Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

A nagging thought is that had Dr Toben been a homosexual, female or
black, a vociferous lobby group might well have already precipitated a
review. Perhaps incompetence of sorts does feature in his sad story. The
question is, whose? And how does a person caught up in a system like this
ever clear his name, once given that it deserves to be cleared?
The Age columnist, Michael Barnard, gave my story his full treatment and
this put me squarely in the so-called right-wing camp. Barnard was known
as the fascist at the Age, a left-wing newspaper. However, now with the left–
right divide losing its significance Barnard and the Age merely reflected a
thoughtful value system that education institutions had lost when they
adopted this silly notion of wishing to deliver ‘value-free’ educational
services to their ‘clients’.
After my appearance in the County Court, and its judgements of 27 January
and 10 February 1989 – and the 20 March 1990 Full Supreme Court
Appeal – there was a media lull. I had the dismissal declared invalid but I
had by now hit the establishment brick wall. Lawyer Geoffrey Gronow
advised me, ‘Pack your things and try teaching in the Northern Territory.
You won’t get back into the game here in Victoria. You’ve had a significant
victory over the bureaucrats who did you in!’. But I was not one to run from
anything, was I?
*
My case was aired nationally in Frank Devine’s column in the Australian on
18 April 1991. Frank’s contributions to a civilised debate ended with his
death in 2009.
An education experience of the worst kind
…You take my life
When you take the means
whereby I live.
That is from The Merchant of Venice. The lines - and, in fact, the entire
play - have painful relevance for Fredrick Toben, unemployed school
teacher of Goroke, Victoria.
Toben is not, unfortunately, the only 47-year-old person now out of work,
in debt and hovering on the edge of despair. But he is probably the only
one able to put part of the blame on Shakespeare.
In 1983, as a newly hired ‘temporary’, Toben set his Year 10 English class
at Goroke Consolidated School, located in sheep country in north-west
Victoria, to studying The Merchant of Venice.
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