Hunter High

By Kevin Michael Phillips

After surviving an armed student siege at Hunter High School, Australian school counsellor Danielle Bennetton emerges from the carnage and is thrust into the spotlight first as an eye witness and, ultimately, as a celebrity psychologist – racked by guilt.

Three years later, Danielle locks herself away in a beachside cabin, surrounds

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mr
• Release date: Aug 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780648322115

Kevin Michael Phillips

Kevin Michael Phillips was born, raised, and educated in Canada, then moved to Australia in his twenties. With his passion, talents, and sense of calling always driving him towards communication and teaching, Kevin earned university degrees in communication/media, theology, and education. Always frustrated with the mindset, methods, and ineffectiveness of the educational system, he published his first novel "Hunter High" in 2019.

Book preview

1

Daddy paid extra for the teak wood frame.

And then he insisted on eighteen karat, gold leaf lettering – so proud was he of his little girl, graduating university with her master’s degree in psychology.

But now that desktop nameplate just seems to sit there beside my computer – mocking me.

The degree, the title, the nameplate – and his pride – only add a burden of guilt and shame to my underlying sense of inadequacy. It wasn’t really me that he was proud of, after all, it was the academic achievement.

He still trusted the judgement of the whole educational system, but I no longer could. I couldn’t even trust my own.

Accredited Psychologist – who do I think I am, anyway, to unravel and decipher human behaviour and events? In the eyes of the world I became this internationally acclaimed analyst of the Hunter High School siege – this celebrity psychologist. But when I’m alone, there in my office, just me and that nameplate, the doubts reign supreme and all the old questions echo once more in my mind.

I pick again at the mental scab of my guilt and let the accusations bleed into my conscience. If only, what if, what should I have done instead? The terrible and tormenting Triplets of Regret – Should Have, Could Have and Would Have. Should I not have known? Could I not have predicted? How would I defuse the crisis if only I had it to do all over again? How many lives might I have saved?

Perhaps my only true qualifications are that I just happened to be there, and I just happened to survive.

As a kid I had no ambition to be a psychologist. No special gifts of observation or discernment. No ambition at all, really. Former classmates now looking through their old high school yearbooks would be hard-pressed to link my face or name to any exceptional talents, accomplishments or, indeed, even participation. I endured high school, grateful for my cloak of anonymity.

The average student, the middle of the bell curve – that was me. Some might have even said that mediocrity was my home. But I never felt at home in high school at all. I was uncomfortable even in my own comfort zone. Years ago I thought I was the only one. Perhaps we all did. Now I know better.

I was the youngest of three, with my two older brothers always looking out for me. They led the way, their suggestions and experience sparing me from having to break any new ground of my own.

I wore their reputation and achievements like so many hand-me-down clothes. I didn’t know you were David Bennetton’s sister. Do you share Keith’s musical talents? If you’re a Bennetton, you must be great in the pool. Some people seek the limelight, I preferred their shadows.

I was always considered a tomboy. But that label, like most labels, is much more convenient than it is true. Insecure would have been much more accurate. I was only a tomboy because I followed my brothers. If I had two older sisters, I would have been described as feminine. I just followed. I was a follower.

My brothers tried tying reins onto their bicycles, I tied reins onto my tricycle. They were cowboys, I was a cowgirl. When they played army commandos in the pool, I was the sentry they killed. They got plastic archery sets for Christmas, and I was their target.

But we all learnt from experience and, after my thirteen stitches and a broken arm, Daddy warned them to stop abusing me or he’d break their necks.

When the boys finally got their air rifles, I became a shooting partner. When they graduated to using .22s on our rural property, I learnt about ballistics and was fascinated – perhaps because it was all so scientific and predictable. Precise muzzle velocity, a trajectory you can track, a tin can target whose wounds you can examine in your hand. You can diagnose the pathology of human tissue damage – suture, operate, and amputate as necessary – but who can know the true depth of psychological damage? Challenging to quantify, difficult to treat, perhaps impossible to ever truly heal.

We do the best we can with the hand that we’re dealt. But how much does that hand shape our destiny? What if I had been the oldest, or one of three girls? Would my world have been entirely different, perhaps? What about my destiny? What about Hunter High? I guess I’ll never know.

Me, I responded to the hand that I was dealt by becoming Daddy’s Little Girl, and The Peacemaker between two troublemaking boys and my father’s heart condition. I’d lay awake at night, The Nurse, listening to Daddy snoring from his bedroom across the hall. I confidently assumed that no one could snore through a heart attack – I don’t know where I picked that up – but I’d set my alarm repeatedly through the night and stuff it under my pillow to muffle the sound. When it woke me, I’d sit up and listen – still snoring, still alive. Then I’d reset the alarm while everyone else in the family slept soundly.

With no ambition to speak of, I graduated from high school, got a job in the local credit union, lived at home, and saved my money. I wanted to travel the world and meet people. I loved to listen to them. Perhaps because when they were talking, I didn’t have to. Perhaps because Daddy always said that he could figure out any problem just by talking it over with me.

So I travelled, and I listened, and I discovered that people everywhere love an open ear.

I started thinking about becoming a counsellor, but neither of my brothers had gone into counselling, and the maze of counselling responsibilities seemed too daunting for me to venture into on my own. One brother was a bank manager, and the other a teacher.

I loved to travel, so I became a high school geography teacher. How’s that for a career decision? For how many of us is destiny determined by the flip of a coin, a chance meeting, a flighty decision, family factors, or simply fear of the unknown?

Often it takes a crisis, a death, or a confrontation with mortality, before we ever really consider the responsibilities and consequences of our decisions.

It’s funny, how I didn’t consider classroom teaching to be as daunting a responsibility as I had counselling. Sad, how I didn’t even reflect on my own discomfort and lack of performance as a high school student before qualifying as a staff member myself.

High school teachers must be trained and qualified in their chosen subject areas, yet their skills at inspiring and supporting their students usually go unquestioned, unassessed, unchallenged, and undeveloped.

I might have been an unexceptional teacher with only mediocre classroom skills, but I did listen to the kids, and that made me an exceptional adult. Students would hang around after class, ask for me at the door of the teachers’ staff lounge, and keep in touch after graduating. Daddy’s Little Girl, The Peacemaker, The Nurse.

I taught not only geography but also social sciences. Social sciences led me to sociology, psychology, and back to my interest in counselling. I extended my studies online, attended tutorials and seminars at the university, and became an accredited school counsellor.

Like all graduates before me, I studied for years to qualify for a job I had never even performed. And then I even had the audacity to function in that aspect of my job description that included career counselling – if you can believe it – and I guided each poor, unsuspecting student seeking advice in my office to make as ill-informed a career decision as had I.

I began my work as a high school counsellor on rotation between three Newcastle schools. Hunter High was one of the three.

I listened to the students, reconciled, and pacified. I monitored their emotional pulse, their psychological vital signs. Or so I thought.

After the siege at Hunter High, I was the obvious choice to counsel with the students. Then the Department of Education asked me to sit in on the Coroner’s Inquest and compile a report on the causes and aftermath of the siege, which formed the basis of the State Inquiry and, ultimately, the Australian Royal Commission into Teenage Stress and Mounting School Violence.

I eventually developed that study into my master’s thesis in psychology entitled The Sociological and Psychological Context and Factors as Background and Precipitators of the Hunter High School Siege.

That thesis was then published and, when it became an international best-seller in the academic world, I became a celebrity psychologist.

But it was all very clinical and antiseptic. The system sheds no tears, makes no apologies, and suffers no regrets. The New South Wales Police, Department of Education, and Ministry of Justice all did their due diligence. Reports were filed, recommendations made, guidelines put into place.

The police commander on the scene – who didn’t dare to enter the school himself that day, yet criticised the tactics employed by those who did – ended up writing a best-selling book, sold the movie rights for half a million dollars, retired from the police force, and now lectures and consults with police around the world.

Case closed, reports filed, movie made. But there’s just one problem. The whole story was never really told.

Each witness was only able to report their version of their experience of the siege – which was only a small part of the overall events of the day. And then every word in every report was written – every decision from every court and committee was made – by people who weren’t even there. Not in the classrooms and corridors of Hunter High. Not that day. Not on Black Friday.

Most were government employees constrained by confidentiality, physically and chronologically distanced from the events, and each contributing as only a small part of a much larger analytical team.

I was the only one who personally survived the siege and was then given unrestricted access to all evidence from all sources – police reports, eyewitness statements, taped interviews, video footage, text messages, mobile phone call recordings, transcripts of all police radio communications, forensic evidence, courtroom testimony, and inquest deliberations.

But it took me three years to truly appreciate that fact.

Slow cooking. Crock potting. Accolades, master’s degree, television talk shows, magazine interviews, and a gnawing in my stomach.

Then suddenly the glaringly obvious, that I hadn’t even considered, finally dawned on me. Not only was I the most qualified person on earth to tell the whole story – I was also the person on earth who most needed to hear it.

I was so busy, after the siege, playing the peacemaker and the nurse to all the traumatised survivors that I postponed and then neglected counselling care for myself – putting it off while I worked on inquests, and committees, and wrote my master’s thesis.

Catharsis, that’s what I need. Release and relief. Deep purging and thorough cleansing.

I need to relive that day in hindsight. I have thirsted for the time to identify, and mourn, and bury the dead. Not file numbers, or forensic photos, or snippets of testimony – but the events of the siege appreciated as a story and recounted as a story, as an episode set within the context of people’s larger life stories, a memorial to a collision of lives that lasted less than an hour.

It happened in a flash, but we thought it would never end.

It’s a story about an intersection of lives and deaths, mistakes and misunderstandings that were prohibitively expensive, and yet which continue even today in the hallowed halls of our educational institutions.

Critics may try to ban this book from our classrooms and censor its tale of terror and violence – but such a ban, I fear, would ultimately create more victims than ever fell that day at Hunter High.

Some from the educational and judicial systems have voiced their fears that such a book would only inspire other confused, angry, and unstable young students to copycat the original crimes. But I believe just the opposite – that evil, like all deadly viruses, thrives and breeds best in the dark and can only ever be destroyed if first identified, labelled, and exposed for what it is.

It’s taken three stressful years, but I’ve finally come to realise that I can never learn from a truth that is swept under the rug, and that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own response to evil.

Yesterday, when I told my publisher that I was going to write this book, she was very supportive and immediately launched into advice about format, rewrite schedules, and deadlines.

I listened politely for twenty minutes, but after I got off the phone with her I booked a cabin by the beach for four weeks, turned off my mobile phone, and sent an email advising her that I would write this story only once – for me. There will be no rewrites. Nor will there be any teak wood nameplate to mock me here in this cabin – I left it back on my desk at home.

Out of touch with everyone for four weeks here in this cabin by the beach yet, hopefully, more in touch with myself and the truth than I have ever been. Just me, my laptop, and the twelve hours of edited audio and video recordings that were used as evidence for the inquests.

What you are about to read is my retelling of the events, three years after they happened, as best I can communicate them. And that’s no simple task, because simultaneous events were experienced by different people in different locations. Therefore, I must warn you in advance that one minute of real time can seem like five or ten when recounted from eight people’s points of view – it being impossible to ever truly capture or communicate life in any word, or image, or medium.

I also warn you that if you choose to read on you will be sharing in my catharsis – and my experience of evil. Police reports and coroners’ inquests are not intended nor equipped to address evil.

My publisher began to advise me on the literary devices employed in the best-selling fictional novels about evil. But the existence and power of true evil is not fiction, certainly no source of entertainment.

It is not taught in our schools, nor recognised in our counselling – yet I walked with evil as it stalked the halls and hearts of Hunter High on that Black Friday, and then I wasted three years trying to explain and analyse it away.

Wasted lives, and wasted years.

But, now that I am finally committed to conveying the truth about what I witnessed in the corridors and classrooms during the Hunter High School siege, I am determined not to pander either to the strategies of publishers or the appetites of readers – even if that means I am never published and I end up holding the only copy of the whole story ever printed.

2

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Sydney Harbour, Bridge, and Opera House – iconic symbols all – luring millions of visitors to Australia each year from around the world, worth billions in tourist dollars.

Million-dollar views from multimillion-dollar properties.

Image, façade, spin, fantasy, fairy tale, legend – and Sydney is inhabited by some of the wealthiest and most powerful myth-makers in Australia, determined to keep the dream alive.

But the dream becomes a nightmare when the average wage earners – the consumers, the members of the home audience – embrace the fantasy, and end up believing their own propaganda. Mortgaged for life to some of the most over-inflated real estate in the world when, in truth, much of Sydney is very old, run-down, oven-hot in summer, chronically traffic-congested, poorly serviced by public transport, nowhere near the waterfront, and pockmarked by low-income Housing Commission estates – while many of Sydney’s inhabitants suffer an all-pervasive level of striving, stress, and frustration just below the surface of their lives which goes largely unnamed and unaddressed.

A constant craving, a restlessness, a lack of peace.

And the fairy tale sucks not only the lifeblood of Sydney’s residents, but also the resources of its neighbours – like Newcastle, the largest coal-exporting port in the world (a two-hour drive north of Sydney), and Wollongong, the biggest steel city in Australia (eighty minutes to the south).

It was cities like Wollongong and Newcastle that built the industrial spine of Australian wealth – employing immigrants with no other options, and horrendously underpaying them to toil in coal mines and steel works that ravaged their health and jeopardised their very lives.

And so, anger, resentment, and revenge brewed just below the surface of these blue-collar towns. The fathers and grandfathers carried industrial-size chips on their shoulders and passed them down to their sons and daughters as an inheritance – charging the next generation to never again let the wealthy and powerful take advantage of them.

Newcastle is door to the beautiful Hunter Valley, wine-growing and horse-breeding country to rival any in the world. But the vineyard, the thoroughbred, and the ocean frontage property are typically only afforded by the entrepreneurs who harness the labour, the money, and the dreams of the blue-collared masses.

Hunter High School was located on the outskirts of Newcastle, and surrounded by the Hunter Valley. Its students were mainly middle and lower class – the next generation that had ignored the warnings of their forefathers as antiquated and no longer relevant in a new age of human rights and labour laws.

But slavery takes many forms, and they were already addicted to the media, and brainwashed by advertising, to work all their lives for toys, trinkets, and a lifestyle worth far less than the lifeblood, debt, and stress demanded for their attainment.

It was Sunday night, the eighth of October, and Newcastle, Australia was shifting gears in preparation for another week. In fact, most workers and students were not just shifting but actually grinding their gears, and their teeth, at the thought of another Monday morning. Lunches were being prepared and refrigerated, clothes ironed, and homework completed at the last possible moment – often between commercials.

If only the weekend was a little longer. If only the vacation could go on forever. If only we didn’t have to grow up. Monday morning blues – like the mini-depression faced by moviegoers the world over whenever the house lights come back up, the cinema has to be cleared, rubbish swept from the floor, and reality faced once again.

Just another Sunday night for most people – but not for Leon Spitzer and his Dregs. Tonight was the launching pad for their master plan.

Most people’s coping mechanism and escape plan is an ill-defined and fragile optimism, fuelled by the weekly purchase of lottery tickets. Leon opted instead for a self-confident pessimism, and a willingness to pay any price in order to win a losing game. Leon had called a meeting of the Dregs to finalise details.

3

Leon Spitzer certainly had a flair for the dramatic, there was no doubt about that.

The vast majority of suicide notes are still handwritten affairs – even in an age of word processors. But a handwritten note would not suffice for Leon Spitzer.

In fact, his was not to be a suicide note at all but, rather, a carefully choreographed suicide production designed to shock and intended for a global audience.

Leon had done his research on the internet with all due diligence – like any other high school project – and concluded, quite rightly, that reaching a truly global viewing audience would require an Ultra High Definition, digital, broadcast-quality video camera. He had the top model GoPro Hero delivered to his home and charged to his father’s platinum credit card. Next month the proof – the evidence – would scream out at his father from his very own credit card statement.

Undeniable, embarrassing, shameful.

Leon would make his own father an accomplice! The Great Anton Spitzer, an unwitting dupe, a pawn in the destruction of his own reputation. Sublime revenge – Leon could almost taste it.

The video camera now rested in Leon’s hand – a black cube, a technological marvel similar in size and weight to a box of wooden matches (maybe two) yet capable of recording at professional, international broadcast standard for over sixty minutes on a thirty-two gigabyte, micro SD card the size of a postage stamp.

To the camera Leon had affixed a pair of Immortal Mics, one on each side. Each microphone was embedded within a moulded plastic replica of the human ear and designed to be attached to either side of a helmet or head strap in order to replicate human 3-D binaural immersive hearing. The protype mikes had been hailed by action sport enthusiasts around the globe as the ultimate audio enhancement of the GoPro’s already breathtaking digital images.

Leon made certain the GoPro was steady on its tripod, and that the reflection of his head and shoulders was centred in the lens, as he turned on the camera and smiled.

He was very photogenic, young Leon. Black shoulder-length hair with just the slightest of chemically induced golden highlights, and a seventeen-year-old face that required daily shaving even at his early age. He habitually flaunted a three-day growth of beard – just like the movie stars and models – and he always dressed in black.

His smirk, his grooming, and his attire were carefully orchestrated to project an air of neglect and apathy. Most people were fooled. But behind his cynical eyes worked the brain of a young genius – darkened by years of loneliness.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, he began, friendly and confident like a TV host – only smirking.

Leon Spitzer was a natural born leader. Money, looks, brains, charisma, vision – he had it all going for him. He even had a following, a gang, disciples.

All this potential at seventeen years of age, yet totally devoid of hope. His only vision was revenge, his only vehicle was Hunter High School. A big fish in a small pond, yet setting out to make a very big splash – a tidal wave, in fact – whose ripples would be felt around the world.

"Or should I say ‘Good evening, officers? Detectives? Inspectors?’

You police will be the first to view this video.

Followed by our next of kin – initially as proof of our involvement (they won’t believe it when they’re first told), perhaps also for purposes of identification – but ultimately in order to gain their cooperation with the investigation."

Leon had a far-off look in his eye, like a wild prophet gazing into the future. No longer smirking, he was now chillingly confident. His tone of voice a toxic and almost intoxicating blend of prophecy, promise, threat, and showmanship.

"Then some resourceful media hounds will be offered a peek ‘off the record’– perhaps as a bribe for the future, or a repayment for some past favour done for the police. They will undoubtedly plan to broadcast it. Perhaps they could film the reaction of the victims’ parents – just think of the ratings. But then the leak will be leaked. Court orders will be issued, injunctions served. ‘Classified evidence .… jeopardising an investigation’. And the footage will be pulled minutes before airing.

The police will first analyse, and then re-enact the course of events. Pathologists will time and measure, based on video footage. Lawyers will pour over the transcripts. Coroners will take notes in the courtroom, and make recommendations based on what they have seen.

Scandalised by the video indictment, the New South Wales State Government and Department of Education will follow up their own inquests with legislation, new policies, more funding, and anger management training for teachers and students.

Snippets of the video will inevitably make their way onto YouTube. The set of DVDs will become sought-after, precious, priceless – simply because they are forbidden. Eventually the video might even be broadcast with appropriate viewer discretion warnings. Several books will be written, documentary and dramatised films will be made."

Then Leon reverted to his very best Tweety Bird imitation, And to tink it aww stawted wight hewe in my humboo widdle twee house wit a few of my vewwwy cwosest fwends ….

Leon stepped slowly back from the camera to ensure a dramatic unveiling of his lair. As he grew smaller, the interior of the magnificent tree house filled the frame – lit eerily by hundreds of candles.

Gathered around a heavy, medieval-looking table in the background, behind Leon, silent and unmoving, sat his four headless Dregs.

All detail obscured by flickering candlelight and sinister shadows, the four Dregs appeared to be dressed in long, black, hooded robes – the hoods devoid of faces, and even heads. Caves of empty blackness just sitting upon their shoulders. The effect, again, was chilling.

"But please forgive my rudeness for not introducing my colleagues earlier. We are the Dregs, the scum, the offal, the slag, the entrails of society – or so you treated us. We were alienated, each of us, in our own way and through no fault of our own. So we came together – sharing our loneliness – a lonely hearts club, an anti-society, a family of orphans.

Oh, we might have worked our way back in, I suppose, but as Groucho Marx once said ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member’.

We are the Dregs. We are about to pour out the cup of our wrath, and you are about to drink it – right down to the last drops, the bitter dregs.

Perhaps a brief intro from each of our team members might now be appropriate?"

Okay with you if I begin? he asked his Dregs.

The four empty hoods nodded silently in approval, and Leon again approached the camera.

Only this time he kneeled, leaned into the lens as he adjusted the camera tenderly downward with both hands, sat on his haunches, and lowered his voice.

"My father, The Great Anton Spitzer, a legend in his own mind, is at the cutting edge of computer technology – usually communicating with his own son by email. Recognised worldwide as a success – yet, at home, a miserable failure as a husband and a father.

He only ever had two reasons to take me on a business trip: either because he really needed me to entertain the kids of a business prospect, or because my mother really needed me to stay with her.

Anton Spitzer paid his wife to leave – bribed her to abandon her only child. But two weeks later she came back. It took her two weeks to decide that I was priceless! She came back and told my father he could keep his money, that she would just have to struggle along on my two-million-dollar trust fund.

He made my mother a counter-offer that she couldn’t refuse, and when she did, he vowed that he would hound her to an early grave.

It’s not that he didn’t want to lose me, you understand, he just didn’t want to lose. Just like in business – after a certain level of financial success it was no longer about the money, it was the winning, the power, the control. He just wanted to beat someone else to the discovery, the patent, or the bid, so he could watch them lose.

So, one night, with the Spitzer legal team snapping at her heels, my mother took an overdose of sleeping pills to escape beyond the borders of my father’s global empire. I’ll never know if she just wanted to escape for the night or forever, whether it was an accidental overdose or a selfish suicide – she had always told me that she couldn’t live without me."

He paused for a while, apparently lost in his own painful memories, before resuming his address to the camera.

"You might not have heard of Anton Spitzer, but his hand has shaped your life, because his fingerprints are on every computer in the world – hardware and software, components, programs, and patents.

These are the days of digital processing, instant access, and exponential networking – but nothing of real value is passed down from generation to generation. These are days of techno-isolation and phobic insulation, when office cubicles have become the slave galleys of the twenty-first century.

I was brought up on Xbox, PlayStation, Google, Facebook, and YouTube. The only well-developed muscles in my body were in my fingers.

Entertainment, consumerism, mass media, and global marketing.

Australian teenagers wearing American baseball hats backwards – we don’t know the American cities, we don’t support the teams, and we don’t need the visors to protect us from the sun, because we never go outside. We’re too busy in the dark, all alone, talking to our disembodied friends on Facebook. Virtual friends. Cyber pseudo-relationships."

His voice trailed off into a menacing whisper as he peered deeply into the lens. "But I’m not alone here in the dark, am I? Those four seated there behind me, backing me up, are my blood brothers."

The five Dregs had assembled in Leon’s tree house, but it could easily have been a movie set – Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson to be precise, albeit a two-thirds, scaled-down version constructed when Leon was only twelve, perched nine metres off the ground on a platform anchored between two huge trees and only accessible by rope ladder. Due to its compressed scale, anyone entering the tree house looked, and felt, strangely larger than life – sometimes even disoriented and dizzy.

The tragic irony was that the Swiss Family Robinson story was all about a close-knit family who survived by the work of their own hands. In contrast, Leon’s tree house was designed by architects, built by carpenters, and never once even visited by Leon’s ever-absent business mogul of a Dad.

At the multimillionaire’s insistence, no nails had been used in its construction, only hand-carved wooden pegs. And all because Leon’s father had never even read the book. He had instinctively assumed that Pacific Island castaways would have had no access to nails but, according to the story, the Robinsons had salvaged tons of building tools and material from their shipwrecked vessel.

Leon, however, had read the book, and his silence on the matter had cost his father an additional seventeen thousand dollars and provided Leon a source of great amusement whenever he recounted the tale.

And even now, three years later, having viewed the video countless times since its first police screening, I can never help but feel voyeuristic whenever I watch that clandestine, candlelit meeting.

I remind myself, each time, that Leon intentionally shot it for public viewing, with the camera in full view of the other participants, but I am still distressed by Leon’s evil intent that his father would hear his son’s bitter indictments against him when the video was played back at later inquests. Still haunted by that guilt, that sense of complicity, that never-ending nightmare, that was also part of Leon’s plan for all his victims. An integral part.

And now let me introduce you to my Dregs ….

4

Her name was Wendy Stankowski, and that wasn’t her fault. Lots of Stankowskis had emigrated to Australia from Poland after the Second World War.

She was a solid girl, some would say big-boned, and that wasn’t her fault either.

She experienced a real growth spurt in the year or two before kindergarten – grew like a weed – and thus evolved her nickname around the house. A nickname meant to stay around the house. An expression of love. A term of endearment. Her pet name. Weed.

But names, it seemed, would wield an awesome and terrible force in Wendy’s life.

Stankowski – a name, a handle, a tool at home – would soon be sawn-off, whittled, and sanded into a weapon at school.

Stinkowski. Stinkhouse. Stink, Stank, Stunk – Wendy was taunted and haunted in every tense, and in every sense.

By Year Three, Wendy and her friend Vesna D’Ambrosi were inseparable, a name-taunted sorority of two. The victimised girls always sat beside each other in class, they shared lunches, and secrets, and sleepovers. Then, one day, Wendy even shared her pet name – after all, Vesna was like part of the family, and the pet name was another of the shared secrets that so bonded them together.

But, in Year Four, Sharon Tilden moved to the school and stole Wendy’s desk, and her best friend, in the same day. It was only shortly after, that Sharon Tilden launched the Stinkweed campaign – broken promise, stolen secret, violated friendship. The name stuck like a poison-tipped dart, and Wendy felt betrayed by both friends and family – if only they hadn’t come up with her nickname in the first place.

And there she was, Stinkweed, locked outside the safety of her home to bear the embarrassment and humiliation all alone. Abandoned, surrounded, and hounded.

A leper at the mercy of a merciless pack.

Shunned at school, Wendy then began isolating herself in her bedroom at home. She grew sullen and distant with her parents, and never really enjoyed another laugh or conversation with her father throughout all of Years Five and Six.

She immersed herself in Dolly magazines and the like – image and celebrity gospels for prepubescent girls. Her walls filled with posters of famous, beautiful, and airbrushed teen idols.

Then came another growth spurt – this time horizontally. The kilos piled on mercilessly, and her breasts developed too large and too early.

The posters came down in her room. She might not be able to silence the mocking at school, but she didn’t have to put up with it in her own home.

The nightmare that was primary school for Wendy Stankowski seemed to be highlighted by a two-pronged graduation present. During the last few months before the summer break, she was simultaneously struck by the ravages of acne, and the sudden death of her father early one morning. Wendy’s mother, Joyce, responded promptly to both crises – but they each still left their scars.

Wendy’s cheeks were red and angry by the time her mother figured out the right combination of skin care and low dose antibiotics. Wendy’s father was blue and lifeless on the bathroom floor by the time the paramedics arrived, her mother’s face still covered with his shaving cream from thirteen valiant minutes of administering CPR.

The school bus, with many of her classmates on board, drove past Wendy’s front door just as the body bag containing her father was being loaded into the morgue van. Wendy would later comment to relatives that there was something unrecognisable in all their faces. Perhaps it was compassion.

Perhaps not. Perhaps their puzzled expressions were no more inspired by compassion, than their words of torment were inspired by hatred. They were just a roaming pack, seeking a leader. A lost flock, lacking a shepherd, and looking for direction. Disappointed by parents, who had been disappointed by their parents before them. One generation lost after another.

I used to think that adolescence was just naturally a time of testing and rebellion. But not any more. Now I wonder if it’s not a time when the hordes of youth are simply hungering after leadership, like compass needles searching for true north. Where leadership, identity, purpose, and direction are provided, there seems to be a natural – and relatively painless – growth into adulthood.

What if much of the teenage rebellion in the Westernised world is simply anger against the elders who have let them down, against the preceding generation who have been negligent in seeking their own direction and passing it on?

Isolation. Insulation. Alienation – one person from another, one generation after another. Intrinsic, inherent, endemic to the twenty-first century.

Society declining, accelerating, reeling, careening, spiralling out of control.

And amidst this lack of identity and direction rises an all-consuming need to create others, outsiders whom we can distinguish from ourselves on the inside, them whom we can distinguish from us.

Someone, anyone, whom I can condemn as worse off than me.

Someone, anyone, over whom I can exercise power and thereby lessen my own feelings of powerlessness.

Consumerism at its worst: my satisfaction fuelled by dehumanising others. My identity solidified, and my feelings soothed, by robbing others of their identity and disregarding their feelings.

The false identity of belonging, the abusive power of exclusion, the simultaneous creation and destruction of the misfit.

Later, when Wendy received the condolence card signed by the thirty tormentors in her class, it seemed only surreal – not insincere, or hypocritical, or even ironic.

For overnight, it also seemed, all her anger and blame had shifted focus from God and Class 6C to Wendy herself for squandering her father’s last two years.

Her self-pity sharpened to guilt and self-loathing.

Rejection, loneliness, isolation, anger, regret, self-loathing – and her descent was now complete.

Settled on the bottom of the ocean of despair – just like a whale, she wrote in her diary. She gave up, and felt ironically relieved in her hopelessness. Relieved of all expectations.

The black clothes that she wore to her father’s funeral seemed oddly comforting – a graphic expression of her morbid soul.

When her father died – she died.

Weed never answered to the name of Wendy again.

She never returned to primary school.

She never again faced her tormentors, as a pack, on their turf, in a primary classroom.

She dyed her hair black, she wore heavy black eye