Burn after reading

Wednesday, 3rd December 2008

School-leavers and their HSC bonfires excepted, we’re not a book-burning nation, says Matthew Fishburn

The Gideons came to my school when I was 13. The whole school gathered in the quadrangle for the headmaster’s comically lacklustre introduction, before we trudged past a trestle table and were handed the familiar little red books. Passions ran high at lunch that day as boys in short sleeves proceeded to lob their miniature bibles at each other across the canteen.

It was only a matter of time before there was the predictable escalation, and a few of the more daring began to tear pages out and spit on their copies. I was shocked, but I can’t unpack exactly why: was it the blasphemy or just the ingratitude? Was it the destruction of simply any book, or the destruction of just that one in particular? One thing is clear: I was not much of an iconoclast.

And yet, nor am I particularly surprised by the current vogue for pyromania in Australia, as students finishing their leaving examinations celebrate with ‘HSC bonfires’. One has even got himself in the papers, as reporters enjoy the travails of Victor Xiong, a student at Sydney Technical High School in the city’s south-west. Xiong has been organising a bonfire which caught the imagination of Facebook, and while he had originally intended ‘a small thing our own little group wanted to do to let off steam, for fun, to burn our notes and stuff’, it has got a little more attention than he expected (2,642 ‘confirmed guests’ when I checked).

Understandably impressed by such biblical numbers, Xiong contacted an events organiser, hoping to stage a party at Darling Harbour, complete with a bonfire and fireworks. But his party-planners appear to have chickened out, leaving the student and his friends trying to organise a new event at the last minute, all the while being heckled by scores of restless and unsympathetic Facebookers. ‘If it doesn’t happen it will be pretty awful,’ Xiong is quoted as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald.

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