By Noel Towell and Caroline Schelle
It’s been 21 years since Renato Manias began his time at Ballarat and Queens Grammar School, aged just 13, but he hasn’t forgotten the welcome he and his classmates received from the older boys in the boarding house.
“They woke us at two in the morning, and they got us into the common room,” Manias recalled this week.
“They had a big projector in there playing a pornographic movie, and they made us watch for about 20 minutes”.
Former Ballarat Grammar student Renato Manias with schoolmates in 2005.
“After that, they made everyone stand up, and any of the kids that were … excited, got bashed.”
It was a taste of things to come for Manias and his fellow junior boarders at Ballarat Grammar’s Dart House boarding facility, where he says routine beating, hazings and humiliation of junior boys by seniors was no secret among the school community.
“It was a very brutal five years in the boarding house, Dart House,” he said.
But when Manias, now in his thirties and a successful Melbourne financial adviser, read revelations in The Age this week that 10 senior boarders had been sent home while allegations of “strapping” against junior boys were investigated, the claims had a grimly familiar ring.
This week’s reports also had a triggering effect on another old Grammarian, Michael Short, a former journalist at The Age, who wrote of having substances applied to his genitals by older boys at Ballarat Grammar when he too, aged just 13, boarded there in the 1970s.
Further back in the school’s past, an ex-student who did not wish to be named told of the tough culture at Ballarat Grammar in the 1950s and 1960s when he was a student there.
The man recalls being hit by teachers with a rattan cane, a punishment that was both legal and routinely used in schools at the time.
The cane was sometimes used, the former student said, by long-serving headmaster GFJ “Jack” Dart, after whom the boarding house at the centre of the current allegations is named.
Ironically, it was Dart – an educational innovator awarded the Order of the British Empire for his contribution to the profession and who remains a revered figure at Ballarat Grammar – who abolished the adversarial “house” system at the school, before it was reinstated after his retirement in the 1970s.
But there were unofficial retributions, too, administered by older boys.
“I was ‘toothpasted’,” the older former student reported.
“As well I was ‘nuggeted’ – was held down and had my testicles blackened with ‘Nugget’ shoe polish.”
Long-serving Ballarat Grammar headmaster G. F. J. “Jack” Dart, pictured with school prefects and probationers.
Another former student, also speaking on condition of anonymity, spoke of ritual humiliation and assaults against him and his fellow “strappers” – as year 7s to year 10s were called by the senior boys – in the late ’80s and early ’90s at the school’s other boys’ boarding unit, Wigan House.
“They had this thing called the ‘inter dominion’,” the man recalled.
“They’d wake you up in the middle of the night and drag you out of bed. It was the middle of winter, undies on your head. All the young kids would have to run naked around the courtyard, up around the girls’ boarding house, and back up through the corridors.
“You’d get whacked as you were going through the corridors, and they’d have aerosols with the flames trying to get you with those. Pretty brutal. As a year 9, I was terrified.”
Ocean Grove mother Donna, who did not want her surname used, told The Age of calling police after her son, then aged 13, was burned so badly with an aerosol can by four boys at Grammar in 2018 the child was left permanently scarred.
“The [boys] followed him into the toilets, turned the light off, locked him into the cubicle, taunting him, standing over the top, and … holding him down [before burning him],” she said.
The mother said her son had been bullied for months before it escalated to him being burnt.
What he went through was “horrendous”, Donna said, adding the response from the school was “shocking”.
“The way teachers deal with bullying, it’s almost as though it’s acceptable,” she said.
More recently, a boy was removed from Grammar in 2023 after a series of incidents culminated in the child suffering a third-degree burn, inflicted by an older boy with a spoon that had been heated in boiling water.
The alleged victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he was dragged out of bed at 3am and beaten by older students wearing balaclavas. On another occasion, he said, he was pulled from his bed again late at night and forced to run around an oval in his underwear, drink sour milk and eat rotten eggs.
Although the school contested the boy’s family’s belief that the incident was part of a broader culture of “strapping”, Victoria Police confirmed in the days after the fresh allegations emerged that some of the claims also dated back to 2023.
The school declined to respond this week to questions from The Age about the accounts gathered from former students.
Rather, Ballarat Grammar’s Travis Polkinghorne, who as director of development is responsible for “furthering the strategic goals of the school in relation to fundraising, sponsorship, bequests and establishing a culture of philanthropy within the community” – according to LinkedIn – wrote to alumni on Friday seeking to reassure them.
“I want to take this opportunity to provide you with some information following the recent media coverage regarding the situation in our boarding community,” he wrote in an email, seen by The Age.
“To ensure a thorough and independent investigation of the allegations and our processes, the school has engaged an external investigator to examine these matters in detail.”
Polkinghorne said the investigation was “not only assessing specific concerns” but also looking at broader cultural and systemic factors.
“We will update you at the conclusion of the investigation,” he said.
Principal Michael Heath said last week that Grammar would thoroughly investigate the latest “horrendous” and “confronting” allegations and had drafted in respected interstate boys’ education expert Brad Fenner to oversee the response.
Ballarat Grammar is far from unique among Victoria’s 28 private and independent boarding schools to face challenges with hazing, bullying and other “student on student” abuse.
Leading law firm Arnold Thomas & Becker, which is representing dozens of former students of other schools around the state who allege they were subjected to abuse by their schoolmates, said the issue was not isolated to Ballarat Grammar.
“In our investigations, we have identified that some schools have a reputation of bullying and intimidation amongst students,” senior lawyer David Thomas said.
“We’ve run a trial against another prestigious private school where it was alleged that there was an existing culture of bullying by year 12 students of younger students that was not addressed by the school.
“Our investigation relating to another grammar school revealed that there were initiations for new students at one of the boarding lodgings.”
The rituals detailed by Thomas are not dissimilar to those alleged at Ballarat: late-night beatings, humiliations and younger students forced to run naked around school grounds, suggesting common themes running through boarding school hazing practices.
“There exists a duty of care by the school to supervise and care for the safety of all students,” the lawyer said.
“Experiencing abuse at school at the hand of other students can have far-reaching impacts on an individual.”
“As a year 9, I was terrified.”
Former Ballarat Grammar student
But for most of the state’s 2676 school boarders, staying at school is the “best experience of their lives”, Australian Boarding Schools Association chief executive Richard Stokes said.
While the behaviour alleged at Ballarat Grammar was “horrific”, Stokes said, it was far removed from the experience of the vast majority of modern boarders.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on there, but that sort of behaviour is something that existed a long, long time ago in boarding, and is not part of the current boarding practice at all,” Stokes said.
The alleged incidents at Ballarat Grammar showed selfish behaviour, which seemed to be on the rise, Stokes said.
“It’s sad because boarding schools are incredibly supportive and wonderful, positive communities and kids can get so much out of it.”
Professor Steven Roberts, head of Monash University’s School of Education, Culture and Society, warned that “punishment behaviours” like those alleged at Ballarat were linked to a resurgence in notions among young people that were thought to have been consigned to the past.
“The punishment behaviours are absolutely connected to the return to ... modes of masculinity associated with dominance and hierarchy,” Roberts said.
“To dish it out and to withstand the punishment are ‘manhood acts’ that are demanded of boys and men.”
Over time, practices like hazing, punishment and other “rites of passage” become embedded in a school’s culture and each cohort perpetuates them, the academic said.
“We seem to be living through a period where harsher and more dangerous hazing is having a revival.”
The professor pointed to an uptick in “intensified hazing rituals” as students returned to school in a post-lockdown era.
“[That] could indicate that the loss of normalised social experiences in that period has played a role,” he said.
There was also an explosion of social-media influences in the “manosphere” who have normalised gender expectations around gender and toughness, he said.
“[Things] that are associated with dishing out and being on the receiving end of problematic hazing rituals.”
It was disproportionately all-male or male-dominated groups bound up with cultures of extreme and harmful hazings, the professor said.
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