Routine beating, hazing and humiliation of junior boys by seniors at Ballarat Grammar dating back decades has come to light as the school grapples with a punishment culture that is not confined to just one prestigious private boarding school.
It’s been 21 years since Renato Manias began his time at Ballarat and Queens Grammar School, aged just 13, but he hasn’t forgotten the welcome he and his classmates received from the older boys in the boarding house.
This week’s reports also had a triggering effect on another old Grammarian, Michael Short, a former journalist at, who wrote of having substances applied to his genitals by older boys at Ballarat Grammar when he too, aged just 13, boarded there in the 1970s.Further back in the school’s past, an ex-student who did not wish to be named told of the tough culture at Ballarat Grammar in the 1950s and 1960s when he was a student there.
Another former student, also speaking on condition of anonymity, spoke of ritual humiliation and assaults against him and his fellow “strappers” – as year 7s to year 10s were called by the senior boys – in the late ’80s and early ’90s at the school’s other boys’ boarding unit, Wigan House.“They’d wake you up in the middle of the night and drag you out of bed. It was the middle of winter, undies on your head.
Rather, Ballarat Grammar’s Travis Polkinghorne, who as director of development is responsible for “furthering the strategic goals of the school in relation to fundraising, sponsorship, bequests and establishing a culture of philanthropy within the community” – according to LinkedIn – wrote to alumni on Friday seeking to reassure them.
Leading law firm Arnold Thomas & Becker, which is representing dozens of former students of other schools around the state who allege they were subjected to abuse by their schoolmates, said the issue was not isolated to Ballarat Grammar. The rituals detailed by Thomas are not dissimilar to those alleged at Ballarat: late-night beatings, humiliations and younger students forced to run naked around school grounds, suggesting common themes running through boarding school hazing practices.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on there, but that sort of behaviour is something that existed a long, long time ago in boarding, and is not part of the current boarding practice at all,” Stokes said. “The punishment behaviours are absolutely connected to the return to ... modes of masculinity associated with dominance and hierarchy,” Roberts said.
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