Dark secrets at the heart of one of Australia’s most elite schools: Behind the castle-like buildings, ex-students tell of horrors that left them broken men. Now the dam is about to burst
The Southport School’s campuses sprawl over 51 acres of sunlit castle-like buildings, verdant sporting ovals and playing fields, tennis courts and heated swimming pools – but the imposing grandeur hides much darker secrets.
TSS, as the Gold Coast school is usually called, boasts premiers, Senators, generals, media figures and a touring squad’s worth of senior representative rugby stars, including Australian Wallaby captains, among its illustrious alumni.
The school, which charges more than $32,000 for Year 12 fees, boasts it ‘champions good men’ and on its website principal Andrew Hawkins stars in a video featuring swooping overhead shots of the magnificent facilities set to soaring choral music.
‘We’re really proud of our 120-year history and this beautiful campus we get to enjoy daily,’ Mr Hawkins, himself a TSS old boy, declares.
‘Our many traditions underpin our school spirit that makes us the respected, caring yet forward-thinking community that we are today.’
John Swoboda, who completed Year 8 to Year 12 as a TSS boarder from 1992 to 1996, knows a much darker and seamier side to the prestigious Anglican institution, having suffered sexual abuse and bullying for almost the entire time he wore its uniform.
‘It’s very showy, it’s built to impress,’ Mr Swoboda tells me of his former school, which has about 16,000 enrolments from kindergarten to Year 12.
John Swoboda attended The Southport School as a boarder from Year 8 to Year 12 from 1992 to 1996. He tells me he was abused by fellow students and a teacher
Mr Swoboda, who settled with TSS in 2023 for the abuse he suffered, tells me his family had a long connection with the school, with both his older brothers attending, along with his grandfather.
Like his brothers, Mr Swoboda left the family’s pig farm, which is about three hours’ drive inland from Bundaberg in central east Queensland, to fulfil his destiny as a TSS boarder.
‘It had always been present in my life before I attended because my brothers were there. It was always a topic of conversation,’ he says.
‘It was very impressive coming from the country, and exciting.’
However, the experience soon turned nightmarish when five boys – three from his year and two from the year above – began to target Mr Swoboda at age 12. They were taller and stronger than him. Some even had beards.
The Southport School sprawls over 51 acres of sunlit castle-like buildings and verdant playing fields. The old boys’ association is ‘spending millions on a new pavilion’ says Mr Swoboda
He adds: ‘They were huge and built like brick s***houses… They could have been in their early twenties.’
The dorms were ‘dreadfully under-supervised’, Mr Swoboda says, leaving him at the mercy of the older students.
‘It all sort of started in the open showers that the Fellows House had.
‘Year 12s are in charge, they are the people on duty, [and] a junior master might walk around for bed checks that would be done by 10pm.
‘It was usually 1am when the older students would wake me up. Those guys were always drinking in the middle of the night.’
Mr Swoboda claims he was encouraged to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana before the older boarders demanded he perform sexual acts that felt ‘terrifying’.
Mr Swoboda is pictured as a ‘TSS’ boy alongside his mother. His brothers were also boarders
‘I was threatened a few times by the boys. They said, “If anything leaks out, we will f**king kill you,”‘ he tells me.
‘I never said anything to anyone. There was always this constant fear, which I didn’t really let go of until quite recently.’
Despite keeping schtum, word soon spread among Mr Swoboda’s classmates.
‘I had others approach me and call me names,’ he tells me. ‘It was quite regular but I was never going to say anything (to staff).
‘It was just me. I had very few friends. I did a lot of just putting it away.’
Mr Swoboda would do everything he could to avoid the dorms and the boarding house – sometimes he would just wander around the school aimlessly – but as soon as the last bell went, it was straight to the dining hall then back to your quarters.
Mr Swoboda couldn’t bring himself to tell his family, even during weekends away with his grandparents in the Gold Coast suburb of Hope Island, or on longer breaks back on the family farm.
‘I’d kick and scream not to go back,’ he says.
‘My brothers were like, “Man up, this is what we have always done.” Mum was like, “Come on, this what your grandfather did.” Basically suck it up and shut up.’
He didn’t tell his family the truth of what was happening to him because ‘of the overwhelming fear of everything else that would come with [telling] that truth’.
Mr Swoboda kept his trauma secret from his parents until just three years ago when he lodged a compensation claim with the school.
During his final two years at the TSS, from about the age of 15, Mr Swoboda was also targeted by a predatory teacher.
‘He came up to me at dinner a couple of times,’ he explains.
‘I would always wait for everyone to go because it was always hell down at the boarding house.
‘He would say, “Are you with friends? Are you okay? What’s happening?” Then gradually it would progress to “come back to my room” and we’d chat about stuff.
‘I had the other bullying stuff going on so it was nice to get away from that – but it was a case of straight out of the frying pan into the fire.’
The teacher began showing Mr Swoboda a drawer full of pornographic material.
‘He would get them out and say, “What do you like here?” and, “What do you like there?”‘ Mr Swoboda tells me.
Mr Swoboda is pictured left with his husband Stephen on their wedding day. He did not tell his husband of the years of abuse he allegedly suffered until after they were married
‘It was classic grooming.
‘Then it became sexual. Not just at his residence but it happened at the theatre a few times. He could be quite forceful with what he wanted or what he wanted me to do.’
Over time, the teacher became ‘quite possessive’ and would ‘get really shirty’ if Mr Swoboda failed to turn up for arranged meetings or was unresponsive. In moments of anger, the teacher would threaten him with ‘no one is going to believe you’.
He would also cruelly use Mr Swoboda’s emerging sexuality against him.
‘He told me, “No one here will accept that you are gay. Your parents will hate you. Your family will hate you.” It just got really tense,’ he says.
Mr Swoboda says he was sexually abused by a teacher during his last two years at the school
Mr Swoboda said he knew his TSS experiences ‘weren’t normal’ but because sexually charged conversations with his heterosexual classmates were so commonplace in the boarding house, he rationalised what was happening to him.
‘All the other boys in the dorm were with chicks and they would talk about their sexual escapades. I internally aligned that with “this is what you do at this age” but I also knew you shouldn’t do it with a teacher.’
Mr Swoboda left TSS emotionally scarred.
‘I was very trepidatious about any sort of relationships, even friendships,’ he tells me.
‘I was pretty f**ked up in the head and really angry, angry that no one else was angry.
‘I always referred to myself as little Johnny. I blamed myself a lot for letting [the abuse] continue.’
A turning point in Mr Swoboda’s life was finding the Facebook page Lost Boys of TSS, run by Bill Edgar, who is better known as the Coffin Confessor for his unusual job of telling the secrets people want revealed at their funerals.
Mr Edgar is a survivor of sexual and physical abuse and assault at the hands of three TSS teachers while he attended the school on a scholarship from 1981 until 1984.
He settled with the school in September 2023 for a sum that he cannot disclose for legal reasons, although it was reported he was seeking $2.3million.
Bill Edgar (pictured), otherwise known as the Coffin Confessor, experienced sexual and physical abuse from three TSS teachers and years later reached a settlement with the school
‘Bill was like, “This is unlawful. This is not you,”‘ Mr Swoboda said.
‘It’s taken me a really, really long time to see it from a different perspective. It was sort of like, “S**t, relax, it’s not your fault, not your fault.”‘
From that day on, Mr Swoboda resolved he ‘could no longer participate in silence’.
‘I am not judging any other survivor [for staying silent], but I need to tell what happened to me,’ he says.
After engaging lawyers Slater and Gordon to lodge a compensation claim, Mr Swoboda found the drawn-out time period TSS took to respond ‘retraumatising’ and turned to drugs to numb the pain.
‘I recently had a stint in rehab, a couple of months ago,’ Mr Swoboda tells me.
‘I thought I had a handle on things. I’d always just taken care of this myself but as soon as you start taking things out you can’t put it back.
‘They have got to go somewhere. That kind of processing and reliving [trauma]. I’m still very lucky to remain married.’
It was during negotiations with TSS that Mr Swoboda was told he could not see the file of the teacher he alleges abused him because it had been damaged in a flood.
He also learned there were other complaints from students against the same teacher regarding inappropriate behaviour at about the same time of his alleged abuse.
Mr Swoboda (pictured with his husband) says it took years to shed his anger, shame and guilt
The teacher’s employment was terminated in the dead of night many years ago but the school claimed this was unrelated to any complaints made against him by students.
Using his skills as a fraud investigator for Services Australia, Mr Swoboda tracked the teacher down online and discovered he was working at another school, so decided he had to report him to police.
Police have since paused the investigation due to the emotional toll it was taking on Mr Swoboda, but it’s understood the teacher no longer works at that school.
Mr Swoboda’s settlement with TSS was about $149,000 including costs, about half of which went to lawyers.
Peter Jackson (pictured right), a rugby league star who played for Queensland and Australia, died of a heroin overdose at 33. His history of being abused at TSS only came to light later
‘It was never about the money; it just needed to come out,’ he says.
‘They said, “Would you like an apology?” and I said, “What the f**k would they be apologising for? I just walked out of there and got drunk.’
Mr Swoboda says that, unlike many victims of child abuse, he has been able to maintain some semblance of a normal life, including regular employment.
‘I am proud that I have been able to do that and I’ve met some really incredible people on the way that have just been amazing and without them it would have been a very different path for me,’ he says.
‘I am very happy with where I am.’
He credits his husband Stephen, whom he has known since 2001, with being a pillar of support, even though he kept his childhood trauma to himself until recently.
‘I told him just before I told my parents and after we got married,’ Mr Swoboda says.
Mr Edgar says he has spoken to ‘hundreds’ of former TSS students and most experienced some sort of sexual and physical abuse
He has also shared his secret with other family members.
‘It took my brothers a very long time to open up to me,’ he explains. ‘When I told them, they were like stunned mullets. They are very country, very blokey. But that’s cool – I gave them some space.
‘They had their own tales of abuse, too, really violent physical abuse from students and teachers alike.’
Mr Swoboda points to the Anglican Archdiocese of Brisbane, which runs TSS, having the highest number of abuse claims against it of any comparable body investigated by the 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Mr Swoboda says the school’s priorities are evident from the old boys’ association ‘spending millions on the new pavilion where they can watch rugby’ instead of investing in cleaning up the school’s history of toxic culture.
‘You have such a power for good but you do nothing. It’s phenomenal,’ he adds.
Peter Jackson, who played top-grade rugby league for Queensland in State of Origin and as an Australian Kangaroo in the 1980s and 1990s, is just one of the constellation of sports stars produced by TSS.
Jackson died of a heroin overdose in 1997 and afterwards it was made public he had been a victim of sexual abuse while he was in his early teens boarding at TSS.
Daily Mail Australia has been shown a list by Mr Edgar of 17 other men who took their own lives after allegedly suffering sexual and physical abuse at TSS.
Mr Edgar tells me he has spoken to ‘hundreds of TSS old boys and most were victims of some sort of abuse’.
He previously told the Courier Mail he knows of 113 abuse victims from the school.
‘TSS has genuinely refused to acknowledge the abuse and has continually called victims troublemakers – none more so than myself – which shows how toxic TSS continues to be towards victims,’ Mr Edgar says.
‘While I received a settlement, I did not receive justice.
‘But I did get my revenge by kicking in the doors and exposing the horrific abuse of children at The Southport School – even though it took me 40 years.’
As I was preparing this story, I was approached by another man, John, wanting to share his experience of being physically abused at TSS by ‘sadistic prick’ teachers who administered constant canings in the 1980s.
The man said he walked on ‘eggshells’ during his time at the school, always fearful of bumping into a particular tormentor teacher who liked to take boys into his office to menacingly flex a cane and show them a range of others he could use.
John, who is in mediation with TSS, told me there were ‘many, many other boys’ who experienced physical and/or sexual abuse at the school.
Although he counted himself lucky for avoiding abuse of a sexual nature, he said the years of beatings had a profound effect on his life. He went off the rails once he left TSS and sought refuge in drugs and alcohol.
The Southport School has been contacted for comment.
