Although he was only six at the time, Andrew Morse still remembers with absolute clarity the moment he learned a terrible secret about his stepfather Ron.
It’s a secret that also haunts one of ‘s most prestigious private schools.
Andrew, now 60, was sharing a spare room with Ron, the husband of his adoptive mother, while they were visiting family on a Queensland cattle station. He already knew his dad was a brutal disciplinarian who would ‘flog’ him for minor – even imagined – indiscretions, but in the darkness that night he discovered something even worse.
‘That’s where I remember waking up for the first time with him molesting me,’ Andrew tells me.
‘I was made not to tell anyone. It was drummed into me I was not to talk about this.’
The abuse continued when they returned to their home in Bundall, a suburb of the Gold Coast, near the elite Southport School, which Andrew attended from 1973 to 1981.
What Andrew didn’t know was that he likely sat next to other boys also coerced into silence by his father, who sexually abused more than 20 students during his 38 years at the Anglican-run high-fee boarding school where he was a house master.
The Southport School, known as TSS, boasts premiers, senators, generals and n Wallaby captains among its illustrious alumni. It charges more than $32,000 for Year 12 fees, and declares that it ‘champions good men’.
But last month, Daily Mail revealed that behind the sunlit grandeur of its castle-like buildings and state-of-the-art facilities, TSS faces a multitude of historic accusations of failing to protect students from sexual and physical abuse.
One former TSS student, Bill Edgar, launched court proceedings in which he accused Ron Morse, who is now dead, of sexually abusing him.
Mr Edgar alleged Morse put his hands down his pants and touched him sexually during remedial lessons in early 1981 and 1982.
He tells us that, to the best of his knowledge, four court cases naming Morse as a sex abuse perpetrator have been settled, with two in mediation and 11 still with lawyers for first-stage statements.
Another former student took legal action against the school in 2021 and accused Morse of regular sexual abuse.
That student said indecent assaults where Morse was in the room occurred ‘approximately once per week’ towards the latter part of 1971.
Morse and another teacher, Montgomery Campbell, also now deceased, were alleged to have been jointly involved in one incident which took place in a classroom.
Mr Edgar said Andrew Morse contacted him in May 2017 having seen a Facebook page he created called ‘Lost Boys of TSS’ where he and other ex-students shared stories of the abuse they suffered at the school.
‘I received a call from a man who apologised for the abuse I suffered at the hands of his father and teacher Ron Morse,’ Mr Edgar, whose books include The Coffin Confessor (2021) and The Afterlife Confessional (2024), tells me.
‘The man’s voice was broken but strong, he didn’t need to apologise, but for reasons of his own he did need to free himself from burden.
‘The man confessed to being abused by his own father and ultimately found the courage to come forward and expose his father on the Lost Boy of TSS Facebook page.
‘Without knowing it, Andrew Morse assisted over 20 victims, all now being helped, but more importantly he saved himself and gained a friend for life.’
But Ron Morse was not the only paedophile house master to stalk the halls of TSS.
One of the school’s most celebrated sporting alumni, n and Queensland rugby league star Peter Jackson, died of a heroin overdose in 1997 aged just 33.
After his death Jackson’s wife revealed he was tormented by the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his TSS football coach and house master Hugh ‘Ossie’ McNamara, who was convicted and jailed for his offences in 1995.
Andrew says his father confessed to abusing students in the early 1990s after the family was involved in a sex abuse trial concerning another relative.
‘I came in and dad was p***ed. I had never seen my dad drunk, so I looked at him and I said, “What the f*** are you doing?”‘ Andrew explains.
‘He grabbed his glass and said, “You know the s*** that comes out of it is going to destroy the family.”
Andrew again asked what his father was talking about and got a horrifying reply.
‘He said, “I have abused boys at TSS along with others.” He never mentioned who the others were.
‘Then I said to him, “I can tell you now, mate, if the coppers ever come here for you, I will tell them what you did to me.” He went quiet but he was absolutely s**t-scared.
‘He was shaking and drinking neat scotch, but I kept the peace for mum.’
The confession shook Andrew deeply.
As for his own abuse at the hands of his stepfather, it continued after they returned from the cattle ranch, in the home they shared with his mother and two sisters. He says it got worse when his mum was away.
It only stopped when Andrew was physically big enough to keep his stepfather away.
‘As I got older and bigger I had my own room where I could lock the door but I sucked my thumb until I was 10 or 11,’ he tells me.
‘I believe that was the stress and anxiety caused by [the abuse].’
To compound the trauma, the sexual abuse he suffered was paired with physical brutality.
‘He was a cowardly man. He was a short man but he ruled by fear,’ Andrew says.
‘It was not uncommon to get a smack across the face or a clip around the ear for no reason. It could just be mucking around doing the dishes with my sister, spilling water on the floor.
‘One of the things he used to give me a flogging was an old leather thong. There was also a leather strap kept in the hot water system, a leftover bit of saddlery.
‘This was the type of cowardly grub I had to grow up with.’
Andrew was also caned for being lauded for helping another teacher, and the beltings were not restricted to home. On one occasion, a bad maths report saw Morse unexpectedly show up while Andrew was in another class.
‘Father knocked on the door and said, “Sorry to disturb you. Can I see Andrew for a minute?”‘ he says.
‘I thought, “Dad’s never come to a class of mine before, something’s happened, f***, mum must be dead”.’
But Morse took Andrew to a nearby classroom and administered a caning so severe the schoolboy went back to his class ‘nearly in tears’.
It was only when Andrew, who was a keen cricketer and soccer player, grew into his adult frame that his violent father backed off.
The turning point came when Andrew was living in and out of the family home while working as a bouncer and studying at a trade school.
‘Mum had just put dinner on the table and [dad] said something to mum,’ Andrew recalls.
‘And I said, “What did you say?” Mum said, “Leave it, Drew”, and I said, “What did you f***ing say?” and he wouldn’t answer.
‘He eventually said, “It’s none of your business. Don’t try and get tough with me.”
‘So I just kicked the table, knocked him into the glass door and went to town on him.
‘That was the end of his regime of terror. My biggest regret is I didn’t have more opportunities to bash the f**k out of him and inflict the same pain on him that he inflicted on me and others.’
Although police attended the house in the aftermath of the brawl, no charges were pressed.
Andrew says the sexual abuse he suffered left him suicidal. He even typed out letters detailing why he wanted to end his life, which he left around the house for his mother.
Morse married Andrew’s mother shortly after her first husband, a teacher friend of Morse’s, died of testicular cancer.
Andrew, an adoptee, now believes the marriage was a grooming façade and that Morse had hidden his true nature from his mum.
‘He was a chameleon,’ Andrew says. ‘I am suggesting he hoodwinked mum. He was a pathological liar.
‘Mum was in a position when [her first husband] died that she was a single mum with no income. How was she going to raise two kids?’
After violently assaulting nurses trying to treat a fall injury in hospital, Morse spent his last years in a care home with advanced dementia.
Andrew says he did not learn of his father’s death until after the funeral.
‘I get this random text message from my mother on a Friday morning. “I am just letting you know I am on my own,”‘ Andrew says.
But since going public with his childhood abuse, Andrew says he and his mother are no longer on speaking terms.
‘If, at the end of the day, she goes to her grave without talking to me, there’s nothing I can do about it,’ he tells me.
‘It’s not something I can control or influence, I can’t make her talk to me.’
Andrew is now considering taking legal action against TSS over his father bringing home school canes to thrash him and his sister with.
‘If there was an inquiry into all GPS schools, all church schools around , it would find the allegations of abuse running back in the 1950s and ’60s and onwards,’ Andrew says.
‘It is not isolated at TSS, but the culture that people turned a blind eye to, that is a scourge on the school.’
He also has a last thought on the unmourned ‘cowardly grub’ who was his stepfather.
‘I do, in some way, believe the school created the monster.’
TSS Headmaster Andrew Hawkins told Daily Mail in a statement: ‘Ron Morse was a Housemaster at TSS some decades ago’.
‘After his time at the school as a staff member, the School is aware that his stepson, Andrew, made formal complaints of sexual abuse by Mr Morse,’ Mr Hawkins added.
‘As these allegations were made in the home, and not at school, the school was not formally engaged by police during those investigations.’
‘As the current Headmaster of TSS, our team and I are committed to making TSS the safest it has ever been for our students in our 124-year history.
‘The introduction of Student Protection Officers and our Head of Student Safeguarding makes us sector-leading in this space.’