My First University: The Pride Before The Shame

MY FIRST UNIVERSITY : THE PRIDE BEFORE THE SHAME

From taking night high school
classes in Prahran
after years of working since
finishing the technicians Leaving Certificate
course in metallurgy
with turning and fitting
at Ferntree Gully Technical School,
and my traditional
staunchly religious
and conservative peasant small-farm upbringing,
at least
after I realised that you had to
tell the examiners what they wanted to hear
(which was a leftist take on language and ideas and history)
if you wanted to get good marks,
and in that way
I so gained results
high scoring enough to give me entrance
into Monash University
to do an Arts Degree
in English, History, Philosophy & Politics.

So when I first went
to university
in 1977 and sat in
my tutorials in Politics 101,
or was it in Philosophy 101 ?
in the Ming (Menzies) Wing at Clayton Campus,
I was proud to be there,
coming from such a background as mine,
a background like no other.

I was lonely, for
I had no peer.
So I went to that campus
like an alien as if
to gain an advantage
- gathering intelligence
on them.

But then, I
was surprised to find
a fellow inmate in those classes
who was of another class again.

Gavril was someone who
held deeply conservative views
and had still got in to university
somehow against the odds,
odds that soon showed their hand
in the fact that the tutor a
nd all the other class of inmates
in that tutorial except me
attacked Gavril every time
he opened his clever mouth
with a telling
and pertinent conservative critique
of some aspect of the leftist dogma
and line that was being peddled
as objective truth.

For I was silent.

Gavril's brilliant but
lonely stance often became a strident one.
Which made him seem less cultured
in other's eyes. And even,
shame-facedly, in mine.

But the bullying irked me,
as the closed-ranks cabal
forceful mindset of the tutorial class
frightened me.

I was troubled so far
I did not sit the exams
intending to desert
that war and drop out.

I now regret that.
And I wonder what became
of Gavril whom I should have befriended,
but did not because I was confused
about what to believe.

As I see it now my silence
was a thing of cowardice
of which I am now ashamed.

Now, too late,
I would be Gavril's supporter.
His friend.