AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Old boys of Knox Grammar, like me, will always be marked by how close we came to the abuse there
Adam Brereton
@adambrereton
Tuesday 10 March 2015
The abuse at Knox Grammar is not ancient history. Not for me. Craig Treloar, Adrian Nisbett and Barrie Stewart were all teachers at the school when I started school there, in year five, in 1999. It wasn’t until 2009 that they were arrested after decades of child abuse, three years after I graduated.
We all remember those teachers and now, with the royal commission, we remember the students, too. To see their faces contort in the witness box is a reminder that being an “Old Knox Grammarian” – whether or not you paid the old boys’ association’s membership fee – is to be forever marked by a closeness to abuse. As the inquiry into Knox started to gear up, I sent a text to my Mum: “Just so it’s clear, I was never abused.” Having to send that message depleted the last of my goodwill about my schooldays.
We never really owned our experiences at Knox, anyway, I’ve come to feel. Our academic success belonged to the outstanding teachers, whose brilliance we still feel bound to pay tribute to, even as we wonder just how much they knew. Knox’s famous musicals manufactured Hugh Jackman, as far as the school is concerned. The hundreds-strong cadet unit – to which my mother and stepfather, both serving Australian Defence Force members, gave their time and expertise – was rightly a source of pride for Knox, but was often seen merely as a component of the school’s leadership program. The school celebrated its foresight in having kept it alive after Gough Whitlam ceased funding military training for students. Whitlam was himself a former student (see, Knox produces leaders!) but the school rarely mentions how little time he spent there.
In an analogue of the school’s Uniting Church faith, it was if the student could achieve nothing of virtue without the irresistible grace of the institution. Similarly, the student body was shot through with a sense of predestination – the recurring names in the yearbooks, decade after decade, and the smiles in the old boys’ publications – that is hard to understand from the outside. My family was part of that. I would regularly appear in the sons and grandsons of old boys photos, although it always seemed to me an accident, rather than fate that sent me there; I started at Knox a few years after my father’s death, when my mother remarried and we moved to Sydney.
The central question the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has been driving at is the right one: whether the legendary former headmaster of the school, Ian Paterson, who led the place from 1969 until 1998, put the school’s reputation ahead of the wellbeing of abused students. The correct question, posed wrongly, because Knox Grammar during Paterson’s tenure was an extension of the man’s ego. The school’s reputation was not something external that could be defended or prioritised.
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