One of the challenges that faces any society is how boys will become men. In many societies the passage is mapped and enacted through ritual initiations or through military training.
It also periodically causes great anxiety. In Cambodian camps after the Pol Pot years the refugees wanted education above all else. They feared that their children were becoming monsters. In Australia, too, the panic about Sudanese young men and the punitive treatment of boys in the justice system reflect the same anxiety.
The rising number of young men incarcerated for domestic violence, too, points to their stunted view of manhood and to the lack of good role models and of community engagement in their formation to manhood.
Two recent books encourage reflection on different aspects of the passage from boys to men. The centennial history of Newman College in Melbourne underlines the founding mission of the college to form Catholic leaders in the professions and so in public life.
The early students, all male, were privileged in having the opportunity for a university education. One of the themes of the history is the place that humiliating initiations and heavy drinking played historically in the life of the college, as they did in most university colleges. They are seen as recurrent features of the path that boys followed in becoming men.
The narrator in Tim Winton's most recent novel, The Shepherd's Hut, is Jaxi, a boy living in a small Western Australian town. He is regularly bashed by his drunken father, almost friendless, taciturn, violent, at school, and is caught having sex with his cousin, Lee. After discovering his father dead, and fearing he will be blamed for it, he escapes into the bush.
In his struggle to survive he is sustained by his memory of Lee and his hope to join her, and reflects intermittently on his life. Through an edgy relationship with Fintan, an old priest exiled to live in a shepherd's hut, and the rituals of place and daily living, he eventually comes to some awareness of where, what and who he is.
"A central element in the transition of boys to men lies in conceiving and building equal and respectful relationships with young women."
The magic of the book lies in the narrative voice. Jaxi's language is made for conflict — coarse, violent and dismissive. But he is essentially honest and, when he thinks of Lee, tender. As he focuses on survival in the bush he finds words and a rhythm to describe the world around him, and his experiences of thirst, thirst quenched, killing to eat, digging and walking. His exchanges with Fintan, who talks incessantly to avoid self-revelation, enable him also to find words to understand himself and what he wants for his life.
The modelling of manhood offered to Jaxi by his drunken and violent father and to Newman students by initiation rituals and heavy drinking is one of toughness, and taciturnity, where the closest approach to intimacy and connection was through alcohol soaked camaraderie. Jaxi hates his father and his drinking, but learns to endure his beatings and to beat up his peers who lean on him.
The Newman history suggests that initiations interested students only in the first years of college. Older students grew out of it. That may reflect the more mature relationships they had formed with young women as equal human beings, moving beyond the fear and idealising that characterised their entry to university.
This place of relationships to women in the growth to male maturity is echoed in Jaxi's story. The energy for his journey to self-discovery came out of an idealised but tender relationship with Lee, which was both counterpoint and challenge to the violence that marked his other relationships. His resilience and conviction that he was an instrument of God for good were shaped by growing inwardness and self-reflection and put at the service of love. He was in with a chance of finding himself as an adult.
This suggests that a central element in the transition of boys to men lies in conceiving and building equal and respectful relationships with young women. This requires mentoring and modelling by adults, particularly where, like Jaxi, they have grown up in violent and dysfunctional families.
Many of the messages boys receive from media and from their peers is that women are essentially objects for exploitation. The modelling that often shapes their relationships to women and their treatment of them takes the form of violent pornography. It plays into boys' own concealed fears for their own sexuality and capacity to develop relationships. They identify their masculinity with power over women and with violence towards them.
If this is so, public Australian attitudes to vulnerable young men will exacerbate the situation. Few resources are given to help families raise boys and to schools to support them in becoming resilient but not violent, loving but not exploitative, strong but not authoritarian. Instead, they are feared, neglected, locked up and demonised if they behave badly. It is no wonder so many end up in prison. They deserve better of us.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.