Larvatus Prodeo

“Cyber-bullying� attracts our attention for two reasons. The first is its evident association with “cyberspace�, a new technological milieu that our society is still adjusting to. The second is something it shares with “traditional bullying�: it’s a social behaviour of children which reflect back to adults their own behaviour in a way that adults find uncongenial because it has been stripped of the rationalisations that give it social sanction.

Let’s pay a quick visit to “Greenfields High�, the State high school I attended in the 1960s. Like all Victorian State government schools of that era, it was constructed to a standard design by the Public Works Department.

The social milieu of State High schools in that era also followed a standard design; for sporting competition within the school, for instance, there were four “houses�, named after worthy figures of Australian history – Bourke, Wills, Leichhardt and Lassiter at Greenfields – each with its own house colour – blue, red, green or that dingy yellow they call “gold�. And there was an education department standard strap, corporal punishment for the administration of, in the headmaster’s office. Near the school offices, there were honour boards, where previous students who had excelled in sporting or academic achievement – but mainly sport – were listed with the names of their houses. The school was too recently established to have an honour board for its war dead but it did have a cadet company.

The model for that milieu will be obvious to anyone who has read any of the Billy Bunter books of Frank Richards or, more respectably, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Greenfields High was an attempt to recreate the English public school in suburban Australia. Through various rituals and observances – such as the morning uniform inspection – we kids were supposed to be instilled with pride in ourselves, our appearance and our school. This would engender something called “school spirit�. The visible signs of school spirit were a spruce turn-out at morning inspection and, of course, enthusiastic cries of “Go Greenfields� from the boundary whenever classes were suspended so that we could turn out to watch the school footie team play.

In fact, all that emphasis on regulation haircuts, polished shoes (and regulation hemlines in the case of the girls) probably did little except convert a few pre-dispositions to obsessive compulsive disorder, and other mental illnesses, into the full-blown thing. The much vaunted “school spirit� often just failed to materialise – one year it got so bad that at the annual outing to Olympic Park the principal was forced to issue a ukase confining all spectators to the grandstand where you will show your support for your school. None of that bunking off to a quiet corner to read the latest Pan Book of Horror Stories away from the covetous glance and itchy fingers of the teaching staff that had made the annual trip to Olympic Park tolerable for the non-competitors made such a bloody poor showing for the school in previous years.

The thing I find most striking as I’ve worked through this little portrait of the place is the sheer absurdity of it all. And the sheer absurdity of wanting it back as a model of best educational practice. After thirty odd years the Headmaster – the very authoritative and authoritarian headmaster of the school – looks sadly diminished. A humourless, not very clever man who coasted into his plum job on seniority, operating a pre-fabricated copy of a tradition he didn’t understand in a time when it was coming under challenge. So personally attached to the place that he lived in house backing onto the schoolgrounds; each morning he would start the day by opening the gate in his back fence and walking the short distance from his backyard to his office.

Was there bullying in this little ersatz Eton down under? Of course there was – it was endemic. It started at the top, with that education department standard strap and every kid’s knowledge that serious offences against the cult of school spirit might earn “the cuts�. It propagated down through and various members of the teaching staff who saw their jobs for the most part as child-tamers – not educators. The sort of bullying you get when you place a stupid, rather incompetent person who doesn’t understand the concept of responsibility in a position of authority (I’ve recorded a couple of more memorable examples of such teachers at TBP). Outside class, in the schoolyard with its own long-standing traditions – such as the code of silence – it flourished, out of sight and out of mind.

No one was innocent – not even yours truly. But we’ll gloss over that for the time being, if you don’t mind. Like Lear, I prefer to see myself as someone more sinned against than sinning.

The bullying at Greenfields High was mostly of the traditional form, which is confined to school hours and the daily journeys between home and school. One particular female bully was notorious for her after school bullying. That was the Senior Mistress, who drove her Volkswagen beetle around the streets after school, alert for the sight of a girl who had taken off her hat, or hiked her skirt a few inches too high above the knee. Anyone she caught flouting the school’s code of seemly modesty for young women would be sent back to the school, in tears, for a good dressing down and an hours detention. Meanwhile, anyone with a mind to could get one of the smaller kids in some, secret out of sight place for a quick stand-over job. As long as it wasn’t seen it didn’t matter.

If you were really determined to make some kid’s life a misery, in the interests of cementing a budding friendship, all you needed was unsupervised access to a telephone, as I once learnt when I got an anonymous call at home from a couple of little shits who’d selected me as their weakie of the week. So much for the idea that it’s the intrusion into home life that makes cyber-bullying new and special. The intrusion’s been available since the invention of the telephone. What’s changed, since the 1960s, is that more people have telephones and telephone use has become much cheaper and much more extensive. The cyber-bully is working in a tradition established by the nuisance telephone caller and the poison-pen letter writer. The few new possibilities offered by cyberspace are those offered by blogs and various other on-line forums; the ability to publish complete bullshit in a public forum where it might, conceivably, attract the fickle attention of the wider public.

Postscript: that looks like another convenient resting point to me, even though I haven’t got word one of Part III down (but the ideas are there). So we’ll leave it at that now, with absolutely no promises that said Part III will ever appear.