The Secret History - Introduction

Time mocks historians.

In truth, is it not a deeply human gesture to record, commemorate and memorialise that which is so evanescent and ephemeral? It avails little. Everything in the cosmos, from galaxies to sandcastles, will one day exist tenuously in memory and memory alone – before slipping into nothingness or the mind of God. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, Prospero muses, and our little life is rounded by a sleep. Even so the historian, parrying oblivion, puts pen to paper.

When a source emerges that purports to illuminate the past, questions arise: why does this document exist? Who was the audience? What the writer in a position to know their subject-matter?

As the author of the Whitefriars Secret History, I respond accordingly:

• It was written in response to the official history that was released in 2010, the year of Whitefriars’ 50th anniversary. The Official History is a sanitised account of the school down the years. Our tenure at the College - a mere six years of the half century - warrants detail and honesty.
• The Secret History’s audience are my classmates who attended Whitefriars between the years of 1978 and 1983 (or part thereof). So it is a ‘bottom up’ account rather than a ‘top down’ survey. No history is objective. It will be, however, a better approximation of the truth than its official counterpart as there are fewer conventions in play. There were three streams in Year 7 – A, B and C. I was assigned to the B Stream, and pretty much stayed in that dynamic for the six years even though collectively we were mingled together from Year 10 onwards. The Secret History reflects a B view of the College – other perspectives are possible.
• There is a fine line between facts and anecdotes. I witnessed much of the following narrative with my own eyes. For those incidents where I was not present, I rely on the testimony of my schoolmates. Some of the events, it is true, have been mythologised over the intervening decades; I will separate fact from fiction.

Yes, they were small events, but cosmically interpreted.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Whitefriars. They were aureate years. Even so, it was not a great school. It did little to unlock whatever potential we had to our name. Much of its dynamic would not be tolerated nowadays. Even so, my affection has endured to this day, hence my impulse to pen this work.

The Secret History does not pretend to be a linear account of days as we progressed from Year Seven with Mrs Healy and her fags to HSC with Joey Jordan; rather, I will focus on one story after another in the hope they encapsulate its zeitgeist. It does the school no service to gloss over the scandals, failures and lunacy of those years.

The Secret History is a labour of love, but I intend to explore Whitefriars' underbelly in full. With Procopius as our lodestar, let us commence.