Rest in peace, Mr Gregory (Greg Wuth)

(10/04/1963 – 19/09/2024)

Mr Gregory was my high school drama teacher. But he was so much more than that. If you had Mr Gregory as a teacher, you knew about it. And you never forgot it. It was impossible to.

Every single day of my high school years he dressed in all black, head to toe. He wore black loose-fitting pants, reminiscent of MC Hammer; comfortable black slippers that you could imagine an off-duty ninja wearing; a plain black collared shirt; and a black leather bumbag where he kept his huge jailor’s set of keys for the drama department classrooms.

But even more distinctive than his all-black attire was his bellowing laugh that you could hear—quite literally—from one end of the school to the other. It would echo through the halls and stop entire classes in their tracks. It was unmistakable. Almost as if God had given him momentary access to a loudspeaker, just for laughter.

Then there was his huge, beaming, Cheshire Cat smile that you could never quite tell how much was genuine and how much was ‘put on’, because so much about Mr Gregory felt like a performance. As a student in his classes, I often felt like a lucky punter who was fortunate enough score front-row tickets to an intimate, one-man show about the human condition and how one might ‘act’ your way through it.

One of my fondest memories of Mr Gregory was when one of his students brazenly questioned him about his ample stomach, referring to it as a ‘beer gut’. His retort was swift and resolute, “It’s a gourmet gut, child!”

I graduated high school way back in 1997. And while I struggle to remember some of the names and faces of my high school teachers, 27 years later I still have so many memories about drama classes, school musicals and Rock Eisteddfods with Mr Gregory that will stay with me forever.

There was the time he made the whole class wear a neutral mask, stand on a chair, and pretend to pick invisible apples and place them in an invisible basket for a solid 45mins. Or his deep love of Shakespeare and his tips on how I might make Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream really come to life. Or the times he would literally chase a naughty student around the classroom holding a book above his head, faux threatening to throttle them if he caught them. Or, if he was too tired to run, he would simply remove one of his slippers and throw it at them. Or the time we gasped when we discovered his real name, written in pencil inside one of his books: ‘Greg Wuth’. To us, he was always Mr Gregory.

When you were talking to Mr Gregory, he made you feel like you had his undivided attention. He made you feel like you were special. Like you were a lead character in the musical of his life. To me, Mr Gregory was never ‘just a school teacher’, casually cashing his pay cheque at the end of the month. He lived and breathed every moment of that job. And he wanted you to care about drama too.

One thing I will always be grateful to Mr Gregory for was teaching me the art of the draft. In year 11, we had a written assignment to do for his drama class, and he asked me to bring him a draft the following week. So, the next week came, and I handed in my draft. By the end of the lesson, he returned the draft to me, covered in notes he’d made in the margins on how I could improve everything from the wording and structure to the overall argument. I was in shock. But I thought, “OK, I’ll rewrite it and hand it in again”. So I did. Little did I know he would make me repeat this process 8 times! Yep, he made me completely rewrite a high school essay 8 times. And these were not small changes. These were Mr-Gregory-level changes.

At the time, the whole process made me feel overwhelmed, and I remember crying after the third or fourth draft, because I was so attached to my words and what I had written, and then rewritten. It felt like he was asking me to take a knife to my own creativity, over and over again. As a 16-year-old, this hurt my feelings. And I resented him for it. But after I got an A+ for the essay, there was no going back for me. The art of the draft quickly became a permanent fixture in my life. So did the mindset of not being precious with my own writing. After that experience, I was able to carve up my writing and rewrite it as many times as I wanted or needed to, because I knew that there was always something rewarding waiting for me on the other side of the next edit.

Mr Gregory, I don’t think I have seen you in about 10-15 years, but I wept when I heard the news of your passing. I know that you were often the butt of jokes from Christian high school kids who were wholly unused to seeing anyone be or act differently to the norm—especially not someone as wonderfully flamboyant and unabashedly strange as you. You were incredibly funny, but you were anything but a joke to me.

In fact, I’d often ponder the meaning behind your all-black attire. Many students asked about it, but you never gave a straight answer. Not in my time there, anyway. Deep down I suspected it had nothing to do with fashion, or black being the unofficial uniform of thespians, or even some secret desire to run a coffee shop in Melbourne. No, your all-black clothing gave me the feeling that you were in a permanent state of grief. Whether you were grieving for a loved one, a pet, or a part of yourself that you felt you had to hide away from the world at large, or even from yourself, I never knew, and I never asked. Maybe you had a completely different reason for wearing all black, and maybe this interpretation was just me projecting some of my own darkness on to you, but there always felt like there was an invisible ‘weight’ that accompanied the black clothes. Like it represented something heavy and unseen you were carrying around with you.

So, years later when I saw you dressed in much brighter clothes, it made me smile. I remember one particular instance when you came over to my parents’ house dressed in a loud floral-print shirt. It floored me. I was in so much shock that it took me a moment to process what I was seeing. After all, I’d never seen in you in anything but black. However, once I’d gotten over the fact that you didn’t look like my memory of Mr Gregory, I was really happy for you. You seemed so much lighter. Both in your clothing and in your energy.

Mr Gregory, I want you to know that you changed my life forever in so many ways—big and small. Most of which, you probably have no memory of. But I will never forget them. You were one of those teachers who didn’t just teach me things—you changed the trajectory of my life. You helped set me on a path that led me to where I am today.

So, before I say goodbye, Mr Gregory, I just wanted to say thank you for everything you did for me. For the confidence you gave me to be myself, unapologetically. For the example you set—showing me that there were so many different ways to be a ‘man’ in this world. And, perhaps most importantly, for the belief you put in me. You believed in me well before I ever believed in myself. You shined a light on my potential, and for that I’ll forever be grateful. You are someone I will never forget for the rest of my days. Even if I wanted to—I couldn’t. Because you were unforgettable. As a teenager, you were so much more to me than just a high school teacher. You were a guide.

All my love,

Ross

(Pictured: Gregory Russell Wuth, 1999; this was as much colour as you could hope for from Greg at a school graduation back then. Thanks very much to my good friend Matt Cerwen for the photo.)