Warnings and wild times at Schoolies

CANBERRA - Australia is bracing itself as Schoolies Week, an almost Darwinian rite of passage for the nation's school-leavers, gets into full swing.

Every year thousands of youths swarm to beachside resort towns in a hedonistic revelry that inevitably ends in tales of drunkenness, drugs, sex, assaults and predation by deviants and ageing Lotharios known as "toolies".

"It's no secret that Schoolies Week means tens of thousands of teenagers in the one place for a couple of weeks - every leech in the country knows this," warns the National Schoolies website's survival guide.

"There are heaps of older people either wanting sex from you, wanting to beat the croutons out of you, wanting you to join their religion or wanting you to buy something."

Even before the first of 50,000 schoolies began their annual migration to the number one party, on Queensland's Gold Coast, police seized a huge stockpile of drugs assembled for dealers mingling with partygoers.

As the Gold Coast party began, the first drug arrests were made.

Police renewed warnings of sexual predators after a man was warned against photographing young women.

Australian Federal Police agents have joined more than 1000 local police to boost protection not only against the normal run of crime, but also lower the chance of a terror attack.

Since it began evolving into a national institution about three decades ago, Schoolies has become an agony for parents, social workers and police and emergency services, but a gold run for party towns and companies that specialise in booking holiday packages for kids on the rampage.

It is such an institution that five years ago the Federal Court held that a trademark on the names "Schoolies" and "Schoolies Week" taken out by a pioneering specialist travel agent was not valid because the annual party had become a tradition.

A 1997 survey published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health found that of the almost 1800 school-leavers questioned, about 52 per cent of boys and 37 per cent of girls were drunk every day (or night), 47 per cent of boys and 34 per cent of girls spent all or part of their partying on drugs, and 44 per cent of boys and 16 per cent of girls had casual sex.

While most Schoolies resorts are now trying to clean up their act, organisers at one venue this year were slammed for its pole dancing competitions, a "naughty" school uniform night, and wrestling in baked beans.

The round of end-of-school celebrations began at the weekend on the Gold Coast, and will continue at different venues until the end of the month.

Police made a number of arrests, including for such serious offences as assault and drug possession, and two youths were injured - one seriously - when their car ran into a tree on the way home from a school-leavers' party at Toowoomba, west of Brisbane.

Gold Coast police are also investigating the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl, and the gang-bashing of the 18-year-old son of an anti-Schoolies Week Brisbane broadcaster.