40 years ago, I was abused at Ballarat Grammar. I know first-hand that change is possible

My testicles received far more toothpaste – Macleans stung the most – than did my teeth during my first week as a boarder at Ballarat and Queens Anglican Grammar School, aged 13, back in 1976.

It was called toothpasting. A group of senior students pinned down a junior boy and rubbed a load of toothpaste into his balls and surrounds. It stung mightily and immediately.

Ballarat Grammar principal Adam Heath said at least 10 current senior students had a “perverse sense of justice”.Credit: Joe Armao

You were held down for a count of 60, upon which you were released, usually screaming, to the shower. There, the shower mats were elevated by a sharp plastic lattice on the downside. These had been upturned by the older boys ahead of time, and you were forced to run on the spot on the cutting edges while desperately trying to rinse your busted balls in frigid water.

Now Ballarat Grammar School is in the news over allegations of student-on-student abuse in a boys’ boarding house. The reports of the past week suggest the continuation of an insidious culture that was already entrenched when I was there more than 40 years ago.

Allegations include a punishment ring of senior boarders hitting younger children with straps, in line with a twisted tradition. The school’s principal, Adam Heath, has said the students had a “perverse sense of justice”; a belief they had the right to “administer consequences” on students believed to be as young as 13.

As journalist Noel Towell revealed, allegations of a broad culture of abuse towards junior students from senior boys were raised with the school by the family of one former student two years ago. The parents of the then 12-year-old boy told The Age, “it’s not just being belted with a strap, it’s a culture of, ‘If you don’t do what I say, because you’re junior to me, you will suffer an outcome. There will be physical recriminations’.”

The school says these latest allegations are “horrendous and confronting”. They are. And it is fair to believe they go to the school’s core.

When I was a student, “strappings” didn’t end in the shower block. Back at the boarding house after the toothpasting terror, misfortune might have it that you were hung out of an upper-storey window by your ankles, as I observed occur. Or you would be blindfolded in a circle of older boys and punched whenever you mistook the utterer of some word or another. Or allocated as the “slave” to a senior boy.

In my case, there was abuse at the hands of two priests who have since died, and physical assault by two teachers.

At my 40th school reunion, I stood in the chapel behind the altar and weighed suing the school.

In recent months, I unexpectedly settled in mediation a three-year Supreme Court case against Ballarat Grammar School for negligence. In part, my case reflected the very culture that has caused such disastrous headlines and coverage for the school over the past week.

The reason the school can use this moment, shocking but not surprising, is because its headmaster, Adam Heath genuinely appears to understand as a teacher, a father and a human being that the long-held status quo is not an option.

During my mediation, Heath led a legal and financial team of five or six people, all of whom I could look in the eye as I told my story. A few months after that, he travelled to Melbourne where we met and spoke for an hour. He knows, I am certain, the gravity of the effects of abuse.

Police are investigating the latest allegations and a review is under way. Heath says the school is providing support to the affected students and families “as we seek to understand the choices that have led to these behaviours”. What choice in a culture of conformity?

Assuming Heath truly cares and is a man of his word, he needs the full support of the school community to change this culture. Parents need to intervene, as has been the case here, and so does the school’s faculty. They need to get behind change or be damned for damaging the innocent.

Still, it is worrying to see the school’s lawyers contest the allegations of the former 12-year-old student, and propose the family sign a non-disclosure agreement in settling the matter, as recently as March 2023.

It ought to abandon that position. The school today has an opportunity to genuinely break from this inglorious past and fix an entrenched culture of cowardice and bullying.

To not take that chance would be an egregious error, for it has shown me that there can be restorative justice, up to a point. Recompense can’t reinstate, but it can help people heal a bit. The damage of abuse can be mitigated, but is permanent. And cleaning it up might take some balls.

Support is available via Lifeline 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636.

Michael Short is a Melbourne writer and former chief editorial writer for The Age. His podcast, Good People Fix Bad Shit, launches later this year.