I was recently complaining to a friend about his freezing bathroom. He talked about the need to ‘toughen up’, and the influence of ‘character-building’ experiences he remembered from years of boarding school’s draughty, winter ablution facilities.
I had a rush of memories from the early ’60s about my own experiences as a young boarder at Corio. The summer morning shower routine, entailing three jumps under the cold shower, only beaten by the winter regime that added two jumps under a hot shower, after the cold jumps! I could not remember the addition of any soap, or shampoo, so am left wondering on the overall issue of hygiene!
But the memory got me thinking about those times. A big question continues to be why on earth my parents, both confirmed socialists, sent their two boys to one of the most prestigious Australian schools, the epicentre of elitist conservatism? Over the years, my brother and I have both thought long on this issue.
I remember being trundled into the car, with my brother because Dad wanted to talk with us. I was 11, my brother about to turn 13 and we drove down the road somewhere. Dad said that Mum’s migraine headaches were becoming worse and that our behaviour was exacerbating the attacks! Sitting in the back seat, I immediately resolved to stop fighting with John and to do the dishes more often!
Dad continued, and advised that the local high school, of which he was the Chair of its Council, was going through a bleak period and that in his opinion would not provide us with a satisfactory education! Dad had consulted family friend Alan Marshall, who advised Scotch College, or if we could afford it, Geelong Grammar would provide the very best education. As a consequence, Dad told us that we would start in February 1961! My brother would go into 2nd Form, and me into 1st Form.
Years later, an elder sister talked about Dad having a nervous breakdown or severe depression coinciding with the time of our departure for boarding school. Financially, the fees must have been met from the continuing windfall of the subdivision and sale of our land at Rosebud!
So off we went. My memory suggests that my elder brother seemed to take to the changes without too many apparent hassles. I know his presence was a comfort, but I still found the transition difficult. From the intimacy of the family surrounds – Mum, my sisters, the family mealtimes, from the coeducational norms of Rosebud Primary into the mostly male-only environment, a large, impersonal dining hall and dormitory, sleeping with fifteen or twenty other boys!
Matron, a middle-aged woman, presumably with some medical background, was our female focus. She tended cuts and bruises, the bedridden, and often provided a friendly shoulder. As a chronic asthmatic, she also oversaw a lot of my incapacities and admissions to the school’s medical centre.
My feelings of abandonment slowly dissipated as new friendships were formed, routines absorbed, and a new life began. Mum and Dad were allowed to visit towards the end of that first term, delayed officially to enable “…the new-boys to settle in!”
Classes do not burden my memories, save the suggestion that I drop Latin, after achieving 2% at a mid-term exam. I do have a lingering disappointment early in that first term. The school’s choirmaster was interviewing all new boys. Singing was something that I was very good at and enjoyed. But when asked if I had ever sung in a choir, and I answered in the negative, “…Next…” signalled my dispatch back to class! My failure to remonstrate has stayed with me, as a wotif-moment, over the decades since. The selected choristers received extensive training, as sopranos and, as subsequent tenors! I missed all of that training, and it wasn’t until 6th Form that I eventually insisted on singing for the choirmaster and finally took my place with the tenors, in the stalls!
It must have been in my second year when my contemporaries started to talk about being confirmed! Ever eager to conform, I thought I should follow the mob, albeit unsure of any implications! I joined evening classes and was proceeding along the road to godliness, when my journey was interrupted by my mother’s admission that I hadn’t had the necessary precursor, of baptism! Not to be put off, I badgered Mum and Dad, and they arrived at school with one of our neighbours from Rosebud, who swore to do the necessary duties as a godparent, thirty minutes before my confirmation!
But there were some bizarre rules, regulations, expectations, and obligations to be observed. Group-think served, in part to ensure observance but misdemeanours, of a more serious nature, had the cane, mostly delivered across your underweared, or bared bum, working towards compliance.
Sixty years on and I still make my bed in the morning! I fold or hang clothes in the wardrobe and prefer to eat meals at the dining table. Whatever the hangover, I feel better with those few habits observed. But there were other bizarre anomalies remembered that still make me shake my head.
There was a small oak tree, reportedly germinated and grown from an acorn retrieved at Gallipoli. It sat in the middle of the road in front of the clock tower. Junior boys, on their way to the chapel, were required to detour, to walk to the right-hand side of this tree. I think you were also expected to salute, as you passed! I was told it was a mark of respect to the fallen. Oddly, this observance was not required of senior students?
There was the rule that forbad walking around with your hands in your pockets. Corio was not a tropical idyll, and those wintery days could be punishing. Efforts to keep hands warm, if caught, meant that the pockets of your pants – short pants for Junior School, throughout the year, another physically endowing custom, were sewn up! Many, myself included, developed seasonal chilblains.
Then there was the nude swimming. Lessons at the pool were without modest frippery! The first few times caused a great deal of awkwardness and embarrassment. Years later, researching this practice suggests it was prevalent, right through until the 1970s where Tom Brown’s boys and swimming came together. There were no doors on the toilet cubicles, either. Another opportunity for moral guidance at Corio?
In junior school, at the beginning of each year (it might have been at each term) we had to parade, wearing only a dressing gown, in front of the matron. When you were at the head of the queue, you opened your dressing gown, matron grabbed your balls, and with a suitably thoughtful facial expression, she asked you to cough! I never heard of any outcomes from this examination. It apparently confirmed whether or not testicular-descent had occurred, despite the reality that this medical phenomenon is happening in utero! A decade later, I saw the movie If, and I recognised some possible explanations for the practice!
I remember hearing of one young progressive who, upon heading the queue, presented his tumescent member. A mortified matron had the owner of the tumescence taken forthwith to the housemaster, for caning!
My first caning was for failing to present satisfactory progress on a social studies assignment. As an eleven-year-old, I had never been hit before, and the prospect, the terror, waiting outside the housemaster’s door was a torment. He had installed a nifty little system of green and red reflectors on the door. He was able to illuminate and signal from behind his closed door, adding to the overall terror. I seem to remember pissing myself, and his study floor, as that first thwack landed on my bum!
Then there were the banana custard episodes! These were regular outbreaks of ‘the shits’. We linked it to the banana custard desserts. Imagine three boarding houses in junior school, each with maybe fifty boys. Each house had about five toilets upstairs and five, downstairs. The mayhem almost always arrived in the middle of the night. There were urgent, and extremely critical dashes for the loos, pleas, as some of the afflicted refused to vacate their cubicles! Ah yes, definitely character-building episodes.
Another test was the late winter, early spring walk across to the gym and swimming pool complex. From Junior School, it meant a walk underneath an avenue of trees that separated the school from Limeburners Bay. It was a prime nesting ground for magpies, and they enjoyed the opportunity to swoop on any and all intruders. I don’t remember ever getting pecked, but the near misses kept everyone on their toes!
While still in the vicinity of the dining room, one of those inevitable rules was that you weren’t allowed to leave until you had finished your meal. Swede was a regular inclusion on your plate. Nobody, but nobody liked swede, except one kid from England! If you paid him a penny, you could swipe your swede across to him, and he would eat it! I suppose the extra cash went into the sweet shop, up the road.
That shop was the high point of the week for many of us. We had a shillings’ pocket money each week, and on Saturday mornings, we were allowed to make the mile-long walk up the road. The decisions, the delicious anticipation – honey bears, clinkers, licorice blocks or straps, jubes, smarties. That shilling could be spun out, with careful selection and consideration and the walk back along Biddlecomb Avenue, sugared mouthfuls, talk of the decisions, the pros and cons of a particular choice, ensured that Saturday mornings were always eagerly anticipated.
The walk to the shops passed quite close to the Shell refinery. One scientifically-minded student had researched gunpowder manufacture in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He found that mixing sulphur and charcoal would provide a reasonable equivalent. So we sometimes detoured our milk bar return to collect a little sulphur that was spilling out from the Refinery’s pile, onto the roadway. The charcoal was readily available from the groundsmen’s burning piles.
At the back of the junior school ovals, there were some evil-looking bull ant nests! Somebody had secured matches, and when a sufficient quantity of the mixture went into the nest, Mt Vesuvius erupted at Corio! Boys could be scientifically-curious!
They could also be mean little bastards. Bullying, name-calling, gossiping and priggish behaviour were almost acceptable. Relatively harmless pranks, short-sheeting somebody’s bed was a trivial example. There was the ‘cruscification’ where arms would be strapped into the verandah’s blinds, while somebody hauled on the ropes! Then there was nuggeting and the royal flush. The nuggeting of someone’s genitals with boot polish or someone upended into a freshly used toilet did happen, although it was never clear to me what if anything had triggered the ‘sporting event’.
Dorm Raids were a diversion that generally involved a lot of clandestine planning and group execution. At an appointed hour, the gang would sneak into another dormitory, and on a signal, two boys per bed would tip mattress and contents onto the floor. The number of beds upended and the speedy return to our dorms, before the prefects descended determined our success.
I experienced quite a bit of name-calling, some connected to my Uncle, at the time being reported in the national press for his loud condemnation of the US presence in Vietnam, and of Australia’s involvement. I was labelled a communist, a traitor, sometimes sent to ‘Coventry’ and generally wore the same wash as the papers were reporting of him. I was proud of his stance, but nonetheless, the labelling hurt.
It was ironic when, six or seven years later, as conscription to fill Australia’s Vietnamese contingents started to impact on some of those same young men, I began to meet them at the anti-war rallies!
I generally enjoyed my years at Corio and especially the year spent in the mountains adjacent to Mount Buller. I grew from a sickly, skinny asthmatic through, and into a bloke who could run a cross country quite well, could read, write and reason and maintain a lifetime enjoyment of Australia’s remote bush.
In long past absentia, thank you to my parents, for their brave choice and inevitable sacrifice to service those fees. Thanks also, to that school. Its commitment to rounded educational outcomes, despite its quite anachronistic embodiment of another time, enabled me to come through and into adulthood feeling somewhat worthwhile