I was touched last week by the obituary that my old friend Bernard ‘Zorro' Khoo published on his blog to mark and mourn the passing of his old friend and teaching colleague at St John's Institution, Vincent Fernandez.

And along with sympathy for Bernard on the occasion of his loss, I also felt a pang of envy for his evidently happy memories of the institution at which he and Vincent taught and coached sports teams.

Because, as Zorro's piece reminded me, I have very different recollections of a St John's College that I attended way back in the 1960s.

My St John's, I hasten to disclaim, has no connection with my family despite the suspicious similarity of names. So there was not a shred of nepotism, let alone Malaysian-style NEPotism, in my involvement with this institution.

‘Institution' being an entirely appropriate description of the place, as it proved to be more like an open prison or low-security lunatic asylum than most would expect of Sydney University's residential college for male Catholic students.

A hotbed of alcoholic anarchy

Rather than the civilised and cloistered centre of scholarship to which my parents fondly believed they were committing me, and which in my relative innocence I also expected, it proved to be a hotbed of alcoholic anarchy.

Drunk with potable intoxicants or power or both, seniors and sophomores subjected us newcomers to a system of so-called ‘fresher-bashing', purportedly for the purpose of initial ‘initiation' into the institution, but in practice unrelentingly for the entire first year.

I have to admit that, despite the ominous word ‘bashing', the plethora of indignities and insults we freshers were subjected to stopped short of actual physical assault.

But short of beatings and waterboardings, we experienced virtually every refinement of Abu Ghraib-style physical and psychological intimidation a sick mind could imagine.

Not that I recall it as all doom and gloom. Shared suffering being a powerful bond, we freshers quickly became great mates in misery, and thus, five decades later, my room-mate at St John's, Phil Gibbs, remains one of my closest and most cherished friends.

And, thanks to either the resilience of youth or a touch of masochism in my mental make-up, I found lots of the fresher-bashing activities not so much fearsome as loads of fun.

The one I recall with particular fondness is being regularly woken in the middle of the night by drunken revellers and being ordered to clamber up the inside of my room's old stone chimney far enough to escape the worst of the heat from sheets of newspaper that my would-be tormentors set alight in the fireplace, and at the same time being required to sing the old Platters hit Smoke gets in your eyes.

Hardly conducive to academic endeavour

But as jolly as some of these japes were, the atmosphere at St John's was hardly conducive to academic endeavour. So, after a term of failing to get any study done at all, I asked my parents if I could move out and get a room somewhere quieter.

But they flatly refused to believe that a famous Catholic college could be as undesirable as I claimed it was, and made me stay for another term of no study, with the result that, like about 90 per cent of other first-year students at St John's, I failed my university exams.

So that, looking back on these events 50 years later, I'm as nostalgic about my St John's as Bernard Khoo could be about his, if for very different reasons.

Firstly I have St John's to thank for helping me fail to achieve my original ambition to qualify as a veterinary surgeon, as I feel that my alternative career as a writer has been infinitely more interesting than animal-doctoring would have been.

And secondly I'm grateful for the fact that my experience of an institution that was such a disgrace to its staff, Sydney University and the entire Catholic Church proved so powerfully instrumental in helping me overcome my childhood indoctrination into religion.

This and other, subsequent insights into the schizoid split between ‘religious' belief and practice, were hugely instrumental in helping me break free of the false illusions, futile hopes and other symptoms of early exposure to the psychotic hallucinations and delusions so fancifully hailed as ‘gospel truths'.

Rid me of any remaining shred of religious credulity

And witnessing the psychotic antics of the leaders of the countless creeds and sects so viciously competing for the hearts, minds and souls - not to mention the money and political support - of the ‘faithful' has, thank goodness, rid me of any remaining shred of religious credulity.

How can anybody take religion seriously in the light of everything from the paedophilia epidemic among the Catholic clergy through the bombings, stonings, ‘honour killings' and other ungodly atrocities in the name of Allah in the fundamentalist Islamic world, to calls by ‘moderate' Muslims in Malaysia for laws against apostasy promoted by Christian clerics with the help of "portable, hand-held, solar-powered Bibles"?

Or, for that matter, how can the St John's College that was so crucially instrumental in converting me from Catholicism have changed so little in the half-century since I left the place?

Except for the worse, that is. On March 17, 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a story about vicious and obscene verbal attacks by some staff and senior students against the current rector of St John's, Michael Bongers, for his efforts to reform the now co-ed college's culture of "degrading rituals and alcohol-fuelled initiations."

Among the initiation practices mentioned in the Herald article were many that have apparently been instituted since my time, including penis-measuring, underwear wrestling and naked leap-frog.

In short, as one student was anonymously quoted as remarking, "the misogyny and homophobia" still rampant at St John's "would alarm anyone living in the 1950s".

To which all I can add is that at least my old alma mater, or, more appropriately alma martyr, is still doing today's freshers the same favours it long ago did for me and many of my contemporaries: turning them off academia in favour of the arts, and away from religion towards sweet reason.

And from there to the truth that the lives of special people like Bernard Khoo and the late Vincent Fernandez so clearly proclaim: that our worth is not measured by whatever school we did or didn't attend, or our belief or otherwise in one of countless Gods or religious creeds, but the goodness of our thoughts, words and deeds.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia' and ‘1Malaysia.con'.