Matthew Abraham: Remember the days of the old school yard

It’s been 50 years since I left the unforgiving asphalt yard of Christian Brothers College, but I still remember the sense of relief that it was all over, writes Matthew Abraham.

It’s been 50 years this month since the class of ’71 left the unforgiving asphalt yard of Christian Brother’s College for the last time.

I’ve forgotten a lot about my Catholic school years, and tried to forget even more, but vividly remember two things about that last day.

On my way out of the Wakefield St college, I detoured past the now-demolished handball courts to say goodbye to Mr Mabarrack, our tolerant and decent English teacher. When I revealed my cunning plan to become a journalist, he tactfully suggested it might be wise to be a little less ambitious on the jobs front. Fair call.

Then I headed out the small western side gate that emptied onto Frome St. And that’s the other thing I remember, standing on the footpath in the blinding afternoon sun – just how good it felt to know I’d never have to step foot in that place again.

Last week I had a lunch with two fellow survivors of 1971’s Year 12, or Matriculation as it was then – Kevin Naughton and Viano Jaksa.

Kevin is a journalist, broadcaster, political adviser and winner of the 1992 and 1994 World Yarn Spinning Championships. Viano is a gifted, creative educator, a wizard on all things Apple and Mac and an Alfa Romeo tragic.

So it wasn’t a huge reunion, just the three of us nursing light beers and free memories. Kevin also remembers his last day of school clearly – maybe everybody does – and an overwhelming sense of relief it was over. It’s a terrible thing to feel that about your school years, but there it is.

A Mark Knight cartoon pointing out how schools have changed since Matthew Abraham’s day.

While the Josephite nuns in my convent primary school treated boys harshly, the Christian Brothers turned physical cruelty into an art form. Beatings with specially-made heavy leather straps were a normal part of my school life, from Grade Seven right through secondary school.

In 1980, a controversy flared over new guidelines being worked up by the Education Department on corporal punishment in South Australian schools.

As a journalist with The Advertiser, I thought it’d be fun to write an entertaining opinion piece on my memories of corporal punishment, suggesting the state government could have avoided all the fuss by consulting me before bringing in the guidelines.

I detailed the cane with the split end, the layered leather “bombs”, the yard rule, the “well-aimed kick in the pants” and the Year Seven lay teacher who allowed us to rack up lashings on the hand on “credit”, tallied in a book, to be used if we later misbehaved.

“I was belted, cuffed or booted almost every day of my secondary school life – and I was one of the good guys,” I wrote.

The cartoon which accompanied Matthew Abraham’s column in 1980.

It came as a genuine surprise that the article generated shock and letters of denial, but also amazement from hard-bitten fellow journos. It was a penny-dropping moment – the first time I realised that such institutionalised cruelty wasn’t normal, or funny. Punishment by holy men and women wasn’t meant to replace love.

The article carried a cartoon by the paper’s fine illustrator Peter von Czarnecki, depicting a young boy, socks down, wincing, about to be caned by a monk with bulging eyes, Rosary beads hanging from the knotted rope around his waist. It’s as if he’d been there. That really shook me and still does.

Thank God, it’s nothing like that now. I accept that not all boys of my crop at CBC experienced this, that many have happy memories of their school days and not all Brothers were violent. Catholic schools today occupy a proud and important place in our community.

But a friend once observed that Catholics of our generation are the Vietnam veterans of our faith, and this is true. Many are walking wounded. And we now know sexual abuse was the Agent Orange of our asphalt jungles.

While still at school, Kevin courageously blew the whistle on one chronic sex offender, Brother Lawrence Murphy, after witnessing him abusing another boy. Murphy was our Latin teacher and gym master, a violent man who died before facing court on child abuse charges.

This month, thousands of teenagers will walk out of their schoolyards for the last time.

If anyone says school days are the best days of your life, don’t believe them. Shake the schoolyard dust from your sandals, let the sunshine in and go out into the big bad world and make a happy life for yourselves.