Mark Lean: Rape game, 1975

Jerrems’ relationships with her Heidelberg Technical College students were entangled. She was their teacher, yet, transgressing boundaries, she spent many afternoons swimming, smoking and drinking with them down by the river, and photographed them over two years. Mark Lean, for example, was photographed almost compulsively, as is evident in Jerrems’ contact sheets, and appears most famously in Vale Street later that year.

A variety of accounts acknowledge they were intimately involved but this photo exposes the complexity of their supposed relationship. Jerrems originally titled the work The game of drawing straws (Lean is holding a straw in his clenched fist) but then crossed it out on an early print and wrote Rape game. At the same time, she also widely spoke about her violent experiences with the boys. Regardless, the age difference and power dynamics between teacher and student complicate and problematise the stories that remain. In later years, long after Jerrems had passed, Lean and Jon Bourke recalled that they were performing a kind of bravado for both Jerrems and the camera: ‘she thought that we were bigger louts than we actually were … we were playing at being louts.’

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982.
© The Estate of Carol Jerrems