My sheltered childhood is long behind me but I had a sense of disbelief when I read about the brutality of boarding school life in Boy on a Wire. Long-listed for the 2010 Miles Franklin, it’s a fictionalised memoir, based on Jon Doust’s own experiences at a boarding school in Western Australia in the 1960s. The routine violence that was inflicted even for minor misdemeanours was institutionalised by both masters and boys. Relentless bullying and bastardisation were part of the school tradition, and dobbing was never done. As a teacher myself, I cannot imagine working in such a brutal and degrading atmosphere, much less trying to learn anything there as a student. See my review at http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/boy-on-a-wire-by-jon-doust/ ( )

beautiful piece of writing ( )

For country kids in the 1960s, the only real opportunity to go to High School was at a church-run boarding school in the city. Our parents wanted us to Do Well. Either like my three older brothers, the expectation was to Do Well and Come Back to the farm with the experience of the world wider than our tiny farming community. Or, like my younger sister and me, it was to Do Well and Go On to Uni and become a teacher or agricultural adviser.

This opportunity came at a cost. My parents rarely spoke to us of the pounds, shillings and pence they sacrificed to educate five children at boarding school. It was what you had to do.

Similarly, nobody spoke of the emotional costs.

The first of these costs was unavoidable: being wrenched from the free lifestyle of our country upbringing to the strange military-inspired a community of boarders in the city. Homesickness among boarders is real and powerful. The narrator in Jon Doust's witty, poignant boarding school memoir describes homesickness well, but it is secondary to what he sees as an unnecessary and scarring cost: bullying.
The bullying described in Boy on a Wire is mainly between boys, perpetrated especially by those just a little bigger.
Narrator Jack Muir has a more complex relationship with the masters. His puzzlement at their lack of intervention is patent throughout his story, as is their lack of support for the Christian faith his mother had taught him.

The masters, in their turn, don't seem to know what to make of young Muir. He doesn't live up to his brother, that's for sure, but they think he is being cheeky when he simply states a view. These exchanges provide much of the humour of the memoir.

Father Fred, the chaplain who turns mid lesson from Divinity to sex education also puzzles young Muir, who delights us with his version of male sexuality.

"Then he turns to us and says, This is a boy's brain, boys, and it is housed in this section of the head, along with a storage area. For what, you may well ask? Boys, in this section of the brain that the male seed is stored.

I look around. There are smiles and hands over mouths. I am confused. Jonesy makes big eyes and taps his head. Father Fred continues.
This section of the brain is connected to the male reproductive organ via a hollow tube that runs down the centre of the spine. When a male engages in sexual activity, of any kind, manual manipulation in particular, seed is carried from the cranial compartment, down the tube and out here...
Be still, boy. This is important. Every man has to know this. In the brain is stored just the right amount of seed required for the production over a lifetime. And if the boy or man over in cultures in practices such as minute manual manipulation, or extravagant sexual activity, then he will be rendered bereft of seed and the cranial compartment will be emptied, thus creating a vacuum in his brain." (P. 63 - 64)

The context for the bullying is the residential throwing together of boys becoming aware of the tug of their developing sexuality. Jack shows us this ever present tug becoming an obsession with masturbation.

A particularly nasty form of bullying was "nuggetting". This savage attack consisted of holding down a boy and scrubbing his genitals with shoe polish (for colour) and Dencorub (for pain). A perverse democracy made it law for every boy to be nuggeted. The experience was exacerbated by the waiting: "When would my turn come?"

Jon Doust describes boys reacting in four ways to being so degraded. Most endured it, and survived – but with scars. Some turned the tables on the perpetrators by a witty word or surprising attitude, which should have shamed the bullies. In my experience, it never did. Some boys detached themselves from their bodies and coped by pretending they had floated away.

A fourth group of boys were so terrorised and humiliated that they did not recover. One, indeed, at least in Doust's narrative, commits suicide.

The treatment of this fourth boy in particular, outraged the young narrator, Jack Muir. He singles out three of the bullies and takes his revenge on them one by one as the opportunity presented.

The memoir is fictionalised. I declare my interests in the story. I was in the same year in the same boarding house as the author. In fact, we were prefects together in The Bunk, until Jon had himself demoted. I can reveal that Dousty’s nickname was not ‘Coco’ (for ‘Coco the Clown’) but ‘Goof’ for his naive but sharp wit.

Some years later I returned to the school as chaplain, determined to make the school a more humane and nurturing environment. Jon's memoir reminds me that my challenge was always to rise above the scars I carried , which were mainly a dangerous naivety about sex, and covert anger, which could sneak out at times, hot and unexpected. I learned that the experience Jon describes was real, but also that bullying at some other boys' schools was even more deeply ingrained and reinforced from the top down.

Jon Doust's Boy on a Wire is an important witness to a particular problem in a particular time. He has dared to speak about taboos, and in so doing, may name them for others of us still living with the scars, and so encourage us on the road to becoming more human.

I laughed and winced at the memories evoked in this tightly written and deeply felt remembrance of times past. I know that boarding is a much gentler and more humane experience than our experience; however, parents and school administrators may find lessons to learn for today's children also wrenched from their country towns and farms to the alien world of the church-related boarding school.

Reviewed by Ted Witham ( )