In time, the smoking room became a smoking corridor, then a smoking floor and the school was well on its way to smoking classrooms. After all, teachers were allowed to smoke in class, so why shouldn't the students? It was easily portrayed as a matter of human rights – the rights of the child had not been invented in those days. Fortunately, before the rot could get embedded with the smell of stale cigarette smoke, someone worked out that giving teenagers carte blanche to act as they wished was not likely to lead to good educational or social outcomes. So a new Head of School was hired to bring a bit of sense to the place.

(Come behind these brackets for a minute, because I want to digress. The new Head lasted only two years, walking out one day as a shivering wreck, to the rousing cheers of the students and the muted applause of their parents. For myself, I left long before that, a decision that had nothing to do with the unimaginative nickname they had given me, the correct spelling of which is ricochet.

Talk of going from the frying pan to the fire, my next school was a noted flogging establishment, where discipline and algebra were encouraged by liberal use of a cane or strap. I didn't last long there either. But all of that is by the way. I need to return to my argument: will you make sure to close the brackets on your way out).

That Progressive School was brought to mind in a roundabout way on a recent visit to New Zealand. I could not help but observe how clean the cities are and how free of graffiti: Napier, Tauranga, Dunedin, beautiful coastal towns without rubbish on the streets and without ugly defacement of walls. The contrast with my current domicile in Melbourne was striking, particularly the absence of graffiti.

In the past week, I read that the daubings on trains and railway property has reached a stage in our city that has caused Metro to ask for a more serious attempt by society to help them solve the problem. You have to feel sorry for Metro: pushing back the tide with a fork comes to mind.

Here, after all, is a city that applauds graffiti, sets aside whole streets in the CBD where graffiti artists are encouraged to show their creativity. The city fathers turn up every so often to open some new decoration; there are speeches and champagne glasses and well dressed women with funny hats left over from a horse race.

Can't these people understand that if you support wall art in this way, it will be an encouragement to vandals. It's like telling young people that they are allowed to smoke on the school grounds and hoping that they will behave better because you have been so farsighted about their rights.

So our wannabe artists develop their limited skills on hoardings and tunnels and wherever they find a few pieces of wood or metal sticking out of the ground. But they particularly love the trains, because the product is mobile and can be seen by many more people. They photograph it and put the result on the web to be admired by others in faraway cities. And if you dare complain about it, you are reminded that Melbourne is the No 1 Something city in the world.

I asked a local in one of those New Zealand cities how it was that they did not have graffiti. Perhaps they decorate their own bodies instead, I suggested, but that did not go down well. I was told that if someone is caught defacing a building, that person and his/her family are required to clean the wall and are held responsible for ensuring that it remains clean from then on, which sounds like a clever piece of enforced service to the environment.

I am not suggesting that such a scheme would work in Melbourne. In fact, I have no suggestion at all for the city or Metro about how they might tackle their problems with graffiti. It is hard to expect the police or the judiciary to take the situation seriously when the city celebrates the practice so publicly and calls it art. Against such nonsense, what use is a fork?

Anyway, that's what I think.

Frank O'Shea is a Melbourne writer.