creese’s desk, and he reprimanded me for standing with my hands in my pockets – I have no recollection at all of the punishment that was imposed, if any, rather suggesting that the strategy of the younger boys was brilliantly successful.

It would be quite unfair to present these few memories as a judgement on Creese’s headmastership as a whole. Maintaining the Hogwarts analogies, it would be tempting, though a gross exaggeration, to compare Hone with Dumbledore and Creese with High Inquisitor Umbridge, though it is fair to say that on the Dumbledore–Umbridge scale, Hone was more towards the left end and Creese towards the right. Reading Fudge’s complaints about Dumbledore’s eccentricities and Lucius Malfoy’s sinuous comments about the need to restore the school’s reputation, I was immediately reminded of the rumours about the Old Boys who wanted to bring back the good old days at Melbourne Grammar, but perhaps that is too fanciful. Bate and Penrose refer to subsequent problems with drugs and dope-smoking and associated expulsions, but that was after my time, and their book includes a photo of a very casually dressed headmaster assisting at a play rehearsal in the Quad. Creese seems to have mellowed with time, but he was nervous and unsure of himself when he first arrived, evidently keen to display his disciplinarian credentials to the Council that had appointed him, and I suspect that many boys whose schooling overlapped with both headmasters have negative memories of the new order. I am told that at the school leavers’ 40th anniversary reunion in March 2010 (that is, of boys whose final year was 1970 and who thus experienced one term under Creese), there were quite a few hostile mutterings when the alumni manager pointed out his portrait in the Memorial Hall.

Plus ca change … Chester Eagle found Hone’s more affable and relaxed style puzzling after Sutcliffe’s stern, unbending formality, and did not know what to make of him or whether to trust him. It would seem that schoolboys, whatever dissident ideas they may pick up, are such a conservative lot that those who live through the changing of the guard are likely to regard any newcomer with bafflement and suspicion.

References

Weston Bate and Helen Penrose, Challenging Traditions: A History of Melbourne Grammar (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2002)

Chester Eagle, Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble,1986)

Donald Horne, Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980)