By Jordan Baker
Warning: Graphic content
For decades, the Salisbury Bar was the toxic heart of St Paul’s College. It was where schoolboy tribalism and entitlement mixed with free-flowing booze to fuel a culture of hazing, lechery and sexual violence.
“They can’t say no with a c--- in their mouth,” read a comment once hand-scrawled on the bar’s wall. “Any hole is the goal,” read another. Women felt pressured into sex, particularly in the mattress-lined “bone room” nearby. Cloth covered the CCTV cameras. Cleaners would complain about the amount of vomit they had to mop up the next day.
A serious bullying incident has again shone a light on St Paul’s College at Sydney University.Credit: Janie Barrett
The other Sydney University colleges had their scandals, but the august, all-male, Anglican St Paul’s was the one that resisted accountability. When the other colleges opened their doors to a cultural audit in 2016, the nation’s oldest university college, with its sandstone halls, academic gowns and prime ministerial alumni, refused to participate.
It took a post on its Facebook page a year later comparing having sex with a woman to harpooning a whale – “happy slaying!” it read – and a furious castigation from then-Sydney University vice chancellor Michael Spence about the college’s “deep contempt for women”, for St Paul’s to confront the need to change.
Since that epiphany, St Paul’s has worked hard on its culture. In six years, it has cleaned out the old leadership, opened the college to women, and introduced a new wing for sober-minded post-graduates. It has recruited students from outside the old bastions of money and privilege, and, symbolically, has overhauled the Salisbury, which is now a cafe by day and a professionally run bar (that closes at the modest time of 10.30 pm) by night.
‘The thing that I learned is that you can never take your hands off the steering wheel, otherwise the car just hurtles out of control.’
Former Wesley College master David Russell
But when news broke of a serious bullying incident this week, in which six students were expelled and 21 suspended when a “mock trial” about a boy’s tendency to spend more time with his girlfriend than his mates turned nasty – it ended with the boy being gagged with a sex toy – the college’s leadership was reminded of a warning once carried in these pages.
“[University colleges] generate and perpetuate a form of tribalism,” former Wesley College master David Russell told this masthead after one of many exposes of residential college sexual assault scandals. “The thing that I learned is that you can never take your hands off the steering wheel, otherwise the car just hurtles out of control.”
With its decision to call on former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick to investigate its culture in 2017, St Paul’s lifted the lid on an ugly past.
One famous incident dates to 1977, when a group of St Paul’s students held an awards ceremony in which a man who raped a woman was applauded for committing “the animal act of the year”. That assault would have been one of many in an era in which hazing and sexual predation were normalised not only within residential colleges, but across the community.
The dining hall at St Paul’s, the nation’s oldest university college.Credit: Janie Barrett
A Herald investigation published 15 years ago showed that even then, after this behaviour became unacceptable elsewhere, it persisted within the walls of Sydney University’s residences. Rape was part of the college culture, the story said, and usually went unreported by its scared, scarred victims. In one incident, about 30 drunk, naked men were alleged to have broken into a college room and surrounded a young woman.
St Paul’s students made the story’s reporter, Ruth Pollard, the villain in their end-of-year review. They hissed, booed and threw objects when she appeared.
Even as late as 2016-17, the Broderick review revealed, hazing and lechery were deeply embedded in the St Paul’s culture. Students would eat sheep’s hearts during initiations. They would invite new women – often first-year students – to the “bone room” for a booze and sex party on a floor covered in mattresses (that “custom” was stopped in 2016).
Women told Broderick about the alcohol-sodden hook-up culture of the student-run Salisbury bar and said it was a hotbed of harassment. They felt pressured into sex.
St Paul’s College in 1977.Credit: Fairfax Media
Students still hissed at freshmen until the practice was banned in 2018, and orientation week (now re-named Welcome Week at Sydney University) was marked by auctions of freshmen to older students, who abandoned them in remote locations, beat them with thongs, or told them to push a mattress through the quadrangle while older boys tackled them.
Anzac Day would be marked with student platoons skolling cask wine mixed with raw eggs.
The report said a key cause of the college’s cultural problems was a lack of diversity. Almost two-thirds of undergraduate residents were from a few, high-fee private boys’ schools, and the report cited research that men who joined fraternities “possess higher adherence to male role norms prior to joining fraternities and join in, in an effort to be validated by like-minded peers”.
The reforms prompted by the 2018 report fundamentally changed St Paul’s. The pre-Broderick cohort has long since graduated, taking with them lingering loyalty to those old traditions. In annual student intakes, female students make up 50 per cent. The next senior student (the equivalent of college captain) will be a woman. The blokey gym includes cardio and yoga rooms. Staff and students are trained in consent.
This latest scandal was, says a St Paul’s insider, an incident rather than a culture.
Still, it’s a stark reminder to Australia’s residential colleges of how quickly that proverbial car, full of people new to adulthood, can hurtle out of control.
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