There is something so manic and intense about Mark Staufer in the documentary he has written and fronted about the sickening abuse of children at Auckland’s Dilworth School, where he says he was raped, viciously caned and mentally tortured by staff, that you can’t take your eyes off him.
It’s a performance, but it’s not performative. It’s as though the abuse he suffered has only just now occurred to him, and the injustice of it, the pain and the trauma of it, is as fresh as it was when it happened when he was a small boy sent to board at the handsome grounds of Dilworth.
It’s basically how it felt, said Staufer, 60, over the phone from his home in Amsterdam. He lives there to stay close to the two children he has with his ex-wife, Sara Backhouse.
The couple arrived in the Netherlands after many years in Los Angeles, and more years in Atlanta; he was a man on the move, determined to leave the past behind.
About three years ago, he started reading the first reports of abuse at Dilworth, where he boarded in the 1970s. He took an interest but didn’t say much about it to anyone. That was classic Staufer: he’d never said anything about what happened. It was like a secret he kept from himself.
But when he was flown to Auckland last year to film his interviews for the documentary, and he took a seat in a studio in Ponsonby with Screentime director Mary Durham, he opened up. He hadn’t rehearsed it; it‘s like a live performance, right out on the edge.
“Part of leaving New Zealand was escaping and running away, so I didn’t think about any of this stuff or deal with it,” he said over the phone from Amsterdam. “I just kind of, like, filed it away in that little casket of your brain where things go to die.”
“And then a friend of mine says, ‘You know what? You should write a goddamned movie about your own life’. It was the most terrifying decision I ever made.
“So I came back to New Zealand for filming, was here for two weeks, and the interview was profoundly kind of affecting to me. And immediately afterwards I was sick for, like, nine days. Physically rolling around, rolling around on the floor. I was falling apart. It was the whole emotional resonance of doing this thing, which I compartmentalised away for so long.
“It’s been about six months since I got back. And I’ve got to tell you, it’s been emotionally really tough.”
All this was said in a beautifully modulated, almost primly accented voice. Staufer’s career in light entertainment - he was one half of Top Marks, a sensationally popular breakfast show on commercial radio, and presented a forgettable TV magazine show with Marcus Lush - is a lifetime away from the documentary The Lost Boys of Dilworth, with its harrowing subject, its atmosphere of adult madness ruling and ruining the lives of children.
Since an inquiry was launched, 126 former students have reported sexual abuse, and 11 former Dilworth school staff members have been convicted for sexual offending.
Actually, there was a twain between his lightweight past and his dark, sombre documentary. Staufer said the Top Marks team decided to broadcast a live show where they jumped out of a car and bailed up passersby. The car stopped at Dilworth.
Staufer: “Terrible experience. I got out, and looked at the school, and just went, ‘No. No. No, I can’t. I can’t.’ It was impossible for me to function. And I got back in, and slammed the door. The other Mark, Mark Kennedy, was like, ‘But this all seems quite normal. What’s going on?’ And there were all these kids from Dilworth crowding around. They wanted to be on the radio. I couldn’t do it. I just closed down.”
The first time he actually returned to Dilworth was last year, when the documentary team filmed him at the school. “Clearly, for me, the chapel is the most upsetting part of the school. Because that’s where I was raped. And the weird thing is, how our sense of smell brings back such memories. You know? I closed my eyes, and I knew that smell.”
I asked him, “What is the aroma of Dilworth?”
“Kind of an acrid dankness,” he said, “that infests the soul.”
One of most powerful moments in The Lost Boys of Dilworth is when Staufer dares to ask the unaskable, and poses the question to himself: “How f***ed up am I?” Again, that sense of going somewhere dark, of not holding himself back in; but he walks it back, and doesn’t actually answer the question. It seemed like a good idea to put it to him.
He said, “I spent so much of my childhood living in dread and terror and with no escape. No way out. But it’s not like I have a psychiatrist living in my brain. So I don’t know. Would life have been better? I’ve been through extremely nihilistic periods.”
“I’ve been an alcoholic. I’ve been a drug addict. I’ve self sabotaged.
“But I can’t go, ‘Well, that’s because of Dilworth’. I just can’t say that, you know. And any good psychiatrist would not say that either.”
The experience destroyed his relationship with his mum. He told her about the abuse; she questioned the school, and believed its bland reassurance nothing sinister was happening.
“Tough woman, mum. But [she] was lied to. They said, ‘Oh, no, none of this s*** has happened’. Instead they just called me a troublemaker, and all that sort of stuff.
“So she never really knew the truth and, as a consequence, I never resolved my relationship with my mother, which is really sad.
“She was a lovely lady. Wore floral dresses. Child of the 50s. There was no such thing as paedophilia then. It just wasn’t a word. It just wasn’t something people talked about. I can see now that she was bamboozled by lies. But I always thought that she betrayed me.”
The boy Staufer had courage, and had his wits about him - he was destined for some kind of career in media. He was expelled from Dilworth because he called the tabloid newspaper the Sunday News.
“But first I had to find the phone number of Sunday News, and to do that, I had to go into the matron’s office and have a friend of mine keep her attention outside while I ripped the number out of her Yellow Pages.
“And then I went to the one phone in the school - it was like a public call box that we used to line up for to phone our mums and dads - and I crept in on a Monday night when I thought everyone was asleep.
“I got through to a journalist, and managed to say, ‘Hi, I’m calling from an Auckland boarding school and abuse is happening’. And then one of the abusers came in and slapped the phone down. The next day I was expelled. Which, of course, is what I wanted to happen.”
He was transferred to Onehunga College, and then Mt Roskill Grammar. He arrived at Mt Roskill with green hair. “This boy just comes up at the end of the assembly, and says, ‘You’re all right mate. I’ll look after you. Probably one of the luckiest days of my life.”
He has remained close life-long friends with Russell Crowe.
The question of his f***ed-upness preyed on his mind as the interview continued. “Maybe I’m unhinged because of being raped,” he said, apropos of something else entirely. “Maybe I’m crazy anyway.”
I asked, “How are you, Mark?”
He laughed, and said, “Can you be my new psychologist? I’m doing better. The actual involvement in this project had a overwhelming effect on me that I didn’t see coming. And I kind of feel humiliated about that. I thought I’d be stronger. I was thinking, like, you know, I’m kind of bulletproof. But the last six months or so have been really hard six months.”
I asked, “Are you in counselling?”
He said, “Yeah, yeah.”
I asked, “Are you planning to come back to New Zealand?”
“I think I might come back to politics,” he said. “I’m really disappointed in the world at the moment. The idiots who are running things. Ukraine. Gaza. I mean, there’s an endless list of this shit. As for New Zealand, I think your former Prime Minister has harmed the country to a huge extent.”
He meant Dame Jacinda Ardern.
I asked, “Is there a particular party you have in mind?”
He said, “No. They’re all the same party, aren’t they, really? What have you got? Five of them? They’re all the same. No one’s looking after the people. No one’s thinking about the people.”
I asked, “Did you observe anything of the famous occupation of Parliament by anti-vax groups?”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “I watched it with a lot of interest. Not that you could get a lot of it on mainstream media. But I watched what I could, and it was kind of revolting. How she reacted to it.”
He meant Ardern.
I asked, “So the voice of those people is possibly the kind of voice you’re interested in?”
He said, “Very much so.”
I asked, “I wonder whether you’ve heard of a former broadcaster called Liz Gunn?”
He said, “She did the Covid stuff, right?”
I asked, “What do you make of her?”
“I think she’s quite gutsy,” said Mark Staufer, independent spirit, survivor of the worst things school can make a kid suffer, living his best possibly unhinged life.
The Lost Boys of Dilworth, TVNZ 1, Sunday, April 14, 8.30pm.
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