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