The Distance Between Their Story and Mine
Goulburn Valley Grammar School (GVGS) recently published an article titled Listening, Learning and Acting, reflecting on the School’s response to historical harm, the experiences of survivors and changes it has made to its child safety and wellbeing practices.
I acknowledge the publication and the School’s willingness to speak publicly about these matters. I also think it is important to be clear about where I stand in relation to it.
I am not affiliated with GVGS and do not identify as a GVGS alumna. I am not aligned with, nor do I speak on behalf of, anyone else who may have their own experiences or claims relating to harm at the school.
Nor should the School’s public account of its history, its responses to historical harm, or its processes of listening, learning and accountability be understood as representing my experiences, views, research or assessment of those matters.
That distinction matters.
Institutions have the right to tell their histories. So do the people who lived within them.
Those histories will not always be the same.
Who gets to tell the story?
One of the questions at the centre of my current work is what happens when experiences of institutional harm move from private memory into public history.
Institutions inevitably produce narratives about themselves. They write histories, publish newsletters, commission reviews, write books such as Something Quite Noble, develop policies and describe the lessons they believe they have learned. This is part of institutional life and, where genuine reflection leads to meaningful change, it can be valuable.
But institutional accounts are still accounts.
They are produced from a particular position, using particular language and serving particular purposes. Words such as listening, learning, acting, healing, accountability and survivor-focused carry considerable moral weight. Their use does not necessarily mean that everyone involved understands the history, or the institutional response to it, in the same way.
For those whose experiences form part of that history, there can therefore be an uncomfortable tension.
You can welcome improvements in safeguarding while maintaining questions about how the past is narrated.
You can acknowledge institutional change without endorsing an institution’s interpretation of its own conduct.
You can recognise that an institution has listened without agreeing about what it heard.
And you can believe strongly in safer institutions for children today while retaining the right to critically examine what happened to children in the past.
These positions are not contradictory.
The problem of institutional silence
For many years, institutional harm was sustained not simply through the actions and inactions of individuals but through cultures of silence surrounding them.
Silence is rarely neutral.
It can protect reputations. It can preserve relationships. It can allow communities to continue functioning without confronting uncomfortable histories. It can also leave the person who refuses silence occupying a remarkably exposed position.
Speaking publicly about institutional harm therefore creates its own consequences.
The person who speaks becomes visible in ways the institution itself does not. Their life, credibility, motives and memories can become objects of scrutiny. Meanwhile, the institution remains capable of speaking through the comparatively controlled languages of policy, governance, improvement and reflection.
This asymmetry interests me enormously and poses a number of questions.
What happens when one person tells a story publicly before an institution is prepared to tell its own?
What happens when that institution eventually begins incorporating the language of survivor testimony, historical harm and accountability into its public identity?
And what happens to the person whose experiences helped force questions into the open?
These are not questions unique to one school. They sit within a much larger history of how schools, churches, sporting organisations, governments, police forces and other institutions have responded to historical abuse.
Independence matters
For that reason, maintaining the independence of my own work is important to me.
My writing is not an institutional project.
It is not an authorised history of GVGS, nor is it intended to represent the experiences of every person who attended the School.
It is also not written on behalf of other people who may have their own experiences or claims relating to harm there.
My work emerges from my own experience, archival material, historical research, legal records, cultural analysis and a much broader investigation of gender, power, consent and institutional authority.
That independence allows me to ask questions that institutional narratives may not ask of themselves.
It allows contradiction to remain contradiction.
It allows uncomfortable histories to remain uncomfortable.
And it allows me to examine not only what institutions eventually say about the past, but what happened during the years in which certain things could not—or would not—be said.
From one institution to a larger history
My current book moves considerably beyond the history of one school.
I am writing about institutional abuse, consent and rape culture in the twentieth-century regional Victorian town of Shepparton.
The project asks how particular understandings of girls, sexuality, authority, reputation and consent became culturally possible and institutionally sustainable.
Schools form part of that history, but so do families, policing, law, media, class, gender, small-town social structures and the sexual politics of the late twentieth century.
I am particularly interested in the distance between the language available to us now and the language available to girls then.
Today we readily speak about grooming, power imbalances, institutional betrayal, child safeguarding and trauma-informed practice. Those concepts provide important ways of understanding experiences that previous generations often struggled even to name.
But applying contemporary language retrospectively is not enough.
I want to understand the world in which these experiences occurred: what adults knew, what institutions considered normal, what girls were expected to tolerate, how reputation operated, how sexual knowledge was understood, and how ideas about consent functioned before many of the frameworks we now take for granted entered public consciousness.
That requires something more complicated than deciding whether the past meets the standards of the present.
It requires asking how the past made certain forms of harm possible in the first place.
More than listening
Listening matters. Learning matters. Acting matters. But words matter too.
The language institutions choose when speaking about historical harm is not incidental. Words determine what is named, what remains ambiguous, where responsibility is located and, sometimes, what can continue to remain unsaid.
There is a difference between acknowledging that harm occurred and acknowledging how it occurred. There is a difference between expressing regret for the past and accepting responsibility for it. There is a difference between thanking survivors for their courage and publicly recognising the circumstances that required that courage in the first place.
There is also a difference between acknowledging “survivors” in the abstract and publicly acknowledging the particular histories, institutional actions and failures that produced survivors.
The abstract survivor can be remarkably convenient. They can be acknowledged, thanked for their courage and incorporated into a narrative of institutional learning without the institution necessarily having to say clearly: this happened here; these failures occurred; people were harmed; and we are sorry.
And the word sorry matters.
Not because a single word can repair historical harm—it cannot—but because an apology requires something that the language of reflection and improvement can sometimes avoid: an acknowledgement that something was done, that it caused harm, and that responsibility for that harm belongs somewhere.
Institutional language can be extraordinarily careful. It can acknowledge pain without naming its source, recognise courage without explaining why courage was necessary, and speak about lessons learned without identifying what, precisely, had to be learned.
That is why word choice matters.
Private apology and public acknowledgement
There is also an important distinction between what institutions are prepared to say privately and what they are prepared to acknowledge publicly.
A private apology may have personal meaning. But when the harm being addressed is institutional, private words have limits.
If an institution is prepared to acknowledge responsibility behind closed doors but unwilling to place that acknowledgement on the public record, the person who experienced the harm continues to carry the burden of telling the story publicly.
That imbalance matters.
The individual becomes identifiable. Their experiences become searchable. Their credibility, memories, decisions and motivations can become subjects of public scrutiny. The institution, meanwhile, can remain protected by generalities: the past, historical harm, survivors, lessons learned, continuous improvement.
This is why I do not believe private apology and public acknowledgement are interchangeable.
Public acknowledgement does not require the disclosure of private details, nor does it require an institution to abandon complexity. It requires something much simpler: a willingness to place on the public record sufficient acknowledgement of its own history that the burden of remembering it does not rest solely with those who were harmed.
A private apology cannot, by itself, correct a public silence.
Nor can the language of listening, learning and acting substitute entirely for acknowledgement of what made listening, learning and acting necessary.
For me, accountability therefore requires more than acknowledging “survivors” in the abstract or speaking generally about historical wrongs. It requires a willingness to name difficult histories with sufficient clarity that responsibility does not disappear into carefully constructed language.
The right to remain outside the institutional story
Remembering matters.
So does disagreement.
And so does allowing survivors and researchers to retain intellectual and narrative independence from the institutions whose histories they examine.
An institution can tell its story of change. It can describe what it believes it has learned and the actions it has subsequently taken.
I can acknowledge that story without becoming part of it.
I can recognise positive changes without accepting an institutional account as the definitive account of the past. Those positions are not incompatible. In fact, maintaining the distinction between them is essential to independent research.
My work will continue through research, writing and scholarship. I am currently writing a book examining institutional abuse, consent and rape culture in twentieth-century Shepparton, including the cultural and institutional conditions that shaped how harm was understood, ignored, challenged and eventually remembered.
There is room in the historical record for institutional accounts.
There must also be room for accounts that sit outside them.
Listening is important. Learning is important. Acting is important.
But accountability also requires naming.
Sometimes the most important part of the historical record is what an institution is prepared to say publicly—and what it still cannot bring itself to say.
Sometimes accountability begins precisely in the distance between the two.
Torriero, Mark. “Listening, Learning and Acting.” Nexus, Winter 2026, Goulburn Valley Grammar School, p. 3.
Read the Winter 2026 issue of Nexus
Barber, Stella M. Something Quite Noble: Goulburn Valley Grammar School—The First 25 Years. 1st ed. Shepparton: Goulburn Valley Grammar School Ltd, 2009.
