This is an ABC podcast.

Every high school has its groups.

Athletes, cool kids, nerds, misfits.

It's kind of a cliche, but it's true.

Dr Mark Williams' group were the truants.

Yeah, my in-group was the wrong in groupgroup for kids at that age to be involved in.

So, yeah, we used to go down, we used to go fishing and smoking pot most days rather than actually going to school.

Mark grew up in the town of Colac in the Western District of Victoria back in the 70s and 80s.

Very insular town. It was a very rough town.

I've heard it's much better now.

But back then it wasn't somewhere that really liked strangers.

And what was your high school like?

It was rough.

One day, in his rough high school, in this rough insular town, a new kid arrived.

And he was from Canada, and he was picked on brutally.

Within, I would say, a day or two, he was, yeah, picked on because of his accent,

and because he was different, and there wasn't anyone different in our town.

He actually ended up moving out of town very quickly afterwards.

His whole family moved out of town.

And so was it mostly just sort of verbal picking on this person or did it escalate to physical as well?

Yeah, no, it was physical fairly quickly. I mean, there was a lot of physical fights at the school.

Teachers weren't really out and about much. And so, yeah, no, it went physical very quickly.

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