Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows an aspect of theatre director Michael Blakemore’s experience at the private school he attended in Sydney in the 1940s, where the emphasis on sport made him a target for bullying and exclusion. It opens with a direct address to the camera by Blakemore outside his old school, and includes archival black-and-white photographs. It also features re-enactments that show Blakemore as a schoolboy (played by Matthew Watkin) boxing and the school cadet band playing a military tattoo. In the final re-enacted scene the young Blakemore, who is reading a book about magic, concocts a spell to make a menacing group of muddied rugby players disappear. Blakemore’s voice-over and the military tattoo played by the cadet band are featured through most of the clip.

Educational value points

• The clip suggests the importance of sport at the elite non-government school Blakemore attended in the 1940s. In this period, and to an extent still today, private boys’ schools believed sport to be character building and to play an important role in instilling in students qualities such as physical and moral courage, a sense of fair play, discipline, industry, obedience and 'manliness’. Team sports such as football, cricket and rowing were favoured because of their emphasis on group loyalty and cooperation. Sport was seen to be a measure of worth and of conformity to the approved masculine norm of the school culture.

• Introspective and creative children like Blakemore did not fit in at this school. While Blakemore avoided bullying by adopting a divertingly eccentric persona, he was not accepted within the school’s model of masculinity. A survey of 900 Australian secondary students for the book Being Normal Is the Only Way To Be (2005) found that boys identified a relentless and often cruel pressure to conform to a male stereotype and to belong to an 'in’ group, and that unless they were 'cool’, sporty or macho, they were marginalised.

• Boys who do not conform to the dominant culture within schools or are different in some perceived way can become the targets of bullying. Bullying can take many forms, including one or more students teasing, taunting, threatening or hitting a victim, or the social isolation of the victim through exclusion. Typically victims do not defend themselves or retaliate.

• The culture at Blakemore’s school in the 1940s is depicted as brutal and tough, with the film assembling images that reinforce Blakemore’s assertion that boys were 'broken in’ at his school. In one shot, a very young boy is shown boxing, a sport that was considered 'manly’. The school cadet band’s playing of a military tattoo with its relentless beat reinforces the sense of discipline and regulation, of drumming out nonconformity.

• Blakemore attended the prestigious King’s School in Parramatta as a boarder. King’s is the oldest independent school in Australia and part of the Great Public Schools (GPS), an association of mainly private boys’ schools. It has a reputation for producing leaders in the private and public sectors. Rugby union is part of the King’s tradition and the school’s participation in GPS rugby competitions dates back to 1892. The military-style school uniform worn by the young Blakemore in the clip is still used today for formal occasions.

• Theatre director Michael Blakemore (OBE) is one of the most successful Australians working in theatre overseas. He has had a long association with playwright Michael Frayn, directing plays such as Noises Off (1984) and Copenhagen (1999), and has worked extensively on Broadway. At the 2000 Tony Awards, Blakemore won an unprecedented double as 'best director’ of both a play, Copenhagen, and a musical, Kiss Me Kate. He has written and directed two films, A Personal History of the Australian Surf (1971) and Country Life (1994).

• A Personal History of the Australian Surf is an example of the performative mode of documentary. Performative documentaries are often autobiographical, and emphasise the subjective and emotive qualities of memory and experience, rather than factual information, in shaping our understanding of the world. These documentaries tend to employ a free combination of the actual and the imagined, and use the highly subjective and personal perspective of subjects, including the filmmaker, to appeal to viewers emotionally.

Michael stands outside the building where his school used to be.
Michael Blakemore My old school has long since departed these buildings for greener pastures and is a vastly different place, I’m told, from the institution where I was to spend seven long years. Boys were sent here to be broken in, like horses, and the bridle and bit was sport.

Re-enacted footage shows Michael as a schoolboy learning to box and the school cadet band playing a military tattoo. Michael continues to speak in voice-over.
Michael In those days instruction consisted of one lesson implied in the classroom and defended in the chapel. Excellence in sport was the only measure of personal worth. I didn’t mind existing in a state of worthlessness. The problem was surviving among the worthy.

Archival photos of Michael’s school days are shown.
Michael I reached for the defences which were natural to me – conjuring tricks, ghost stories whispered after lights out in the dormitory, unkind imitations of common enemies like Matron and the teaching staff.

In a re-enacted scene, military music continues to play as Michael the schoolboy reads a boy on magic. When a group of menacing muddied rugby players tower over him he makes them disappear.
Michael So really the school was proving counter-productive in my advance towards manhood. I may have been a little uncertain about what I was but I was learning fast and emphatically what I wasn’t. I cultivated a personality of diverting if contemptible eccentricity and was eventually left to myself.