St John’s College, University of Sydney

Story by Warrigal Mirriyuula

St John’s College is sinking in sin.

Sydney University is Australia’s first and therefore oldest university, having been founded in 1850. In the years that followed various residential colleges were established, usually under the auspices of religious organisations and committees of the faithful, to provide term accommodation for the men, and for a long time they were overwhelmingly men, attending the University.

St Paul’s 1856  St John’s 1858 St Andrew’s 1867 Women’s College 1894 Wesley 1917 Sancta Sophia 1925

These colleges today are fond of their traditions and like colleges the world over there are many traditions that have survived from the very earliest days of college life, and each year as the calendar rolls around they are trotted out to the general amusement of students and the public. Many of these traditions involve dressing up, or down, as the case may be; throwing things, usually harmless and contributory to general mirth and merriment. There is quite often a certain amount of petty theft, criminal damage and other transgressions including being drunk and disorderly. Needless to say that many of these pranks, antics and muckings about include the consumption of copious quantities of alcohol, and more lately, drugs of various kinds. All of which is routinely forgiven in the spirit of good clean, drunken fun.

It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. Here are hundreds of kids, still children really, who none the less are feeling their oats for the first time, let off the leash yet still somehow protected, not really in the great world just yet. It’s a kind of socio-cultural neoteny. They’re grown to maturity but not yet really adults. If the truth be told, the colleges are not constitutionally set up to encourage students to grow into and accept their inevitable adulthood. The colleges would rather they stayed somewhat immature, cosseted, more readily accepting of the college rules and regulations, not to mention traditions.

I myself became an initiate to some of these traditions when I unsuspectingly chose Sydney University over The ANU and accepted an offer to attend St Paul’s College on the Newtown side of the University campus. I made my choice on the basis of architecture. The ANU college was a concrete box while St Paul’s had intimations of a deeper history and a bijou collection of colonial neo gothic architecture that, surrounded by gardens and bed plantings, remains charming today. Doc Evatt was one alumnus I was particularly proud to be following in the footsteps of.

Appearances however can be deceiving. Within a few weeks of my settling in at St Paul’s I was initiated as a college “man” in one of the most childish pranks I’ve ever been the target of. The overture to this puerile tour de force was a hammering on my door at about three in the morning. Half asleep and suspecting murder, or a fire at least, I opened the door in my underwear, to be inundated with several gallons of iced water. “Blackbagged” and bound hand and foot, I was dragged away to the showers where I was interrogated for about half an hour while more cold water was dumped on me. A kind of early, unpractised waterboarding.

The main questions seemed to be where my father had been educated, what he did for a living and which school I had attended. My answers didn’t impress them much, being composed mainly of very earthy assertions about their various provenances, their tenuous connection with accepted social norms. My sporting prowess seemed important to them though. Sadly I hadn’t much to speak of in that area either. I was incensed, in a rage, and flung myself and abuse at them as often as I could; which was essentially in the moments between buckets of water being tossed at my face. There was a certain amount of towel flicking, pushing, shoving and holding me in difficult positions, all the while I’m having difficulty breathing inside the bag.

They must have got bored with me. Who knows why, perhaps it was just time to move on to the next unsuspecting fresher. Just as quickly as they had taken me, they left me shivering on the tiled floor. I never found out who they were.

I managed to get myself untied, had the longest hot shower and thought to go back to bed. While my interrogation had been proceeding others had completely trashed my room. No real damage, just a huge mess. I didn’t report the incident because by the end of breakfast the next morning it had been made clear to me that to do so would be viewed as “unmanly”, “unsporting”, not a good start to my college life.

In the next few months I got used to excessive drinking leading to excessive behaviour. There were nights when my Lower Arnott Wing corridor was awash with beer and broken glass. On one occasion a medical student from Smithfield down with the flu and needing the loo, stumbled from his room into the darkened corridor, slipped and fell into the broken glass. Someone had removed the fuse for the lights. He needed several stitches to his hands and backside.

I learned there had been a rape on the Paul’s oval the year before after a particularly heavy post Rawson Cup do. I saw naked young women being chased through the college late at night on more than one occasion. What was that about?

My favourite Paul’s story though is the one about the son of a senior politician. This fellow had been resident at the college for many years, a perennial student. He had good rooms in the old part of the college, all neo gothic arches, leadlight and worked stone. He was eccentric, connected and a very bright guy, but he had never grown up.

He had a collection of militaria including a cavalry officers dress sabre. One night a fresher on phone duty in the Blackett wing vestibule rushed to the eccentric’s rooms with a message. I was not there so cannot say what transpired next, and there are various versions, but somehow the eccentric took it into his head to thrust the sabre through the door timber and into the abdomen of the fresher. It was a grievous wound and took a long time to heal. Long enough for the college, the eccentric and his family, the victim and his family, plus a bevy of lawyers to work out just how much money it would take to keep the whole thing schtum.

They worked it out. Not a word ever appeared to my recollection and the eccentric stayed on at Paul’s for a few years more.

Not me. I was out of there at the end of first term. Moved into a little terrace on Wilson St. Got to sleep all night through.

That was years ago now and my departure apparently did nothing to moderate the dysfunctional culture at St Paul’s. In 2009 some college “men” decided they’d post a Facebook page encouraging and inciting rape. http://www.crikey.com.au/topic/st-pauls-college/  And there are a million stories, as they say.

But nothing at Paul’s then or now looks as wrong as the shenanigans going on at St John’s College lately, http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/culture-of-anarchy-at-a-college-in-crisis-20121103-28qvh.html

At Paul’s it really was a minority who engaged in this kind of thing and they were for the most part ex students of the GPS schools; a thoroughly bad lot in my opinion. At John’s however, it looks like the bad blood has infected the entire college.

Big Ears The Mad Monk is a popular alumnus of John’s and appears regularly at college functions. It’s not too long a bow to suggest that his style, his bad behaviour, is seen by The Johnsmen, for that’s what they call themselves, as both license and encouragement in their despicable world view. That college women would acquiesce in these abhorrent displays of misogyny and thuggish behaviour just beggars the mind. For young women to so want to be accepted into a group that gives them the epithet “JETS”, (Just Excuse The Slag), seems to suggest something wrong with the self esteem young catholic women acquire in their schooling, not to mention the almost total insensitivity bred into the boys involved. For as I said before, that’s what they are. Boys and girls playing at being adults in an environment that encourages their sense of exceptional entitlement, that biases and irreversibly corrupts their sexual politics. It’s not just current students that are involved. At both John’s and Paul’s ex alumni are implicated, proving that the damage done seems to last well beyond college. These people are otherwise respected adult members of society.

Try and find a copy of the wonderful Lindsay Anderson movie “if” or perhaps Peter Medak’s “The Ruling Class” for insights here. Themes in “Lord Of The Flies” also spring to mind.

The problem of student behaviour at John’s is like an advanced and deadly cancer. Ignored and undiagnosed for far too long, it is now systematically taking over the body it has invaded and there can be only one solution. Cut it out and hope that what’s left of the body can survive.

I somehow think that John’s won’t have the stomach for the kind of radical but life saving surgery the college needs and the idea that Pell will provide any meaningful answer just sounds silly, doesn’t it? After all he’s done so well with priestly pederasty, and his commitment to women’s issues is widely known.