Although he was only six years old at the time, Andrew Morse still remembers with absolute clarity the moment he learned a terrible secret about his stepfather Ron.
It is a secret that also haunts one of the most prestigious private schools in Australia.
Andrew, now 60, shared a spare room with Ron, his adoptive mother’s husband, while they visited family on a Queensland cattle station. He already knew that his father was a brutal disciplinarian who would ‘spank’ him for minor, even imagined, indiscretions, but in the darkness of that night he discovered something even worse.
“That’s where I first remember waking up to him abusing me,” Andrew tells me.
‘They made me not tell anyone. They instilled in me that I should not talk about this.
The abuse continued when they returned to their home in Bundall, a Gold Coast suburb, near the elite Southport school, which Andrew attended from 1973 to 1981.
What Andrew didn’t know was that he probably sat alongside other boys also forced into silence by their father, who sexually abused more than 20 students during his 38 years at the high-cost Anglican boarding school where he was a housemaster. .
Southport School, known as TSS, has Australian prime ministers, senators, generals and wallaby captains among his illustrious students. He charges more than $32,000 for year 12 fees and declares that he “stands up for good men.”
But last month, Daily Mail Australia revealed that behind the sunlit grandeur of its castle-like buildings and state-of-the-art facilities, TSS faces a host of historic accusations of failing to protect students from physical and sexual abuse.
Andrew Morse (pictured) claims his late stepfather Ron Morse, a former long-serving teacher at The Southport School on the Gold Coast, sexually abused him when he was six.
A former TSS student, Bill Edgar, initiated a lawsuit in which he accused Ron Morse, now dead, of sexually abusing him.
Edgar alleged that Morse put his hands down his pants and touched him sexually during remedial lessons in early 1981 and 1982.
He tells us that, to his knowledge, four court cases naming Morse as a perpetrator of sexual abuse have been resolved, two of them in mediation and 11 still with attorneys for first-stage depositions.
Another former student took legal action against the school in 2021, accusing Morse of habitual sexual abuse.
That student said the indecent assaults involving Morse in the room occurred “about once a week” toward the end of 1971.
Morse and another teacher, Montgomery Campbell, also deceased, were allegedly jointly involved in an incident that took place in a classroom.
Edgar said Andrew Morse contacted him in May 2017 after seeing a Facebook page he created called ‘Lost Boys of TSS’ where he and other former students shared stories of the abuse they suffered at the school.
“I received a call from a man who apologized for the abuse I suffered at the hands of his father and teacher Ron Morse,” Edgar, whose books include The Coffin Confessor (2021) and The Afterlife Confessional (2024), tells me.
Southport School, where Ron Morse taught and sent his stepson Andrew, spreads over 51 acres of sunlit castle-like buildings and green playing fields.
‘The man’s voice was broken but strong, he did not need to apologize, but for his own reasons he did need to free himself from a burden.
‘The man confessed to being abused by his own father and finally found the courage to come forward and expose his father on the Lost Boy of TSS Facebook page.
“Andrew Morse unknowingly helped over 20 victims, all of whom are now receiving help, but most importantly he was saved and gained a friend for life.”
But Ron Morse wasn’t the only pedophile housemaster stalking the halls of TSS.
One of the school’s most famous sporting pupils, Australian and Queensland rugby league star Peter Jackson, died of a heroin overdose in 1997, aged just 33.
After his death, Jackson His wife revealed that he was tormented by the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his TSS football coach and housemaster, Hugh ‘Ossie’ McNamara, who was convicted and jailed for his crimes in 1995.
Peter Jackson (pictured right), a rugby league star who played for Queensland and Australia, died of a heroin overdose aged 33. Her story of abuse at TSS only came to light later.
Andrew says his father confessed to abusing students in the early 1990s, after the family was involved in a sexual abuse trial involving another relative.
‘I came in and dad was angry. “I’d never seen my dad drunk before, so I looked at him and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?'” Andrew explains.
“He grabbed his glass and said, ‘You know the shit that comes out of it is going to destroy the family.’
Andrew asked again what his father was talking about and received a horrible answer.
“He said, ‘I have abused children at TSS along with others.'” He never mentioned who the others were.
“So I said, ‘I can tell you now, buddy, if the cops ever come here for you, I’ll tell them what you did to me.’ hHe stayed silent but was absolutely scared.
“He was shaking and drinking straight whiskey, but I kept the peace for mom.”
Bill Edgar (pictured), also known as the Coffin Confessor, experienced physical and sexual abuse at the hands of three TSS teachers, including Ron Morse. Years later he reached an agreement with the school.
The confession shook Andrew deeply.
As for her own abuse at the hands of her stepfather, it continued after they returned from the cattle farm, in the home she shared with her mother and two sisters. He says it got worse when his mother was away.
It only stopped when Andrew was physically big enough to keep his stepfather away.
“As I grew up, I had my own room where I could close the door, but I sucked my thumb until I was 10 or 11,” he tells me.
“I think it was the stress and anxiety caused by (the abuse).”
To compound the trauma, the sexual abuse she suffered was combined with physical brutality.
‘He was a cowardly man. He was a short man, but he ruled by fear,” says Andrew.
‘It wasn’t unusual to receive a slap in the face or a clip around the ear for no reason. It could just be playing washing dishes with my sister, spilling water on the floor.
‘One of the things he used to spank me was an old leather strap. There was also a leather strap stored in the hot water system, a remnant of saddlery.
“This was the kind of funky food I had to grow up with.”
Andrew was also spanked for being praised for helping another teacher, and the punishments were not limited to home. On one occasion, a bad math report caused Morse to show up unexpectedly while Andrew was in another class.
“My father knocked on the door and said, ‘Sorry to bother you. “Can I see Andrew for a minute?” he says.
“I thought, ‘Dad has never come to a class of mine before, something happened, damn, mom must be dead.'”
But Morse took Andrew to a nearby classroom and beat him so severely that the student returned to his class “almost crying.”
Only when Andrew, who was a keen cricket and football player, reached his adult form did his violent father back down.
The turning point came when Andrew was living in and out of the family home while working as a janitor and studying at a trade school.
“Mom had just put dinner on the table and (Dad) said something to Mom,” Andrew remembers.
And I said, “What did you say?” Mom said, “Leave it, Drew,” and I said, “What the fuck did you say?” and he did not answer.
“Finally he said, ‘It’s none of your business. Don’t try to get tough with me.”
‘So I just kicked the table, threw him against the glass door and went for him.
“That was the end of their reign of terror. My biggest regret is not having had more opportunities to hit him and inflict the same pain he inflicted on me and the others.
Although police went to the house after the fight, no charges were filed.
Andrew says the sexual abuse he suffered drove him to suicide. He even wrote letters detailing why he wanted to end his life, which he left at home 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 that the marriage was a grooming façade and that Morse had hidden his true nature from his mother.
“He was a chameleon,” says Andrew. I’m suggesting that he cheated on mom. He was a pathological liar.
‘When (her first husband) died, Mum was in a position where she was a single mother with no income. How was I going to raise two children?
After violently attacking nurses who were trying to treat a fall injury at the hospital, Morse spent his final years in a nursing home with advanced dementia.
Andrew says he didn’t find out about his father’s death until after the funeral.
‘I get this random text from my mom on a Friday morning. “Just letting them know I’m alone,” Andrew says.
But since going public with his childhood abuse, Andrew says he and his mother no longer speak.
“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 get her to talk to me.”
Andrew is now considering legal action against TSS because his father brought home school canes to beat him and his sister.
“If you did an investigation into every GPS school and every religious school in Australia, you would find allegations of abuse dating back to the 1950s and 1960s and onwards,” says Andrew.
“It’s not something isolated at TSS, but the culture that people turn a blind eye to is a scourge on the school.”
He also has one last thought about the unmourned “cowardly meal” that was his stepfather.
“I think, in some ways, the school created the monster.”
TSS director Andrew Hawkins told Daily Mail Australia that “Ron Morse was the director of TSS a few decades ago.”
“Following his time at the school as a staff member, the school is aware that his stepson, Andrew, made formal allegations of sexual abuse by Mr. Morse,” Hawkins said.
“Because these allegations were made at home and not at school, police were not formally involved at the school during those investigations.”
“As the current director of TSS, our team and I are committed to making TSS the safest place it has ever been for our students in our 124-year history,” Hawkins said.
“The addition of Student Safeguarding Officers and our Head of Student Safeguarding makes us sector leaders in this space.”