Perth’s Kalamunda Senior High School principal gives warning in 1984 yearbook: Orwell

Graduates of a Perth high school have been amazed at the uncanny accuracy of their teacher’s grim predictions 38 years ago. 

A Facebook group of former students from Kalamunda Senior High School, east of Perth, shared the principal’s letter from the 1984 school yearbook.

Taking his cue from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the letter writer said some of the ‘frightening possibilities’ made in that book, published in 1948, had come true.

‘We are living in dangerous times,’ the author wrote. 

‘Our minds are subject to brainwashing and manipulation. 

‘Our privacy is invaded in all sorts of insidious and invidious ways. 

‘Our safety is under constant threat. Our ‘freedoms’ are under attack.’

The principal of Kalamunda Senior High School warned in 1984 that privacy was under threat

One former student, perhaps referencing recent Covid restrictions which plagued WA, said ‘he was right’.

‘He could be describing now fairly accurately,’ another commented.

‘Imagine what he would have written today if he thought the 80s was a dangerous time!’ a third said.

George Orwell wrote 1984, which was published in 1948, to warn about the authoritarian governments

The principal said that those graduating school in 1984 had a challenge ahead of them. 

‘You are going to have to fight for a happy and fulfilling future for yourselves and your children,’ he wrote.

‘I wish you the courage and energy to achieve it.’

However, his grimmest warning – delivered at a time when the US and Soviet Union were locked in a nuclear arms race – has somewhat faded. 

Students were told in the letter that ‘over everything hangs the monstrous cloud of nuclear lunacy and push-button extermination.’

The book 1984 imagines a nightmarish society of people constantly watched and fed propaganda by a ruling party, which has total control of every aspect of life.

Everyone must show allegiance to the mythical leader of the party ‘Big Brother’.

The classic dystopian work 1984 imagines a society where one party controls every aspect of life

Not even Orwell might have predicted that the emblem of one-party control would become the name of a popular reality TV show, where contestants willingly submit to 24-hour video surveillance and broadcast. 

Surveillance ‘telescreens’ are everywhere in the book 1984, which could be seen as a precursor to modern CCTV coverage and almost everyone having mobile phones with recording devices. 

Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, wrote the book to warn about the totalitarian tendencies in governments that he had seen rising in Europe, especially from the Soviet form of communism. 

Orwell also wrote the classic political allegory Animal Farm, where the Russian Revolution is mirrored in pigs taking over a farm. 

For this German protester in 2013 Orwell’s predictions of a society under surveillance have been borne out