The school of hard knocks (see article below) was Assumption College, Kilmore.
Laurie Balmer was in my class at ACK (1965-1968). His younger brother Bernie a year or two below, perhaps in my brother's class.
A similar event to the one Bernie Balmer tells in John Sylvester's article in The Age, today, happened in my first
week at Assumption.
We were having breakfast in the junior refectory. Each of us at our designated table and position. Laurie
F. was seated beside me. The Brother known as 'Tex' was in charge that morning, walking around from table to table. As he passed us, he said to Laurie, who was putting
a spoonful of cereal into his mouth, "Hold your spoon properly”, and punched him in the jaw, breaking one of Laurie’s teeth. No retribution, no
consequence : get on with your meals. No surprise, after four years of this boarding school environment, the 25 years of such nightmare scenes that followed.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was not charged to investigate such mere violence.
At a Bendigo Writers Festival event last year, Ray Mooney (former inmate of Pentridge prison, now a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and lecturer in creative writing) spoke about his time in Pentridge wherein he continued to have nightmares about his time as a boarder at St Patrick’s, Ballarat. When he awoke from these, he was always relieved, he said, to find that he was only in Pentridge.
That conversation with author and journalist Jenny Valentish can still be heard at ‘Big Ideas’ (ABC.RN) :
John Silvester
Saturday Age
10 March 2018
If Bernie wasn’t born with a keen sense of justice, he
developed it while still a teenager when he became the victim of a stitch-up
that has left a scar.
In year 11 at Assumption College the students complained
the milk tasted off: ‘‘The cows were feeding on capeweed, which makes the milk bitter.”
Already known for his gift of the gab, Balmer's fellow
students elected him to raise the subject and so he suggested to a Brother he
take a sip to find out for himself.
Rather than agreeing to what seemed a perfectly
reasonable request, ‘‘he punched me, putting me teeth through my lip''.
It was a major mistake. Balmer was a big lad who could
hold his hands up (he would later become Australian University Heavyweight
Boxing Champion) and he dropped the bully Brother.
While he was only defending himself, he was forced to
leave under threat of expulsion. It still burns that some who knew the truth
failed to stand up for him and perhaps that is one of the reasons he became a
seven-day-a-week defence lawyer, often giving a voice to those who desperately
need one.
(The wheels of justice do move slowly. The Brother in
question has now run into legal troubles of his own.)
FIAPCE
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
Addendum opportunity for the wonderful Blossom Dearie
My Attorney Bernie (words by Dave Frishberg)
Live at Jazzclub
Fasching, Stockholm
