Balcony tragedies, mass arrests, sexual assaults: Good, bad, ugly of Gold Coast Schoolies
I’ve covered Schoolies for 40 years but I’ll never forget the “state-sponsored binge-drinking” instalment of 2009 which sparked headlines for all the wrong reasons, writes Greg Stolz.
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Schoolies rolls around for another year this weekend, but today’s heavily-controlled ‘rite of passage’ festival is a far cry from some of the wild old days.
As a journalist based on the Gold Coast for most of the past four decades, I’ve covered more Schoolies than I care to remember and reported on it all – from harmless teen high jinks to tragic high-rise balcony falls, drug overdoses, sexual assaults and mass arrests.
Then there was the infamous year when police played up more than the school-leavers themselves, with cops in strife for partying with female graduates – and one officer even accused of rubbing his service pistol up a teenage girl’s leg.
Schoolies began not too many years before I started as a cadet reporter on the Gold Coast Bulletin in 1982.
The first official gathering for mainly Brisbane school-leavers reportedly took place at the old Lennon’s Hotel at Broadbeach in 1976 before becoming Schoolies Week in the early 1980s and then morphing into the three-week festival it is today, attracting tens of thousands of teen revellers from across Queensland and interstate.
The Courier-Mail’s digital archives document controversy over Schoolies from as early as 1984, when Coast real estate agent Gwenda Baker told the paper that property owners had instructed her not to rent units and houses to school-leavers because of mass damage and sewerage blockages that had occurred in previous years.
“I’m sure the kids just want to let off a bit of steam, but they go to the pub, get a few drinks in them, and that’s the end,” she said.
In 1985, the-then headmaster at Brisbane’s elite Nudgee College, Brother Vince Connors, wrote to parents warning against sending their kids to Schoolies.
“One long party with no supervision after the tensions of the last school year is fraught with certain dangers,’’ he said.
“The euphoria of the occasion, linked with affluence and the availability of cars and alcohol, is a hyped up and explosive situation.”
In 1994, baton-wielding cops had to break up a wild street brawl involving rampaging schoolies, with police reinforcements sent from Brisbane to help quell the violence.
“Surfers Paradise would be better off without them (school-leavers),” Chevron Hotel manager Bob Marshall said at the time.
“We’re trying to promote the Gold Coast as a resort destination and all this hard work is being destroyed by what has become an annual street brawl.”
In 2002, I reported on a community “revolt” against Schoolies, with angry residents, holiday buildings managers, traders and politicians uniting in a call for a public inquiry into the ritual.
“International and interstate guests who have no idea what Schoolies Week is about say they’ll never come back again,’’ Surfers Paradise high-rise manager James Williams told me.
Surfers Paradise Community Association chairman John Hill said what began as a week for schoolies 20 years ago had become ``a four-week festival for hooligans and hoons’’.
The outcry came months before one of the most violent Schoolies on record, including four stabbings, the violent assault of two cops and a vandalism spree which saw a Surfers Paradise resort flooded.
It prompted then-Premier Peter Beattie, during a visit to Schoolies, to announce a review into the event while also pointing out that most celebrating graduates – including his daughter Larissa – were “having a lot of fun and are not in any danger”.
The violence led to the State Government taking over the running of Schoolies from the Gold Coast City Council in what is now known as the Safer Schoolies Response – a massive multi-agency operation, with a fenced-off “Schoolies Hub” on the beach, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars over the past two decades.
But as I reported in 2003, the first year of the response resulted in possibly the biggest scandal in Schoolies history.
Police from the Public Safety Response Team sent to the Coast to keep school-leavers safe were instead accused of preying on them.
The most damaging claim centred around a 38-year-old sergeant who allegedly plied four girls with alcohol and allowed them to fire his unloaded weapon, dress up in his uniform and breath-test themselves.
The Brisbane-based officer also allegedly took one girl into a bedroom and rubbed a gun barrel on her leg and made sexual comments.
A “terribly embarrassed” then-Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson later announced the officer had been demoted, but said the gun rubbing allegation was unsubstantiated due to a lack of evidence.
Schoolies 2009 was marred by more alcohol-fuelled violence and hooliganism, with police branding it one of the most booze-soaked festivals ever.
Officers made more than 500 arrests, prompting then-Queensland Police Union boss Ian Leavers to call for an end to Schoolies which he labelled “nothing more than a state-sponsored binge-drinking event” which diverted valuable police resources.
“I think they need to dis-encourage students from attending,” he said.
“It’s not a rite of passage – I think we’ve really got to think about the safety of the young people down there.”
But in what became a regular riposte to criticism of the festival, Schoolies Advisory Board chairman Mark Reaburn said trying to stop the school-leavers from coming to the Gold Coast would be “like trying to hold back the tide”.
“You can’t tell Gold Coast Airport to close down or the accommodation providers not to take bookings at a quiet time of the year,” he said.
High-rise balcony-hopping has been a long standing issue at Schoolies, but two festivals I covered were rocked by tragic falls that police said were not the result of misadventure.
The first was in 2012 when 17-year-old Brisbane school-leaver Isabelle Colman, daughter of the late The Courier-Mail sports writer Mike Colman, fell to her death from the 26th floor of Chevron Renaissance building in Surfers.
The other, in 2019, involved Melbourne schoolie Charlie Scott, 18, who died when he fell from the Hilton Hotel tower after a chilling Snapchat post in which he simply wrote: “Goodbye”.
The same year, three Victorian men were charged over the alleged pack rape and illegal filming of a teenager at Schoolies. It was part of a long and sorry history of sexual assaults at Schoolies.
“It’s a dangerous mix,” Bond University criminologist Dr Terry Goldsworthy said at the time. “You have so many young people, all hyped up after finishing school. Throw in alcohol and drugs and it’s kind of almost a culture of promiscuous behaviour.”
But for hundreds of thousands of teenagers over the years, Schoolies has overwhelmingly been a positive experience.
My own two now well and truly adult sons returned with nothing but happy memories with their mates, a bit of a hangover and, in one case, a bad haircut and a new girlfriend.
Police gave last year’s Schoolies cohort an “A+” after near record-low arrests and relatively few emergency centre admissions.
Superintendent Peter Miles said police were “ecstatic” with the results which he put down to changing attitudes and behaviour among young people.
“There’s a lot of education (around safety) going on and they’re a different breed – they’re drinking their lattes and going out for runs in the morning,” he said.
Time will tell whether the Schoolies Class of ‘24 also gets a gold star.
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