I went to Sydney Boys High School, which was a single-sex school as the name may suggest. So was Sydney Girls High School, obviously, but we were adjacent to each other out there at Moore Park, so there was a fair bit of mixing going on between the two. We managed to coexist.
Unlike these Newington College alumni having a normal reaction to the news that NC is planning on taking in female students…
A Sydney barrister and Newington College old boy leading the fight against the private school’s coed shift has sent an impassioned email to alumni, detailing his plans to fly to Tonga this week to lobby King Tupou VI on the issue. […]
In the email, seen by Guardian Australia, Morgan wrote: “I am flying to Tonga on Saturday, nothing is clear, but I am working on meeting with the King of Tonga to explain we are fighting for a tradition in which they are important.”
Newington’s brother school, Tupou College, is in Tonga.
“It’s hard to keep fighting but myself and a lot of people on this link have worked very hard to fight against the bullshit that is destroying a school we love,” Morgan wrote.
In the email, Morgan also encourages the recipients to “never give up” and to oppose the school’s “strategic direction”.
“We will need to show like at the SGM the silent majority disagree with the ‘Strategic Direction’ aka ‘transgender midgets get free schooling paid for by hard working normal people’. What a joke.”
In the midst of this hysteria, the article includes a photo of Tupou—whose father is apparently a Newington old boy, hence the otherwise baffling idea of getting Tonga mixed up in this nonsense—at the UN, addressing the general assembly in 2019. I feel somehow that, despite the family connection, his majesty might feel that sort of thing is more befitting his position than getting involved with this tedious gang of paranoid reactionary shits. I could be wrong about that, of course, and should be prepared for disappointment.
Anyway, I said SBHS and SGHS engaged in mixing, and that occasionally included classes as well… such as my year 11 and 12 German class where we had an honest to goodness girl in the class with us. I don’t know if I ever knew exactly why this was so, but there she was anyway. And how did the boys react to this situation, this invasion of the distaff into our hitherto all-male gathering? By getting on with things. We had work to do in that class and we all got on with it like adults. Which we weren’t quite at that time, but somehow in 1991 and 1992 we were more adult than Dallas Morgan and these other dickheads. I have my issues with my time at SBHS but I’m still glad I went there rather than Newington…
