My Dear Jonathan,
Our teachers were not only steatopygous, as you so rightly point out, they were also achondroplastic, strabismic, mega dactylic, rachitic, and acutely Orwellian. There were cases of chronic anencephaly reported in the Australasian Journal of Jocosity . One English teacher was so nepheligenous, following his lunch-time visit to an adjacent hostelry, that he was unable accurately to throw chalk, and registered a dangerous 3.7 giganephrons on the school’s nephelorometer, which, as you’ll recall, was nailed to the wall outside Fin Cook’s office.
We, on the other hand, were brave and pure-hearted young Neanderthals, and I clearly recall that at least one of us at that time - was it you? - evolved a brow-ridge to keep his hair out of his eyes.
As you will remember, STHS studentry was classified, like those Kow Swamp corpses, according to the thickness of its skulls, on a continuum ranging from Gracile to Robust. Career counselling was intense and prophetic. Those who could walk into a door without injury were destined for a career in commerce, those who fell stunned were guided towards the social sciences, those who bounced off became teachers. Those who, instead, walked through the door, advanced to medicine, science, law, and of course, talk-back radio.
Every word on the STHS 1969 website is truer than true. Each anecdote has been steeped in the vats of time and rumour, a curative liquor as potent as tan-bark and bile. Only the essential truth could possibly remain. My people have checked out every fact, each jot, nay, e'en the last tittle. Gold.
It is my considered opinion (I've been considering it for the past fourteen seconds) that we STHS lads were privileged to enjoy our education balanced upon what one might call the cusp of two cultures. Our staff were gasping the last gulps of a Kiplingesque, British Public School ethos: rigorous scholarship, 'play up, and play the game', boys sternly addressed by their family name ('You're a disgrace to the school, Gard, you and everyone like you'), beatings, Boomalacka, sarcasm, prefects, the Empire, cold showers, and Rugby Blues for the chosen few. Some of teachers were still schoolboys of the old stamp themselves. Albeit all this culture was heavily Australian-accented.
It was our responsibility, as the putative young intellectual élite of the Australian community, to smuggle the Sixties into that smoky old Bexley warren, to detonate a petard beneath the pedagogical fundament, (an explosive composed of a somewhat meretricious liberalism, methinks). Nonetheless, its advent alarmed not a few of our older instructors, and I believe that their angry reaction was chiefly against the arid scepticism of that Age of Aquarius philosophy. Our questioning and disobedience of their tenets seemed to be exercised for the sake of disruption alone, rather than any quest for amelioration, despite what the lyrics of a hundred pop-songs claimed. It’s not so ironic that their rugged old Aussie egalitarianism sat so uncomfortably with our égalité. It may be that we were ignorant, or even oblivious of, the necessary ingredient of responsibility.
All of which may go to explain why, thirty years later, myself, and one or two others, still need to poke fun at our teachers. The balance of power still needs redressing. Either that, or a moiety of us never quite grew up.
Thank you for your amusing, thoughtful and encouraging letter.
Best wishes,
Stephen Gard
