There are no Zorzottos in the Australian telephone directory – nor is the name of a teacher who makes a cameo appearance, Mr Kalkhovnic, to be found – and one can’t imagine that an Ishmael Leseur would be bullied any more for his name than an Orazio Zorzotto. While Bauer’s Anglo-Saxon names are pretty conventional throughout the book, making Ishmael’s burden a standout, the ‘foreign’ names seem the result of out-there invention. The only other volunteers are the extroverted Orazio Zorzotto, an incorrigible comedian and would-be Romeo, who hopes the gig will give him access to pretty girls at other schools Ignatius Prindabel, a nervy science nerd who is a master of the non sequitur and the large and ponderous sci-fi and fantasy fan, Bill Kingsley, who seems to exist in a world of his own. James starts up a debating club, and persuades Ishmael to join. Everything that up until then had been vague and confusing suddenly snapped into focus.’ When James stands up to speak publicly for the first time, Ishmael is stunned: ‘When Scobie spoke it was like someone turning on a light in a darkened room.
Within days of arrival, he has cut Barry Bagsley down to size, standing up to threats of violence with withering wit. He is also smart, knowledgeable and worldly, and thinks on his feet. A survivor of brain cancer surgery, he can’t be rattled by anything any more. What Ishmael soon finds out, however, is that the new boy, James Scobie, has a remarkable power: he is totally immune to fear. There is no safety in numbers when bullies take on the weak it only multiplies the attacks. When an odd boy arrives in the class – small, with a conspicuous facial tic and precocious vocabulary – and Ishmael is allocated to look after him, he fears the worst. And sure enough, the outing of the book’s title gives the bullies even more ammunition. Ishmael had wisely kept the origins of his name, chosen in a bizarre unfolding of events in the maternity hospital when he was born, a secret. It only gets worse when a sympathetic young English teacher, Miss Tarango, arrives at the start of the year and admires the name, telling the class it comes from Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick. Fishtail le Sewer, le Spewer, Manure, they call him, and much more. The class bully, Barry Bagsley, and two of his acolytes make mincemeat of Ishmael’s name.
It becomes a narrative of a particularly challenging school year. The book is in the form of a journal, written in the first person and kept by the protagonist, fourteen-year-old Ishmael, to help him understand the problems his strange name has created for him. That is what the protagonist is called in Michael Gerard Bauer’s young adult novel, Don’t Call Me Ishmael!. So imagine a kid in a rough-and-tumble Australian boys’ school having a name like Ishmael Leseur. But where bullying does occur, it can potentially leave scars for life. In fact, two kids at the top of the social pecking order there carried a Greek and an Italian name. It’s not inevitable: I never copped it for having a foreign name, though I went to an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon school. In a school where Class A bullies rule, the results can be devastating. It’s not easy having a weird name, as many teenagers with foreign or experimental parents can attest – or unusual looks, or a stutter, or being too fat or too skinny, or shy, or any other characteristic that marks a child out from a very narrow mainstream.
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