Fairfax Media and AAP

A BULLYING victim at a boys’ boarding school in Tamworth carved a swastika into his wrist and hacked into the school’s computer system to propagate Nazi symbols, the Supreme Court heard yesterday.

David Jonathan Gregory, 30, is suing the State of NSW for $2 million in lost earnings, claiming that the Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School breached its duty of care by allowing him to be bullied between 1991 and 1996, leaving him with agoraphobia and obsessive compulsive disorder.

He says he was taunted with names such as “Nazi” and “Hitler’’ on a daily basis, socially isolated and physically assaulted. He was also derided as a follower of the controversial historian David Irving, who denies the Jewish holocaust, in the school magazine. Mr Gregory denies that he is a Nazi or subscribes to Irving’s school of history.

But under cross-examination by Campbell Bridges, SC, yesterday, he agreed that during a phase of self-mutilation he carved a swastika into his wrist and hid it under his watch. He also hacked into the school computer system, where he altered the background image to depict skinheads and changed icons into swastikas.

“It was Year 12 muck up day and I was sick of being called a Nazi and I thought I would do it just as a last thing,’’ Mr Gregory said.

Four years after he graduated, when he was working as a dormitory master at The Scots College’s Glengarry campus near Kangaroo Valley, he once again drew the attention of school authorities by decorating his room with a poster that prominently featured a swastika.

Mr Gregory said he designed the poster to market a book he wrote about his time at Farrer, and it also depicted a hammer and sickle. He took it down when he was asked, he said.

He also told the court he was so traumatised by bullying at Farrer that he began obsessively disinfecting himself, resulting in chemical burns. In a 1994 letter penned to a teacher and read out in court Mr Gregory described the compulsive bathing, which on one occasion resulted in chemical burns to his skin.

Once, after another student placed their hat on Mr Gregory’s head, it took him half an hour to “get clean” and he suffered five or six chemical burns in the process.

The hearing continues before Justice Elizabeth Fullerton today.