In my early years of secondary school there was a very fine footballer in the senior team of another school. I had never met him, but hated him with a passion. For me he was the embodiment of evil: came from a snobs school, had a non Anglo-Irish name, represented the wrongs inflicted on Ireland, ran rings around our team, and was a filthy player.
I later recognised that he was an unassuming young man who was scrupulously fair in his play. But that was later. In boyhood hatred created its object out of all the prejudices that lay to hand.
This memory returned in recent weeks when reading of the constant booing and vilification of Adam Goodes, and reading some of the opinion pieces on the Ballarat sexual abuse.
Goodes, already marked as the enemy by rival tribes, either because of his high skills or his fearless representation of an unpopular cause, became invested with racial prejudices, suspicions of unfairness, and imputations of self-righteousness, and so a target for hatred. He is no longer a person but a representative of evil, and so what can you do but boo and execrate?
Unless, of course, he joins your tribe.
Tribal hatred in football in Australia is unattractive, but pretty harmless. Supporters generally don it when they go to the ground and divest themselves of it when they leave. But they always reveal something of themselves in their conduct.
What the Royal Commission laid out in Ballaarat was horrifying and aborrent.
On display were the scale of abuse, the extent of the suffering of victims and their families, the failure of church authorities and others at the time to attend to it or stop it, with the only result of their actions being to perpetuate and spread it, and the inadequacy of the perpetrators to comprehend, acknowledge or be moved by the destruction they had caused.
For reporters it must have been hard to write dispassionately of what they heard, but they generally succeeded. Most of the comment pieces, too, were considered.
In some dealing with Gerald Ridsdale, however, I was struck by the hatred displayed. Writers described him variously as a piece of excreta and as knowingly dishonest. They expressed the hope that he would rot in hell. A man whose evidence was marked by a lack of affect was invested with qualities of evil that came from elsewhere.
This kind of hatred in the case of something as abhorrent