Tummaville School
I was resentful for a long time of my father’s propensity to harsh disciplinarianism. It was the was things were done generally and I think stemmed from the anger that arose ion those charged with the responsibility of maintaining good order when they found themselves without control. In order to regain control and respect, a harshness, and sometimes brutality and violence was resorted to generating a n atmosphere of fear and anxiety and sometimes terror.
I want to work with a number of incidents from my first years at school, a small county one-teacher school of about 30 pupils. There was violence there were one would have expected find love and compassion, and us being infants simply put up with things because there wasnot other choice.
The great evil that was perpetrated there was to use corporal punishment for failing to meet learning expectations, being caned for not having learnt spelling words. I recall in the second year of school not knowing spelling and having to stand up on the form. There were big long desks that seated maybe 6 children and a long form to match. If you you didn’t know your spelling you would be told to stand on the forms and hold out your hand for “six of the best”. For me every bit of that school was steeped in violence and terror. We were farm kids and our parents had by and large been raised under a similar rule. The violence felt indiscriminate. It mande me angry and powerless. I recall one of the word abuses was when chub had trouble with something or he may have been a bit cheeky the teach lost control and started laying into him with the cane. Chub fell to the floor and curled up to protect himself while the teacher beat hime with the cane. We felt both the distress of seeing our friend so abused and at the same time feared for our own safety. What went on was literally unbelievable, and when we tried to raise the alarm were simply not believed, that such an atrocity should be happening. I tried to protect myself with illness. Every morning I would be sick and not wan to go to school. The mothers would take turns to car pool. I remember on morning after the holidays that I could not be prised out of the car such was my fear, I don’t know what such consistent resistance to go ing to school didn’t raise concern. I guess it was because our parents had met with similar school experiences.
But I was a precocious learner. What strikes me most on reflection that there was no instruction on how to learn just an expectation that you would meet the grade. Learn was mostly by rote and memory not an understanding of the material being learnt. Most of the learning exercises felt pointless to me. I remember one craft exercise that I thought was going to be fun. It was simple enough. We had an exercise book with a square with geometrical shapes drawn inside. We were given some squares of glossy coloured paper which we had to cut to size and paste in the shapes.
I though this was going to be easy and felt relieved that it didn’t involve a memory exercise that could bring down punishment for being incorrect. To my horror I soon discovered that there was no method to cut the coloured paper to shape. The paper was too thick to trace through and there were no tools available. I decided to put the paper as close as possible to the shapes and draw the shape on the underside with a pencil. Imagine my alarm when I cut out the shapes and found them wildly inaccurate. You were not permitted a second chance. My world cam crashing down in an instant expecting to caned.
The thing is I loved learning and do to this day but found the tools to learn missing. There seemed to me to be a huge gap between knowing and not knowing with no crossing. After two years of this brutal regime it ended. The country school was closed and we were bussed to Milmerran to the central school. But my basic wariness of teachers had been set and became a potent force in my life and thereafter avoided school learning ensuing it for independent learning undercover. I became fiercely antiauthoritarian but nevertheless scarred, shamed at my lack of perfection and caring a kind of survivor guilt. But I loved learning and was curious about the world. It was inevitable that sooner or later I would have major issues with the authoritarian nature of the Lutheran church and the huge disconnect between the message of the gospel, that of compassion and loving kindness and emphasised the ideas of sin borne of shame and unworthiness.
Over the years I watched as my friends, boys of my own age scrummed to mental illness and in some cases suicide.
As I reflect in order to redeem those memories, that love of learning and a respect for custom it seems impassable. I know that the attitudes generated by those experiences left me wounded and unable to be the person I wanted to be. I became an unhappy child and a social misfit, defensive and craving protection. The time comes now to honouring the suffering of that child knowing that these traumatic experiences were within the context of a dogmatic order that was intolerant of straying from the official line. I was unable settle down to earn a good living but continue to battle my demons.
In this process of writing I have focused mainly on those areas were I felt shame and guilt and much less on traumas that I experienced. I considered my suffering less than others and only have to remember those kids that literally shit themselves with terror from abuse and consider myself fortunate to survive. In comparison tho the horrors we hear on the news we seem to be in a protected par of the world. But when I think of it now That safe secure community that he’d its secrets tight is broken open, like a boil that has been lanced and can now heal. But for real healing there must be restitution, restoration that now at this late stage only I can provide for myself. For this writing is not simply to revealhorrible stories of the past but to apply a remedy for others who my find themselves in this position while reform is carried out by a new generation.
When I think about it, that community had to crumble and disappear, for as much as there were romantic notions about growing up on country there desperately need to be an injection of vitality of regeneration that religion was not providing. I think straight away of the rainbow serpent and hoe that principle was not present. And it is that principle that I call upon now to heal and make whole. A spiritual force above and beyond biological and humanistic reasoning. The God that had been captured and constrained within that little country community had lost power. God had been strangled to death by dogma. God in the heavens too had been relegated it seems to me to a private sector of space time, fragmented and neutered. And for all the talk of an all powerful god it was human vigilantes and henchmen that maintain control where one might have expected freedom and these enclaves need to need lanced also.
This is the sense in which the desert lawmen say that the great stories and body of knowledge they contain are the first owners of this country. The people do not own the stories but belong to the stories and the stories belong to or rise up out of country. And to find healing and regeneration we need to reconnect with the source of all that is. Now I realise that this was the same idea that gave rise to ideas about god and dogma was a rationalisation that tried to understand it. But it no longer fits any more than my cut pieces of craft paper to the image. The method used for sizing them up is in adequate to the task. The meetings come as a result of a flawed perception of how learning works and an over zealous craving for safety thought to come from conforming to the conservative order.
Therefore we turn to the process of storytelling and restore those past experiences into a greater context now that the boil is lanced and the guilty secrets broken. I held my parents and all those entrusted with the care of children accountable for their ignorance. At the same time I know by my own experience that you can never know enough to solve these problems. It can only be done through community renewal and that means that the old communities must be demolished rather than idealised so that fresh life force can re-enter and renew. Sacrifice is necessary. Sacrifice of the adherence to safe views. Courage is needed and a degree of cheekiness and humour.
And what of all those who adhere to the old ways. We must not be impatient. We must not resort to killing fields to quicken regeneration in an effort to capture the new god under whose name a new rule is enforced and the old evils perpetrated. God also must be allowed to evolve, for the god we see reflected in creation id ever changing as our ability to perceive.
I think of returning to Adelaide across the Kookatha plains, the Autumn showers in the golden afternoon sunlight, rainbows and sun showers earnestly restoring country exhausted by labour. I feel myself in loving embrace, a state of grace breaks out in oncoming starlight. And the lone bell of silence peels in the vastness of the night, peace falls upon our troubled soul. Finds rest.
Men with chutzpah Gods agents of becoming, but never forget to grow god.
Crossing Kookatha plains,
Autumn showers late golden sun
Replenish country and my soul
With loving embrace of starlit grace
Vast bell of silence peels against black night
Rest for tomorrow comes anew
It doesn’t have to be good poetry only true.
