THE NAKED CITY: RAH-RAH THE OLD CRANBROOKIANS

Cranbrook – it’s one of Sydney’s most prestigious private schools, founded back in 1918, with a motto that reads “to be rather than to seem to be”. With annual fees around $40,000 for the senior students, it’s only affordable for a highly privileged slice of society, but in the past few weeks it’s been in the news for all the wrong reasons. An ABC investigation triggered the resignation of the school principal over claims he ignored the past conduct of one of his teachers relating to sexually explicit emails.

Whether you like or dislike select private schools like Cranbrook, one thing is for sure. Over the years the school has produced a fascinating list of so called ‘old boys’ ranging from a Nobel prize winning novelist to a number of highly original artists and a disgraced corporate crook. We are used to seeing our exclusive colleges generating a regular supply of conservative politicians, judges, lawyers, high ranking public servants and captains of industry. Cranbrook is no exception.

The media and casino dynasty of Kerry Packer, Clyde Packer and James Packer passed through its hallowed halls as did cashed up Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. All  have gone on to make millions, unlike fellow Cranbrookian Rodney Adler who was jailed for two and a half years in 2005 for financial fraud and his role in the multibillion-dollar collapse of the insurance giant HIH. You can’t hold an old Cranbrook boy down, however, and after serving his twenty year ASIC ban as a company director, Adler is back in business, this time supposedly ‘being’ rather than ‘seeming to be’.

When it comes to topping the music charts we are more used to working class lads like Jimmy Barnes and Johnny Farnham rather than the graduate of a toff public school. Singer Billy Field, whose album Bad Habits reached No. 1 on the Kent Music Report in 1981, was definitely an exception. Raised on a large sheep and cattle property in the Riverina he went on to complete his secondary education at Cranbrook and become both a highly successful singer, producer and recording studio owner with the now legendary Paradise Studios.

In the late 1940s and throughout the ‘50s, the renowned Australian artist, Justin O’Brien was the art master at Cranbrook, and amongst his pupils were Martin Sharp and Peter Kingston. The story has it that they both met flicking clay at each other in one of Justin’s classes forging a friendship that later saw them collaborate at the communal artists’ hangout, the Yellow House in Kings Cross and work on the restoration of Luna Park’s Coney Island. They both went on to become two of this city’s most creative, innovative and at times eccentric painters and graphic artists, as well as campaigners for the preservation of many of the city’s heritage buildings.

Best known for his paintings of Sydney Harbour, Kingston was also a wonderful, filmmaker and cartoonist, contributing regularly to Oz magazine along with its co-founder Sharp, and venturing into the world of early Australian pop art with his paintings and moulded sculptures of the Phantom. He died in 2021, aged 78 and left behind a remarkable legacy of work.

When it came to the pop art of the period, one name really stood out and that was Kingston’s fellow school mate Martin Sharp. Sharp’s major obsessions, lovingly portrayed in his paintings and drawings were Luna Park, Tiny Tim, the Sydney Opera House and the chalk inscription of ‘Eternity’ which surfaced on the pavements of Sydney from 1932 to 1967. Sadly, Sharp died all too early aged 71 but his works evoke a remarkable time period in this city.

Author and playwright Patrick White who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973, spent a couple of his early school years beginning in 1920 at Cranbrook whilst actor, playwright and novelist, Sumner Locke Elliott enrolled at the school some ten years later. Elliott is reported as hating his time at Cranbrook although it was there that an English teacher encouraged him to take up acting and audition for a part in a radio play. After his move to the USA in 1948 he became a successful television playwright before turning his hand in the early ‘60s to a whole series of critically acclaimed novels.

Despite the recent scandal Cranbrook is gradually moving to becoming co-educational, and perhaps in fifty years time the alumni will include a list of women to rival some of the artists, authors and even corporate bad guys that the school has knocked out since its foundation in 1918.