Random thought – did anyone notice someone on the street say when they were out and about who they thought had been ‘caned’? I’m probably talking maybe up to the 1970s?
Maybe not just sporting a pale or red face, but an uncomfortable walk?!
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Actually, only a couple of years ago, I was travelling home on the train one evening and there was a family on the opposite seats to me. The boy was about 10 years old and he was kneeling on the seat looking out of the window. His tee-shirt had ridden up slightly and he was showing a small bit of “builders bum.” I was certain I could see what can only be described as a long welt across the top of his bottom. It definitely looked like a cane mark, but I could never be sure. Whatever, the family were getting on quite well and there seemed no friction. Perhaps spankos only see what the want or hope to see!
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Somewhere here if I recall correctly, though as yet I have failed to find it, there is an anecdote about a Australian schoolgirl observed some years ago, at I think a tram stop of all places, lifting her dress to display cane marks to her schoolgirl companions. Memory urges me to think that it was contributed by a normally reliable contributor, but alas it will not reveal who.
If perchance my memory is correct and the said contributor still contributes, this thread appears to merit a repost. Meantime in idle moments I shall continue to try likely search patterns.
There are of course other posts here concerning similar activities by schoolgirls including a notorious one from the very early days of the forum involving a schoolgirl from the alma mater of very sadly missed much more recent contributor AliceOttley. That one was eventually admitted to be a hoax.
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I do have a slightly puzzling story of my own that I am not sure whether I have related here. I was in a newsagent near Sydney University around 1970 and a girl about 14 in an untidy school uniform was recounting to a friend how she had been forced over a desk and given 4 strokes of the cane. She was hostile at the woman perpetrator but it seemed more about the rough treatment than the caning.
I had the strong impression that it was a school caning. I didn’t really think about it again until this group. It would have been highly unlikely to have been a state school as CP of girls was banned in state high schools (and I think very rare) and the nondescript uniform would not have been tolerated in any of the Australian private schools of that era (or now).
So in retrospect my best guess would have been a less prestigious Catholic girls’ high school and the cane wielder may well have been a nun. To partly back this up, one girl at a local (northern Sydney) Catholic girls’ high school recounted a case where she slid down a bannister straight into the path of a nun. The latter repeatedly thrashed her legs with the cane she was holding.
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Thank you. I wish I had your memory – or your facility with the Forum search engine – or both! Having located the relevant posts on the basis of your information I am particularly annoyed to find that I actually posted on the incident, and I couldn’t even locate my own post!
Rightly or wrongly I did regard Rodney Bacon as reliable and in September 2010 he posted on the incident here. It was actually at a bus station in Parramatta not a tram stop as I thought, and he says that the girl was being questioned by her companions and flicked up her gingham summer dress to display the cane marks.
rebeccaredlands then responded here, saying that the school was probably the Tara Anglican School for Girls. Sadly after the affair of the punishment book entries and its aftermath I cannot be quite as positive about the bona fides of rebeccaredlands as I am about Rodney Bacon‘s. I suspect that (s)he may in fact have been another then prominent contributor. But I could be wrong.
A couple of years later, in December 2012, Rodney Bacon again posted on the bus station incident here, this time giving rather more detail of what he saw. I responded in the subsequent post pointing out the response by rebeccaredlands to his earlier post. It is annoying that the old links no longer work due to the move from Network54 to Tapatalk. I really do think Tapatalk would have been better employed fixing up cross linking rather than setting up those silly opening post quotes on every contribution in the then existing threads!
The incident you describe in your contribution #5 above is interesting and certainly seems to confirm that in Australia outwith the public education system in New South Wales, just as in Victoria, the use of SCP which required bending over wasn’t unknown for girls in private schools. If rebeccaredlands were still around I’m sure (s)he would give you chapter and verse on the school likely to have been attended by the girls you observed!
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i talked(wrote in the general direction of) to a woman in an Australian metal band on either napster or audiogalaxy’s forums that said he had been caned in a religious school there in the early 90s… about 20 years ago, unfortunately i didn’t ask for details
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Am I correct please in assuming that your #7 above should have said ‘…. she had been caned in a religious school ……’?
If so I am not surprised. Like the US Australia is divided into relatively autonomous states and territories, each of which had different laws and regulations on SCP at different times. Further, as in the UK, and I think also the US, the situation often differed between ‘state’ schools and private schools, sometimes I think in the case of Australia between religious and non-religious private schools. I hope Oliver_Sydney will correct me if I’m wrong.
In the past we had two excellent and most interesting Australian contributors. There is an unproven possibility that they were the same person. Certainly both had an encyclopedic knowledge of Australian and British education. Other than the claimed employment status of one of them they almost invariably proved correct on verifiable matters. One of them drew up a table of Australian private girls schools where there was evidence that girls had been caned in recent years. In some cases schools had abandoned and then later reinstated the cane.
I will try to find the post when I feel in the mood for an abortive search. I suspect it will be abortive because I cannot recall any unique words or phrases in the post and the chart itself would have been on a hosting site and is almost certainly no longer accessible.
I do though recall that he posted to the effect that evidence was emerging that girls had been caned on the bare (bottom not hand) at one of the schools in recent years and he expected to possibly be able to quote this in a book he was always near to publishing. As the Sherpas are alleged to say, “Maybe true, maybe not true, better you believe!” Or not as the case may be, as the Sherpas are of course talking about alleged dangers in the mountains not girls being caned on the bare! Next time you communicate with the woman in the Australian metal band ask if ..