Thirtieth-year reunion of the lamentably and cruelly subjected 1973 class at St Edmunds War Memorial College in Canberra; October 4, 2003.

(The name was mere name inflation; it was and is a (boys-only) high school; “war memorial” was included in the title to secure government funding, in return for which the Christian Brothers in 1954 hung along the hallways a few photographs of Australians in heroic action, whereafter no more was said about the world wars). (And I, in fact, did not graduate with the class, as I managed to escape with my family to Geneva, CH, in December 1972, at the end of 5th Form (11th grade).)

The Gathering
The event took place at the National Press Club, in surroundings rather more salubrious than the forbidding halls of the school, a mile away, haunted with pain, misery, and depraved cruelty and desire.
Of the original class of about 88, some 55 could be contacted, and of those about 45 turned up.
I walked into the bar at the club and was initially unsure if I was in the right place. A former classmate approached whom I would not have known from Adam…
The process of running into dozens of blokes whom I did know, however, had commenced.
I had a strange sense of being out of time and yet only moments away from having known these people, 31 years earlier. Nearly all were quite recognizable, with the exception, perhaps, of the ones who were eminently unremarkable even up until 1972. Even several of those, it turned out, were winning or at least amiable and likeable characters, now.
Most were portly or had lost much of their hair… the usual and expected features of a mob 30 years on. Few looked any older than me; most were dressed rather more formally, although a few seemed to be going with a ’70s theme – leather pants, in one case…
I was not resistant to the gathering, but must admit that I was dreading telling over and over the story of how I come to be in America. Word has leaked out to some, but not many. Few even realized or remembered that I had left after 5th form (11th grade) and gone to Geneva. I said little about it, at that time. Most, then, simply were surprised to see me after so long, never having had any explanation for what had become of me.
Most of those in attendance, by contrast, had been virtually nowhere but in Canberra, perhaps with a few years in another city, or a year or two traveling in the usual 20-30-year-old Australians’ way.

The Fate of Some whom I would have Considered Doomed
I was surprised, some 31 years after last contact, to see so many of my classmates in relatively good health – mental health, that is. I understand that some of those not in attendance are indeed Missing in Action, presumed dead or in states of advanced bitterness, addiction, bafflement, or other debilitating conditions. But of those who turned up, virtually all are married with children; virtually all have jobs of some kind, many quite responsible ones suggesting successful ajustments, and careers, even if many spoke of having had to battle uphill against the brothers’ schooling, which emphasized not achieving one’s potential. “Pull yer head in, son” was an almost hourly refrain, and other, more violent means were commonly used to dissuade boys from becoming individual, at least in any way that did not glorify the school. The acceptable accomplishments included winning sporting honors, or academic; although, to be fair, a couple of boys were also highly touted for being able to sing opera arias in near-castrato range.

The Reading of the Roster of the Dead
In the first moment of the dinner portion of the evening, once we were all seated, an organizer called the gathering to order to ask that we remember eight members of the class who could not be with us, nor with anyone else. “If your name is on this list, please do me the favor of carking it now, because I don’t wish to have to revise,” said the organizer. I wasn’t close to any of the dead, although one was of a family that, since the beginning of my primary school days, has been a known and almost sworn enemy clan of the Monaghans. (The oldest brother once, in primary school, squealed on me and my older brother when we set him straight down the lane across the road; he prepared for telling on us by dragging his school cap through the mud, so that he could claim we were responsible.) I couldn’t discover how Peter Flaherty had died, nor how several others had. Two (Peter Attridge and Rodney Willis) were killed in motor-cycle and car accidents, respectively, during 4th Form (10th grade) and 5th Form (11th grade). Alan Dennis died in a car crash soon afterwards – he was in the back seat of a car, dead drunk, when the driver, also pissed, lost control, or something of that sort. David Poole, I learned, died suddenly not too many years ago, after suffering from a stroke or aneurysm while in the shower. I have not yet learned details of the cause of death of the others, other than one who, a few years after graduation, placed a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off. Others confirmed deceased: Martin Carroll, Steve Rennes, and Greg Lee.
At least two others are believed dead, bringing the total dead to 11 out of 85, so that I guess I should consider myself lucky to be alive, at all.

Keiran Roffey, Considered Dead, is Found
The biggest surprise of the evening was to learn that Keiran Roffey had turned up, after suddenly going missing in 1972, and being widely considered dead. He had vanished without trace. A police inquiry went on for some time. I came to believe that Keiran had been abducted – the city reputedly had a pederasty ring and certainly had a self-styled witchcraft coven, and not of the comfortable modern American variety that attracts self-declared warlocks and crones. I mean, one that was suspected of foul, again pederast behavior. There has, in addition, been other abduction incidents.
In any case, I learned from Bede Sunter, who knew Keiran as they lived a few doors apart, that about 12 years ago someone from our class happened to be talking to a bloke in Darwin, I think it was, and learned that his name was Keiran Roffey. He said, “Wait a minute – do you mean, the Keiran Roffey who was at St. Edmunds in Canberra?”
“Yes,” Roffey replied.
The classmate said: “Well, I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but I think your parents might appreciate hearing from you!”
“They would!” exclaimed Roffey, reportedly quite incredulous.
He had been missing, I gather, for about 19 years.
Bede reported that the reunion didn’t go well, at all. His parents were very unhappy to see him, in the circumstances – or something of the sort.
In any case, the story supposedly is that he had upped and run off after being abused at home, or believing he had been – he was always pretty scruffy and smelly, Bede and I recalled. Abuse at home would be a powerful incentive just to take off, because much of his time not spent at home was spent at school, where the brothers treated him abusively, like so many others. They found particular gratification in identifying and mortifying the already vulnerable boys, which the most abject, among others, were.
Bede didn’t know where Keiran is now, but I’d love to talk to him over a beer. (Bede, incidentally, thanked me for turning him onto Jethro Tull, in 4th or 5th form, which had become his favorite band, and his two brothers’, too.)

Various people
David Gordon, though he was at the school for only the final two years, was one of the organizers, and must since have had training in meeting coordination, because he ably filled that role for us.
He reminisced about how coming to the school from out of state, and, having heard of the forbidding reputation of the Christian Brothers, he went to a barber the day before school started and got a short-back-and-sides cut, of the kind we were, by edict, meant to have. Well, he got to school the next day and realized immediately he had made a serious error, because by that time the rule was widely flaunted: Many of us had hair to our shoulders, and some had long sideburns, also a breach. (Peter Donnelly, a farm boy, had had them since 2nd Form; he had been ordered that year not just to cut them off, but to shave more closely, because he had a five-o’clock shadow by the time he arrived at school after a 30-mile bus ride from the bush.)
Anyway, David Gordon said that, that day in 1972, Tony Larobina had come up to him and said, simply, “welcome.” Tony, the quintessential number-one son of hard-working “New Australians” recently arrived from Italy in search of work in the building trades, en route to some kind of comfortable life, remains just as amiable and kind-hearted, today. When I went into my rant about how evil were the tax laws that rewarded people for greedily speculating on housing when so many people can afford no home of their own, or even are homeless, he grabbed my hand and shook it in agreement and brotherhood.
Taking the floor at the reunion, he told the story of how, in 6th Form, he had been entrusted with keeping score at the school athletics carnival of the tally for his “house,” Clancy (one of the school’s four). In a procedure that seems unlikely, now, that chore was entrusted to each house’s most reputedly trustworthy representative.
Well, now Tony wanted to admit, he said, that he had been so concerned for doing right by his house-mates that he had added a few points here, and a few there, along the way.
“The ridiculous thing, though,” he said, “was, we still didn’t win!”
On leaving school, he became an accountant – of course – and he remains one today. He lives in Bega, on the New South Wales “South Coast,” near the border with Victoria, and makes the 170-mile trip up to Canberra for four days each week, for work.
Soon after I entered the club, my closest mate from football and cricket, Terry Kimball, bowled up and cheerfully greeted me. He and I were clearly the strength of our footy team – he was generally a ruck rover, and I the center, which is to say, we both had free rein over most of the field, and were expected to get the ball more often than anyone else, and indeed we clearly did. He told me that in the year after I left for Geneva, he had been quite heavily recruited by Richmond, one of the premier professional clubs in the Victorian Football League, which was by far the top league in the country. Few Canberra players had, at that stage, played in it – few were good enough. From our opponents in Canberra, only Jimmy Richardson, a thug on the Eastlake team who admittedly was a powerful utility player, about 6 feet tall and very tough, ended up in the league. He played there for five or six years, as I recall, and did quite well. It was hard for me to be pleased for him – for a start, he played for Eastlake, the sworn enemy of Manuka, my original club. In addition, he had such habits as to run up behind me and thump me whenever he had the opportunity – not just when we were involved in the play, but also when the ball was at the other end of the field.
In any case, Richmond wanted Terry and offered him this and that, but he decided against going because he was only 17, and nothing was assured, other than a very tough time on the field. He probably chose widely.
His recruitment made me think, however, about my possible fortunes if I had stayed in Canberra. I never have had the stomach for certain aspects of the game at the senior level. For one, the violence, whose outcomes seem more severe than could possibly be warranted in the quest to win a game. Second, I could not, at that stage, bear that amount of matey male company. The thought, even now, is quite repulsive.
In any case, earlier in the evening, one of our classmates, David Thorpe, was recognized as the first person from St. Eddies to play rugby for Australia. That was an allusion to his having been selected for the Australian Schoolboys Team during 6th Form (again, while I was away); and also to the fact that a couple of famous modern-era rugby players emerged from the school in later years. One, George Gregan, is now captain of the Australian team – he’s the half-back.
But the point is, I mentioned to Terry that my strange and unlikely claim to sporting fame, while I was in Geneva, was to have been selected for the training squad of the first-ever Swiss national rugby team. Terry was very excited and complimentary upon hearing it, and said I had been remiss not to have stood up to note the fact, when David Thorpe’s accomplishment was noted.
Well, I interjected, I did need to add that, that year, the Swiss team never did eventuate – in fact, we never even had a training or selection run – and it was not until the next year that a team formed (and promptly was thrashed in its first game by rugby nobodies Czechoslovakia, 52-0).
“That doesn’t matter,” Terry exclaimed. “That doesn’t diminish your achievement one iota.” He guaranteed that he would be spreading the word and thus increasing my renown among my erstwhile peers.
Terry now is some kind of manager in infotech or human resources, or somesuch, and he told to the gathering a St Eddies-related story about his experiences in that world. He was at a leadership retreat with some heavy hitters on the Australian business scene, and the facilitator, endeavoring to spark a dynamic of teamwork and trust, had asked for volunteers to lead the group in some kind of rah-rah activity. Terry had stood up and said he had one: He then taught the gathering the old St. Eddie’s “war cry.” It’s an absurd, colonialist, mock-Aboriginal chant:
Yaragobi yaragobi yaragobi yunga
Taraweera taraweera taraweera munga
Yaragobi yaragobi ya mundu; Edmunds Edmunds, blue white blue.
Ya, ya, ango ya, ango popigo, taraweera wopigo
E – D – M – U – N – D – S… EDMUNDS!!!
So, very soon he had the whole group chanting this ridiculous thing that some moron had come up with in the early, mid-50s days of the school. Or so we thought: After the retreat session, two fellows approached Terry on the quiet, and said they were for Western Australia, and they were a little ashamed not to have admitted it to the group, but their school had that same war cry!

After school, Terry worked for 10 years with Michael Thomas, who unfortunately didn’t make it to the reunion, but who always was a character and an original. His father was a bookie at the Canberra racetrack, and Michael worked weekends for him, calculating his percentages. He wasn’t at all academically accomplished, but he had developed an extraordinary talent for odds, margins of error, etc. – all the essential attributes of a bookie’s offsider, if the bookie was to survive.
Once or twice each season, we would go on long bus rides to interstate footy games, and Michael would regale us, en route, with made-up race calls. They were phenomenally detailed, and convincing. Well, he went from St. Eddies to working at the track as a bookie, and Terry became his offsider. They made a heap of money, according to Terry, but after 10 years, the margins were becoming so narrow and the risk so high, due to the advent of computerized betting and betting aides, which permitted punters to get a lot better grip on their likely odds. So Terry quit, telling Michael he just had had enough. Michael went straight on to become a professional punter, himself, thus avoiding much of the risk, especially given that he was so knowledgeable about racing. Now, he has an office at the racecourse, where he sits in front of a bank of computer screens, calculating his best course of betting at races around the country, and still making a fortune.

So – and this is no surprise – people follow a course that they set for themselves early on, or that is set for them. Our class had some odd characters in it, and their attendance at the school only made them odder. One, always an anxious bloke, has been involved for 10 years in a pitched child custody battle with a former wife. He had twice sued the government for defamation – what the circumstances of this were, I didn’t catch. In any case, what I did hear, fairly dependably, was that he had won his second case at the lower level, but it had been appealed all the way up to the High Court (the Australian equivalent of the US Supreme Court), so that now he was about to become the first person ever to represent themselves before that bench.
I was unsure what to think, but the whole story did not strike me as a good sign.

The person to whom I felt perhaps warmest of all was Robert della Vedova, another son of “New Australians” from Italy, who always has had something of a Fijian appearance due to his tightcurled hair and soft-bear physique. He was perhaps the most recognizable of anyone, as far as I was concerned. Add 40-50 pounds to his old self, and there he was. He gave me a big hug as soon as he saw me, and I him, and we had a warm conversation which quickly turned to fortune in love – because, of course, one of the standard first-five questions of the evening was, Married… Kids?
No, he said. He had been, but the first wife left him and it cost him half of what he owned, and then a common-law partner followed suit, so he was broke and alone, although trying to have a good attitude about it. I could relate.

My vote for the person who had most inexorably proceeded down his own unlikely path was Victor Sain. He had always been antic enough to make some people wonder if he was "sain." He was on the 1st Eleven cricket team and always among the most entertaining of teammates, and also the most resolute in standing up to the insanity and random injustice of the brothers. He rose, after the other volunteer speakers, to salute the class and say how honored he was to be in the company, and how good it was to see everyone. I agreed with him wholeheartedly, as did many others, and we raised our glasses again (of the earlier toasts, one had been to the Dead, and the other, from one of the organizers, had been to the class and the school; the latter part of this provoked among at least 20 of the company the exclamation, “The school?! Fuck the school, mate,” with which I again agreed completely, although I had been so stunned that anyone would toast that place that I had not reacted, initially).
Victor’s toast struck a far more sober moment than one earlier, when he had been given the “Viagra” award for the person most likely to need it – the dose was ironically awarded to him, apparently, because he has reputedly become the renowned lothario from our class. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” he began, and then rattled on about something or other, and said “I have many witnesses that I do not need this medication, including my four girl friends, their several sisters, and… well… some bloke I met somewhere or other.”
He’s of some kind of Yugoslavian parentage, and was always roughly treated by his athletically impressive, hay-blond-afroed best friend in the class, now head of his own law firm in Sydney. Victor was constantly punched with great force – on one occasion, I recall, he was waylaid with a cricket bat, but fortunately with the flat front, not the wedged back or sharp sides.
Victor has long worked as a bricklayer, so that he is in excellent shape. He has a shaved head, and dark, profuse eyebrows – the bald head and the bushy brows, along with his intense dark eyes, make him appear quite mad, and he simultaneously glowers and smiles impishly, usually through billows of cigarette smoke. He kept up a constant commentary on proceedings, and when told by the Press Club staff for the second or third time that if he was going to smoke, he’d have to be in the smoking section of the premises, he said “Oh, I’m sorry mate, I really am. I have a problem with my memory. No, seriously, it’s a clinical condition – I have a doctor’s note about it in me pocket.”
In year 12, the year after I left, popular acclaim advanced Victor as a candidate for captain of the school. It was an unlikely choice, since the brothers had it in for him, as for anyone who exhibited any idiosyncrasies of personality, particularly ones that made them likely to challenge the brothers’ often-arbitrary authority. He was duly chosen by the class in democratic election, at which point the brothers promptly canceled the result and named the runnerup to the position.
Victor exhorted me on several occasions during the reunion to get the hell out of the USA as soon as possible, because the country was clearly a madhouse and run by fascists. “Do you recognize this?” he asked, while making a nazi salute.
Several people, in fact, asked me why the hell I would live in the US. I resorted on two or three occasions to what I said several years ago to my mother, when she responded to my usual litany of grievances against the country, and expressions of disgust with it and its culture and politics, by asking “You don’t seem to like the place much, dear; why do you live there,” and I could only respond: “Because it feeds my disdain, mother.”

The Awards Ceremony
The Press Club contributed three bottles of fine wine to the proceedings, and these were given away as prizes in three categories. First: the person most married and divorced. The Catholic background of the class showed through, here, because the prize went to one of about three or four people who were on their second marriages – the decision in the end rested on which of them had been married for fewest of the 30 years.
The second prize went to the person with the oldest grandchild. Most members of the class would now be 47 or 48, so it was surprising to learn that one had an 8-year-old granddaughter. (He was also among the 5 mugs who had sent their own sons to St Eddies, signifying that surely must be completely out of mind.)
The third prize went to the person most unrecognizable. This contest produced four finalists, none of whom looked any different to me, other than myself. I was loudly nominated by Michael Johnson, a rover on our footy team who used to be quite aggravating but turns out now to be pleasant, genial, and warmhearted. “It has to be Peter Monaghan. It has to be! I mean, he used to be a real good-lookin’ bloke, and now look at him!” He had vocal support from many others in the room, and when the issue was put to a tally by show of hands or yelped vote, I was far-and-away the most selected. So, the bottle of Rosemount Estate Mudgee Shiraz Vintage 2001, came to me. I regretted later not taking that opportunity to raise certain issues about the schooling that seemed to be slipping the minds of the testimonial givers. The most outspoken of them talked only – and jocularly - of unjust punishments for, e.g., not finishing a woodwork assignment for which no tools had been available due to bullying by other class members – “you know who you are!” But I wasn’t feeling it, at the time the opportunity arose, so let it slide – in any case, I didn’t seem to have much support for a considered, categorical denunciation of the Brothers, even though later conversations made it plain that many of the blokes had arrived as some kind of conclusions about them that would have resonated with mine.
Someone commented later that, to him, I looked somewhat like Van Morrison. I had to admit the likeness, which isn’t particularly flattering to either of us.

Other things
One person I was particularly pleased to see, because he epitomized the kind of person who I never believed would survive the school, at all, was Mark Schlegel. He had been a very tall and gangly youth who had muscular dystrophy, I now learn, which had made him very ungainly. He turns out now to be bright and very personable, but at school he was so abused by the brothers, and even by other boys, in that way that rats in a cage will indulge, that I often thought, looking at him, that he would soon go off into a corner like a severely beaten dog, curl up, and give up the ghost. He was among the many boys who got the cuts – blows to the palm of the hands with a leather strap about 14 inches long, 1.5 wide, and 0.5 thick – largely because they weren’t guileful enough to get out of the brothers’ way – to stay out of their dangerous reach and view. When he got the strap – often, as did almost all the boys, upon the merest infraction – he shriveled up in a way that reduced further his bent 6’ frame.
Now, he is probably 6’3”, but constrained to a wheelchair because, while he has feeling in his legs, they simply can’t support him. But he has a good job in the public service that permits him to work more than half the week from home. And he is married with two kids. I was delighted to hear that, and to see how well he has adjusted to his difficulties, and has overcome the oppressive time he had at the school. I wasn’t able to ask him more involved questions about his emotional state in the years after graduation, but I could tell from his demeanor and social grace that he had vastly improved upon the abject conditions in which he was held by the ghastly, abusive Christian Brothers.

I discussed the difficult emotional repercussions of the schooling from a few other people. One – one of four or five A students – told me that he had (like me) spent thousands of hours trying to make sense of the insanity and depravity of the place, and of the then-thriving tradition of parents turning a blind eye to what was being done to their young innocent offspring about whom in so many ways they clearly cared, and deeply. That astonishing inadvertence was, presumably, in large part a function of their trust in the Church – or, to put it less generously, they were extremely and irresponsibly gullible and prepared to not see what they didn’t want to see. Much more could be said on this, but so it goes…

I was amused to learn that, in 6th Form, the brothers had suspended every member of the class three days before the Higher School Certificate. This was the public exams that determined much of a schoolchild’s fate in the years ahead. On it, for example, depended university entrance, and jobs.
I didn’t learn what became of the suspension, or how exactly it came about – I presume it was a collective punishment for crimes committed by a few whom no one would squeal on. Some boys – they know who they were, and I think I can guess who at least several were – had done such things as to hook a bra on the statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the school. They had also somehow gained access to some brothers’ briefcases, taken out their straps, and chopped them up into inch-long pieces. I’m sure that would have made the proverbial shit hit the fan, because those were specialty items, not cheap, that would have had to be replaced with an emergency express order from Pellegrini’s, the religious-supply store. Of course, the order would have gone in with no sense of irony in the Christian brothers placing the order, nor in the blessed-are-the-meek suppliers.
Someone at the reunion swore, based on his own eyewitnessing, that one of the straps had turned out to have been reinforced internally with hack-saw blades.
It was, in any case, time to replace the old leather waddies -– the latest thing in christian correction, at that time, was the light-brown rubby strap, which the younger brothers, newer to the game, had already.

The subject of pederasty came up very often – usually in protectively joking form, but in some cases as part of reports from the war zone, although quite guarded ones. Reportedly one of the brothers is in jail for activities engaged in at a later posting. Several were identified as being suspected or known abusers of boys. But as I said to one friend from those days, the Catholic Church could root out all the pederasts and still have barely scratched the surface of the wrongs done to generations of boys by the Christian Brothers of St. Edmunds. Because, the pederasty was only one expression of bottled desire among the brothers, who were a misbegotten, ignorant, uneducated, personally pathetic mob, by and large. Beneath the iceberg tip of pederasty were other outcomes of their personal misery and subjection to the religious life was an inexhaustible violence -– emotional, psychological, and certainly physical abuse on a grand scale. They were sick sons of bitches, and the few wretches that remain presumably still are.


Chris Mason, originally from Darwin, warned me about going up there at this time of year, which I will, next week. The region is ferociously hot and insufferably humid, particularly for people with a physique and complexion such as mine, he said.
The Brothers may not have succeeded in finishing me off, but perhaps Darwin will.

(Photos, to come.)