All those songs we listened to on the radio? They’re back again, just like a long lost friend. Amazon or iTunes has them all. YouTube has the videos. Just download them for a small price or whatever, depending on the site, add them to your playlist, set it on shuffle, and you are back in 1970. Simple as that!
My blog posts cover a week at a time. I’ll list the Top Ten or Top Twenty or Top Forty for that week, link the titles to an appropriate download site, and discuss one or two of my favorites. After a while, the schoolyard memories will grow ever more sparse and it will be just the music.
There were some wonderful songs in those years. I’d sit on the radiocassette, just waiting for the right moment to hit record. And another favorite song would be mine forever, complete with station identification and smart-arse DJ comments. A pity I no longer own anything that will play cassettes…
But, there they are on the web, there they are on my iPhone, and once again I marvel at this magical science fiction age we live in.
On the first day, we fresh students were assembled into temporary class-sized groups. I can’t recall how this was done, exactly, but it may have been random or alphabetical or by some other criteria.
Our permanent home classes depended on two things: language choice and intelligence.
Sunnybank High offered two languages in those days: French and German. Each student had to pick one or the other, at least for the first year. People said that German was easier to learn (something I tend to dispute nowadays after having some moderate experience in both) and amongst we Grade Eights there were zwei Kursteilnehmer des Deutschen per un étudiant de Français.
I chose French. My elder sister had studied French, so I did. That meant that I could recycle her French primer, and draw upon her for advice on the tricky bits. It also allowed me to feel a teensy bit more elite than the more numerous Germans.
The second criterion was out of my control. Every student was tested for intelligence, ranked in order and permanent Grade Eight classes made up by cutting the whole cohort into two on the basis of language, and again on intelligence. The German classes went from 8-1 (the left side of the intelligence bell-curve) to 8-7 (the right side). Likewise we Frenchies went from 8-8 to 8-12.
So my class was 8-12. We were the bee’s knees, the cat’s whiskers, la crème de la crème. The smarties.
I’d always been up near the top of the class in primary school. First, second or third, all the way through. We smarties sat up the back, while those lower down on the academic scale were right under the teacher’s nose in the front row.
I was naturally clever – and naturally lazy. Instead of swotting over textbooks, I’d generally be found reading a novel. Biggles or Dimsie or William or Tom Sawyer. My father was an unreformed book hoarder and much of my early education was self-imposed. Mum had taught us all to read before kindergarten, and one of my first memories is of reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Of course, I skipped all the hard words, so it was pretty much just “the” and “and” to begin with, but I worked at it, “sounding out” words and pestering Mum until I could puzzle along with a dictionary all by myself.
After that there was no stopping me. I was always years ahead in my reading age, a book in each pocket. Car or bus trips would be a chance to get in a quick chapter or six, and sometimes there would be an eerie glow emanating from under the blankets as I read on after lights-out with the aid of a torch.
Whole weekend afternoons would vanish as I flicked through World Book. Other kids would be out playing backyard cricket, but I’d be exploring the solar system or struggling up Little Round Top or something equally practical.
The result was that I had an amazing store of trivia – which has since won me contests from Christchurch to Kansas City – but was useless at sports. Later membership in Mensa was great for boosting the ego, but no good for making money, although they put out terribly witty newsletters. I could tell you everything you wanted to know about Lou Gehrig, but couldn’t pitch a strike to save my life. Or hit one.
in primary school, I coasted along quite happily. All you needed to do was understand and remember stuff, and I was good at that. I was likewise good at passing intelligence tests, which got me into 8-12 along with the genuine swots.
But when it came to doing homework or completing projects – vital components in the system of “continuous assessment” which took over the Queensland education system – I was sadly disadvantaged. I’m a world class procrastinator, a champion lazy-bones. If the television show were named Australian Idle, I’d be a finalist and a household name.
Smart and lazy, I had no problem with dividing the year up with the clever people at the top and everyone else somewhere beneath. That was my idea of the ideal society. People like me would run the world and look after each other while those who were stupid or otherwise disadvantaged would fend for themselves on the bottom.
There was a novel I admired for its elitist adaptation of democracy. Every Australian got a vote in the society outlined in Nevil Shute’s In the Wet. And then extra votes were piled on top if you had a university degree, had gone overseas, had military service and so on. The elites got more votes, up to a maximum of seven. I thought that this was a wonderful idea. Put the smart, well-educated people in control and society would function in the best possible manner.
Wrong. Dead wrong. What a recipe for social division and disaster! Benevolent dictatorship aside, my ideal society is now one where the people on the bottom are cared for. Basic levels of housing, healthcare, education and so on. The clever, the rich, the well-connected will always find ways to build on the basics, but the idea is to have an inclusive society where everyone gets a fair go.
So, much as I admired the way the new students of Sunnybank State High were divided up in 1970, with the brightest grouped together and assigned the best teachers, forty years later I wonder about the wisdom of this approach.
Creedence Clearwater Revival! Pop groups had such interesting names in those days. Still do, I guess, but it no longer bothers me when they make no sense, the way it did in high school. I liked everything to stack up, conform to rules, have a purpose and be neatly filed away. Creedence – it wasn’t even spelt right. And clearwater revival; that’d be some sort of recycling program, yeah?
But they put out some tremendous songs, and few got the toes tapping like this one.
On the face of it, not a lot to it. Like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Sultans of Swing, it’s a song about, and supposedly performed by, a fictional band. CCR dressed up as “Willy and the Poor Boys” on the cover of the album, and when they performed the song on the Ed Sullivan Show, playing the gut bass and washboard.
Four kids on the corner trying to bring you up.
Willy picks a tune out and he blows it on the harp.
“Blows it on the harp” C’mon!
Jew’s harp, of course. There’s also the washboard, with its rowed ridges, kazoo – a sort of hum enhancer, gut bass using a heavy string held taut by a broomstick and an actual box as a soundbox. And a Kalamazoo, which is a (cheap) brand of guitar.
A rich, rich source of mondegreens. In fact it’s not until I actually looked up the lyrics (in the video notes here), that I realised that
You don’t need a penny just to hang around,
But if you’ve got a nickel, won’t you lay your money down?
I always heard it as “pinhead”! Then again, song lyrics don’t have to make sense. Paul Simon and his Graceland album are proof enough of this.
And that’s it. A listing of the band members and their instruments. But put them together and
Over on the corner there’s a happy noise.
People come from all around to watch the magic boys.
A happy noise indeed! I loved this song back in the Seventies, even if I didn’t understand more than maybe every second word, and to this day it is a comfort music staple. Hard to feel blue when you are bouncing and bopping to the beat.
Donna Dancer sent me a list of students and staff. She’s looking for contact details for most of those and she has about six months to do it. Obviously many people can be found by Google, White Pages etc, but apart from this taking time, many ex-students and staff won’t be found this way. It’s been well over thirty years, and half a lifetime can break many links.
So I’m looking for help. Or rather, Donna needs all the help she can get, and every person we can contact in the limited time left is a bonus. It might be something simple, like remembering a given name where we only have initials, or remembering a married name, or a career path, but every little detail helps.
I’m still trying to work out the best way of handling this task here, being mindful of privacy concerns. I don’t want people to feel they are being stalked, for instance. One thing I must insist on is that addresses, phone numbers and email addresses should not be posted in comments. Facebook or Twitter or other publicly visible IDs are okay – those sites have their own mechanisms to handle spam and other abuse. Send them to Donna, but let me know you’ve found them, so I can make a note.
As time goes by we can tick more boxes until eventually we have a shrinking number of “tuff” names.
One possibility is that I make up hundreds of sub-pages to present what information we have. At the moment, most pages would be just a name.
Not that I’ve got a lot of time myself, being a taxi-driver working thirteen hour shifts. but every little bit helps, and if we can get just one person to attend the reunion who wouldn’t have otherwise known about it, let alone made it, that will make it worthwhile. Just to see a smile.
The big day came. New uniform, new bus stop, new faces, new school.
It’s pretty much a blur, really. It was then, and is now but more so. Too many things to take in all at once, confusion, random authority figures giving instructions, missed messages, getting lost, feeling bewildered and excited and trying to see it all with big round eyes.
So many cool kids. Or kids trying to be cool, anyway. I’ll bet the new Grade Nines weren’t impressed at the little fish in the big pool, and the freshly promoted Grade Twelves wouldn’t even have noticed our arrival.
Two images really stand out in my mind. The first is of Alex Moutsatsos. He was one of those Calamvale Primary kids picked up in Danny’s bus, and he was beginning Grade Eight, just like me. He was tall and skinny. Taller than just about everyone else in the year, especially those for whom the glands hadn’t quite kicked in yet. Like me.
His Calamvale schoolfriends called him Stalky, so Stalky he was. And of course, being a sensitive, socially adept, emotionally intelligent young lad, I made all sorts of silly jokes about his appearance. At one stage our group was parked in one of the “tunnels” through Block 1, and as we sat, leaning against the brick wall, I noticed that the triangular space under Alex’s gangly knees could be seen as a kind of tent, and I attempted to move in. Yeah, I had a great sense of humour in those days.
In the years to come, he and I would become firm friends. We’d sit together on the schoolbus, recommend books and music and movies to each other, talk about teenager stuff for hours on end…
We later went to university together, wound up in the same workplace, and he was best man at my wedding.
Strange. We’d lived only a few hundred metres apart, literally around the corner from each other, for years and years, but because he was on a different bus route and went to a different school, we never met. Not until that first day at Sunnybank State High.
Another memory is of someone who faded out of my life rapidly. For the first days we were grouped into temporary classes and the first lessons weren’t heavy on the academicals. They were more getting to know each other sessions. One teacher – it may have been the freshly-married Mrs Podevin, who as Miss Hanson the previous year had absolutely won my big sister’s heart – went around the classroom, getting each student to introduce themselves, say a few words, where they had been born, what they wanted out of high school. The usual break the ice guff.
Painfully shy, I stammered out a few words about my tiny primary school and the huge high school, and sat down gratefully, but other students made a better job of it. One student seized the opportunity and made it her own.
Lyn Slamon. Forty years to the day and I’ve never forgotten her name. She stood up, introduced herself and sang Born Free, the theme song of the film about orphaned lioncubs in Africa rescued and returned to the wild. No music, no nothing but her beautiful pure voice. I was enchanted.
Lions – photo by zwartkops
Born free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your heart
What a song! The way Lyn delivered it, you could feel the classroom walls falling away and the lions romping across the boundless plains, the deep African sky above, the freedom and limitless space opening up as her voice soared high and deep. We applauded with genuine enthusiasm as the last notes faded.
“Encore!” someone called. It may have been Mrs Podevin, as delighted as everyone else. And Lyn obliged.
Second Hand Rose was her encore, now that I think on the day. Barbra Streisand’s quirky song about being the daughter of a second-hand dealer.
It’s no wonder that I feel abused
I never get a thing that ain’t been used
I’m wearing second hand hats
Second hand clothes
That’s why they call me
Second hand Rose…
My younger brother must have felt like that sometimes…
Lyn just belted it out. Barbra Streisand without the nose:
Even Jake the plumber, he’s the guy I adore, he had the noive to tell me he was married before…
High school was really coming alive!
Lyn was one of those kids who had a talent, trained it up and made the most of it. Sends you down a different career path, opens up more opportunities, and gains you more fame and fortune than the shy guy in the corner.
Lyn didn’t last in Sunnybank. She faded out of my view fairly soon, finding new opportunities elsewhere, but I remembered her thrilling first day performance. Years later, I saw a mention of her in a newspaper. More than a mention really, as it included a photograph. Quite a big photograph actually, on page three of the Brisbane Telegraph, and it showed rather a lot more of Lyn than I’d ever expected to see. I suppose she must have turned eighteen out in the real world.
So that’s it – the only two memories of my first day at Sunnybank High that I can really be sure of, and both involved people.
Although I was barely aware of it, the Vietnam War was creating all manner of ripples and undercurrents in American and Australian culture. Anti-war films and songs were popular, often themed on previous wars although the message was clear and relevant to Vietnam.
Oh! What a Lovely War and M*A*S*H, dealing with the First World War and the Korean War respectively, were huge hits of that time. Bright bouncy songs intercut with doomed soldiers going over the top, and humour in the bloody wards of a front-line surgical hospital. The contrast in emotions could not be starker. And of course both got the viewers thinking about the folly and waste of war.
Consider the borders of nations at the beginning and end of the Twentieth Century. They are virtually identical, apart from the largely peaceful demolitions of the colonial empires in the middle of the century, and the dismembering of the Soviet empire at the end.
Europe, in particular, is virtually unchanged, despite two long and bloody wars. The nations of Europe are friendly. France and Germany share a common currency. And so I wonder what the bloody hell was the point of it all?
Vietnam was a big commitment for our small nation. Then, as more recently, we followed the USA into war. We had to resort to conscription to fill the ranks. Although our involvement in Vietnam was winding down, and by the time Whitlam was elected in late 1972 there were only a few embassy guards and the like remaining, in 1970 there was always the thought amongst we young male teens that our birthday might be picked when the time came.
Smiley was John Farnham’s contribution:
Yesterday there was laughter and songs to sing
Yesterday we had loving to burn
Yet today there is a war and there’s peace to pray
When will they learn?
Smiley, you’re off to the Asian war
And we won’t see you smile no more
Out in Park Ridge I was closer than most. My bus stop on Middle Road was on the direct route to the Army camp at Greenbank, and the firing ranges stretched for many kilometres. There would often be military truck convoys, each full of green-clad troops holding rifles or machine guns between their knees.
Truck after truck after truck. Sometimes the soldiers would wave to we kids standing by the side of the road, and sometimes we’d wave back.
On sleepy afternoons there would be the distant rattle of small-arms fire, or now and then a vast metallic bang, as if someone had slammed a mighty door. Another crater on the demolition range.
Years later I’d be one of those soldiers, spending weekends and holidays with the university regiment, but for now the whole military thing was a grim mystery. The firing ranges were beyond a belt of doleful bushland, warning signs guarded the fences, and the gates were patrolled by sentries.
There weren’t any merry songs about jolly soldiers for the Vietnam War. No patriotic airs for the brave troops. Just anti-war songs in various disguises.
Arkansas Grass was another Australian song, despite its American Civil War theme. This one was far more direct, aimed squarely at the “General McAllisters” of the US:
So gaily we marched with the Grey and Red,
To lick ‘em first time like the good General said,
With nary a thought that so very few would go home,
If it weren’t so wrong for a soldier like me,
To throw down his gun, to run to be free,
Then all of us here with the fear in our eyes could go home,
It’s hard for a soldier. Patriotism, pride, mateship, loyalty. So many things keep him in uniform, doing his duty, firing his rifle at the enemy – a band of people just like him. The folly and waste of war are readily apparent. Even the most one-eyed of patriots can hardly fail to be aware of the stupidity of it all, the sheer bloody crime of combat, but you are in it to the hilt. you are part of it.
The American Civil War put the united states of the ex-colonies into battle against each other. Families were literally divided. Likewise in Vietnam. And here we were doing our best to keep one cultural group split into two. They spoke the same language, they had the same history, they were one people, far more than the Americans of a century earlier.
Maybe the politics seemed clear enough in those days, but now my daughter has toured Communist Vietnam and I’ve poked my nose over the border into Shenzhen in Red China, and guess what? They aren’t evil. They are friendly and smiling and happy to pour you a glass of green tea.
We’ve got all those legends about Gallipoli, when we invaded Turkey, but fifty years later we invaded Vietnam, and there’s bugger-all patriotic pride about it. Just a long list of names in the Australian War Memorial and an aging generation of sorrowing mothers and sisters and wives, fathers and brothers and children grown to adulthood.
Maybe, if it hadn’t been for the Smileys and M*A*S*H’s and Arkansas Grasses of those days, maybe the support for the war wouldn’t have waned and maybe my days in uniform, instead of being part of the Queensland University Regiment Social Club where I met my wife, I might have found myself wading through a paddy field or strapped onto a stretcher or sealed in a grey plastic body bag.
So, thank you John Farnham and thank you Brian Cadd and thank you everybody else.
We were the Number Ones in our primary schools in 1969, but some of us were Number Twos. I was.
I was the second child in the family. My elder sister, Margaret, had spent 1969 as a Grade Eight student at Sunnybank State high School, and every afternoon, she came home on the bus and was full of stories about schoolfriends, teachers, activities, lessons, sports events and all kinds of exciting news. I remember that she raved about her English teacher, Miss Hanson
Now, I was enjoying my final year at Park Ridge Primary (where, for the first time in my career I didn’t have a big sister supervising me and I could get into all kinds of mischief), but I was also looking forward to the glories of high school. Sunnybank sounded such a totally wonderful place, and the sooner I got my hands on a Bunsen burner and a double bunger, the better.
High school would mean more than just a change of school. At Park Ridge, I walked home with schoolmates, including my younger brother. Sometimes we would “trot” the two or three kilometres home in the fierce Queensland sun. Other times we would dawdle, play in creeks, climb embankments, fossick for returnable glass bottles on the roadside, fight with other kids and generally arrive home just in time for dinner. Sometimes I wonder how my mother survived parenthood with her faculties intact. But she did.
If it was raining, we might take the Greyhound bus at enormous expense, but like as not recent rain merely increased the playtime opportunities of the walk home. Happy days!
The primary school was reasonably local, but high school was a different matter. Sunnybank was the nearest high school, and that was half an hour’s drive away. Some of my classmates elected to go to Beaudesert High, an even longer distance in the other direction.
A contractor by the name of Danny drove the school bus for the education department, ferrying remote area kids into Sunnybank each morning, and returning us home about four o’clock. Along the way he collected students graduated from Calamvale Primary, Park Ridge’s bitter rivals in sports and government funding. They had more pupils, teachers, classrooms and resources, so victories against them in any field were rare for we kids from the back blocks.
They would, of course, now become comrades. Sunnybank seemed like the inner city to kids living on farms. The high school was huge, with over a thousand students, and most of the students would have come from the two local primary schools of Sunnybank and Runcorn. Whole class groups would transfer, more or less intact, from primary school to high, and what chance would we few country kids have against platoons of friends from birth?
It all seemed a bit scary, not to mention a whole new slew of teachers and buildings and ways of doing things.
A rosy future – photo by mmagallan
But big sister Margaret was proof that it wasn’t that bad. She loved Sunnybank High. She would have seen it as a new opportunity. Always the schoolroom star, teachers loved her, praised her and loaded her down with new challenges and resources. She thrived at primary school, and then went on to excel at high school and university, where she gained a doctorate and became a lecturer.
In the mean time, my primary school days were over. My grey shorts and shirts were passed onto my younger brother, and I was taken into Sunnybank to buy a new school uniform. Grey shorts, same as before, but we wore a green shirt of a particularly unfortunate deep lime colour. The girls got dark green skirts and white tops and looked fresh and bright and fabulous, but we boys just collected sorrowful looks from outsiders.
Not that any of us cared. The big thing about the uniform was that it had lots of pockets to put things. Pens, hankies, a few coins, a sandwich, a packet of stamps for the album, last week’s folded up school newsletter, a cicada husk, bubble gum…
The six week summer holidays dragged past, with games of backyard cricket, weekends away down the coast to visit relatives, long games of Monopoly, forced labour in Mum’s vegetable patch, black and white daytime movies: Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers…
Eventually it all came to an end with the Australia Day public holiday at the end of January, and I went to bed that night, dreaming of a new chapter in my life.
I’m rarely going to post up the whole Top 40 each week. More like the Top 10. The Carroll County Accident never made it past number 28, so it will drop away in weeks to come, but it was the song running through my head when I took this picture. Not to mention Arkansas Grass – a double whammy blast into my middle age from out of my teens.
Bob Ferguson wrote this song, inspired by passing through Carroll County in Tennessee, according to the Wikipedia article. He also noted seeing another Carroll County in Mississippi. The sign above is on the Arkansas/Missouri line, so there must be a third one.
Carroll County’s pointed out as kind of square, The biggest thing that happens is the county fair.
Kind of pentagonal, in the photo. In many ways the Carroll County of the song sounded very much like the Beaudesert Shire of my youth. Rural, conservative, insular. I guess, now that they’ve excised Logan City out of the territory, it still is.
I went to the Beaudesert Show one year. Very country and hokey compared to the Ekka, but it was interesting enough, as such things always are to a teenager. Dad was running some sort of Polaroid picture booth as a sideline to his normal job selling electrical appliances. You and your girlfriend stuck your head through holes in a painted scene and you were jolly sailors or bronzed beachgoers or whatever, smiling as Dad snapped you, and you left with the instant Polaroid picture to take home and show your wife how much fun you’d had at the county fair. There were Dagwood dogs and fairy floss and laughing clowns and displays of craft and the farmers with their prize goats: beards neatly trimmed, kids running around.
The wreck was on the highway, just inside the line…
And there I was, on a highway, just inside the state and county line, in a landscape that didn’t seem to have changed much since the Sixties. Or the Depression, or the Civil War, give or take a few satellite dishes. It was a backwoods kind of highway, a pleasant change from the interstates that look much the same all over the world. Here people’s driveways and front yards opened right onto the road, and you could pull over at a corner store or a Sonic diner, where they brought the coffee and fries right out to your car once you’d ordered from the microphone/speaker arrangement at every slot in the parking lot.
In some ways, it was a vast distance from Park Ridge, but in others, it was very close to home. Too close to home, maybe, and as I thought on the song with its accident, deaths and hinted adultery, I resolved to drive even more carefully, at least until we were out of Carroll County, and back on an anonymous interstate, where I could set the cruise control and never move the steering wheel on my genuine Yank tank for ten or twenty miles at a stretch.
A long way from home, a long way from that gawky, geeky teenager listening to a song on a transistor radio, but he’s still there inside somewhere. The songs are no longer new and exotic – they are the comfort music I put on the iPhone in this strange science fiction world I now live in.
We were the Number Ones in 1969. We were setting the styles in primary school. We were putting Flower Power stickers on our ports. We listened to 4BC and 4IP echoing the glory days of Swinging London or Woodstock and San Francisco.
Some of us were just beginning to bud out and grow stuff and shoot up, Heightwise, that is. We were innocent of mood-enhancing substances in those days, apart from clandestine sniffs of the cooking sherry or maybe a slurp from a grown-up’s glass of Cold Duck or Blue Nun when nobody was looking.
This was Queensland, this was Brisbane, this was conservative. We didn’t go to Moratoriums, we didn’t hold sit-ins. Or love-ins.
My primary school was Park Ridge, way out in the sticks, just short of Jerry’s Downfall, where the Mount Lindesay Highway flooded when it rained, and the ghost of Jerry (and presumably his unlucky bullocks) lurked in the sparse gums and our imaginations.
I came to Park Ridge the year that dollars and cents came to Australia. It doesn’t seem all that long ago now, but I guess that looking back on 1966 from 2010 is is a bit like recalling the First World War from the Sixties, and the changes made by four decades turn the past into a different world.
In 1969, computers were the size of trucks, The Beatles still had all their hair (and their lives), LBJ was cranking up the Vietnam War with the help of Harold Holt, and to the imagination of a young schoolboy, the Iron Curtain must be a terrifying continent-spanning structure.
Still on the moon
Park Ridge school only had four classrooms then, all upstairs. The middle two could be opened out into one big room through a folding wall, but this only happened for very rare occasions, such as the first moon landing, when the whole school was crammed in to watch history in fuzzy black and white, Teddy Jobson must have been closer to the screen then I was, or he was just guessing when he exulted, “He’s down!” as an amorphous Neil Armstrong made that one small step.
In hindsight, I wish I’d paid more attention to current events and popular culture. It’s galling to have lived through such an exciting decade and not noticed. But other concerns were more immediate, such as dismantling exercise books to create paper planes, working out the best possible way to spend a five cent fortune at Appleton’s lolly counter or simulating flatulence with armpit and cupped hand.
The Park Ridge uniform was grey and gold. Grey shorts and grey shirt with thin yellow stripes on the cuffs. Little grey hat that was occasionally used for its intended purpose when it wasn’t a container for wildlife, a wrapper for unconsumed lunch, a weapon or a frisbee. Shoes were optional in summer and rarely polished at other times.
Under the school were wooden “forms”, the tuckshop and the enduring smell of warm school milk. There were areas of packed earth down towards the littlies’ end. Water came from rainwater tanks – “town water” with its chemical taste came very late – and the toilets involved a scoop of sawdust in the can to follow up the shiny paper.
Mr Hill, late of the Empire Air Training Scheme, was the Headmaster, teaching Grades Six and Seven. With a hundred odd pupils and a handful of teachers under his command, he was as close to God as it got in those days. He bucked the official syllabus, teaching us “Latin and Greek roots”, and I was enthralled to find the bones of long dead languages hiding in every day words. I was a bit of a bookworm – so what’s changed in forty years? – and I’d long read Mark Twain’s classics, but perhaps my most pleasant and enduring memory of those days is of Mr Hill reading aloud to the class on a long series of golden summer afternoons as we followed Huck and Jim rafting down the Mississippi and giggled over Tom Sawyer’s capers.
The school faced north, turning its back on the pungency of the Red Comb chicken sheds and abattoir. In between were rows of pines, the oval and a wasteland where bracken grew and the empty stumps of mighty trees served as forts, houses and pirate ships. Every now and then the children would be assembled to pluck out bracken for later burning, and the grass was kept under control with a self-powered lawn-mower magically winding itself inwards on a spiral course, tethered to a central post.
The population of the district – and consequently the school – steadily expanded as large properties were divided into “farmlets”, soon to be followed by developers turning acreages of scrubby bushland into suburban estates. It was sad to see our wild playgrounds tamed, but the process had compensations, as crews of exciting men with chainsaws and bulldozers performed their tasks, leaving worksites unattended after hours. Fresh cement called out for embellishment, ditches and roadworks became temporary fortifications, and earthmoving equipment transformed into tanks and bomber cockpits. I remember happily pulling levers and twisting knobs in one yellow-painted behemoth when it suddenly roared into life. My brother and I instantly fled the scene, neither words nor thought necessary.
I regretted the missed opportunity for years after, but it was probably just as well we didn’t experiment further, and the bulldozer was left to idle its tanks dry.
Families were larger in those days, and it was a safe bet that a classmate would have a series of siblings extending into other grades and possibly out the other sides into infancy or the elite heights of high school. Geoff McKiernan was the eldest of his family, and like a set of mirrors infinitely receding, ever-smaller clones occupied the lower grades, each sporting the same features and haircut. There were five children in my family, though we had a better gender mix. The school was actually only made up of a handful of families, once you began counting surnames. The influx of new families was enough to set the old school creaking at the seams, and it wasn’t too long before even the three new classrooms were full up, and temporary rooms made their ugly appearance.
But by that stage I was gone for Sunnybank State High School, half an hour’s reading time away on Danny’s bus. In the years and decades to come, I watched the bushland and farmlets vanish under bitumen and shopping centres, the narrow roads turning into motorways, and the world of my childhood change almost beyond recognition into something out of science fiction.
Pete’s Jukebox
Oh boy! What a fantastic selection of songs in the list above! Some famous names, some radio classics. Just slot the whole lot into your iPod playlist and you’ve got a snapshot of 1969. And a generation.
Two songs stand out for me. Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To, My Lovely is one. Peter wrote and sang some wonderful songs, rich in emotion and melody, but he is one of those artists who, when you hear their name on the radio, you just know what song is coming up. And it’s always this one.
“Where do you go to, my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed?” Sarstedt asks, as he describes the fabulous lifestyle of a desirable young woman, jet-setting companion of millionaires, who lives in a fancy apartment on the Boulevard Saint Michel. Everything is roses and champagne, a glittering future beyond, but
I know where you go to, ’cause I can see inside your head:
I remember the back streets of Naples, two children begging in rags,
both touched with a burning ambition, to shake off their lowly-born tags.
Presumably Sarstedt is the other ragged child, and we can learn about his own fabulous life, the sun-chasing, sparkling fame of the beloved star. Who dreams of Marie-Claire, his companion in childhood poverty.
Slumdog Millionaire all over again. Marie-Claire is an odd name for a Neopolitan, but not impossible, and the rags to riches story is one that is as familiar and comforting to the listener since bards told tales of mighty kings from humble roots.
My wife and I once sippt idle lattes in the morning sun as we gazed at the elegant apartments across the Boulevard Saint Michel. And we wondered if there might still be found rooms full of stolen Picassos, Rolling Stones records, and friends of Sacha Distel.
The other song is one that is never heard on classic radio. The message is similar to Sarstedt’s, the melody is memorable, but it lacks the imagery.
They say he’s the star,
And he’s sure to go far.
Ain’t he pretty?
Here comes the star
He’s the idol of all the world.
He’s got it all. The crowds, the glory, his name up in lights. But he’s the loneliest man in the world, yearning for a girl and a time of love, who left when fame called.
I’d give it all away
Just to hear you say,
“I love you”.
There’s the public face we show to our adoring fans. And the private dreams that, at two in the morning, are all there is in our world. Dreams and memories of nothing much but love and friendship.
We’re all dreaming in our schooldays of a glorious future. The fame, the fortune, the fabulous lifestyle. Work hard and reap the rewards. Use the talent to show the world. Pick the right numbers in the TV lottery. Whatever. It’s success and the new Mercedes in the driveway of our grand mansion we’re all aiming for.
Yes?
No. We might get those things, one way or the other, But they are nothing compared to the love, the smiles, the shared moments that we can have for free. Casually throw them away, and you will spend your life regretting.
Here’s the reunion newsletter Donna sent me, titled Newsletter 1 for 2010:
Hi Everyone
Hope you all had the Xmas and New Year you had hoped for.
We had a major breakthrough before Xmas as John Eggleton had kept a Graduation Program so I believe that the attached list is all the seniors of 74 (thanks to Doug Wait for sending the list on) and with the help of Graham Payne, all the staff.
I have highlighted in green all the people that we definitely know how to contact and who have made contact. Could you please look at the list and just shoot me an email on any snippets on the new names added because even to look up the white pages you need a suburb at least . I don’t mind how many emails you send with thoughts on where people live, work or who they married because it has proved very successful in cross referencing peoples memories.
The people in bold did not appear on the graduation list so maybe some of them did not complete year 12 but that of course does not mean they are not welcome at the reunion.
How does Saturday 18th or Saturday 25th September sound for possible reunion dates. Let me know your preference.
Looking forward to seeing you
Looking at the Friends Reunited page, it looks like Saturday 18 September has been chosen.
A year or so ago, I was driving some young people home, late at night, to a house in Garran. We drove past a house and one of them pointed it out to the others. “That’s one gay place there!” and everyone laughed. I looked at the GPS map. A very short street, named Gay Place, and of course the first house on the left was 1 Gay Place.
Gay had a different connotation in the days of the Sixties and Seventies when they were laying out Woden’s suburbs and I was at school in Brisbane. Our annual high school fete was called Gay Day, and while it was a festive occasion, it wasn’t THAT festive!
LGBT topics weren’t very openly discussed in my schoolday environment. By high school, I think we all had an idea of what homosexual folk did, but chiefly it was nudge-snigger innuendo television comedians. Poofters, horse’s hoofs, shirt-lifters. That chap on Are You Being Served?.
Not proper people.
Homosexuality didn’t feature in my family home discussions. Sex didn’t. Swear words didn’t. I said “Damn”, and my mouth got washed out with soap and water.
High school. Nobody was openly homosexual. It was something they might possibly do in university. This was Queensland in the Seventies, remember. But we knew. When the principal brought out one of the sport players on a Monday and praised him because he had been selected for a local football club, he said, “This boy plays with men!” and oh how we roared!
Fair enough, too. Good line.
Bosom buddies – photo by donlambson*
What sparks this post is a link provided by a friend of mine, on the subject of coming out in “middle school”, which I guess would translate to the early years of high school in Queensland. You may find the article here.
Good article, give it a read. Positive, optimistic, supportive.
So it is with some embarrassment that I confess that my attitudes to LGBT folk were pretty stone-age for the first 40 odd years of my life. I blame my upbringing for the original attitude, and BookCrossing.com for changing it.
I remember one Canberra Day parade, and there was a float from some gay group. I stood with wife and kids and watched and made some joking remark. My wife, instead of laughing, gave me one of those looks, and I thought, geez, what have I done now?
I joined BookCrossing.com shortly after, and there were openly gay people in the forums. Folk who were witty, charming, gentle, caring, loving people. Quite a difference from the stereotypical views of my youth. One of them in particular attracted every ounce of my sympathy, because he had been beaten up for being homosexual and the resultant medical and dental problems were a major factor in his present day life. He’d also come in for severe criticism from his family, notably his father, and I thought, poor bloke, he doesn’t deserve any of this, he’s such a sweet guy.
We became friends in BookCrossing.com and on the Livejournal blogging site, and I remember how his bitter, cynical posts changed when he found the right man and moved in with him. Loneliness became joy. Their region changed the law to permit gay marriage and his partner, returning from a long flight, descended the terminal stairs to find his guy down on one knee, ring in his hands, proposing marriage.
They were married, they have lived in sweet joy for years, and long may they continue. I love a romance story, and this has been one of the best ones.
My attitudes changed. I thought about it and concluded that gay people were people too. So where was the problem? Where was my problem?
There was no problem. From that moment, LGBT folk became normal in my book. My mother would frown on this if she knew, I’m sure. But what people get up to in their bedrooms is no business of mine anyway.
If I have any difficulties with LGBT people, it’s with the campaigners who try to present LGBT folk as being deserving of special positive treatment. This seems to me to be as abhorrent as singling them out for negative treatment. In my book, people are people, regardless of gender preference, skin colour, religion or any other similar factor. Men and women are different for certain medical aspects – very few blokes get to have an obstetrician checking them over, for example, but otherwise I find sexual discrimination as abhorrent as any other, and I long for the day when both sexes are treated equally in rights and respect and rewards.
I like to think that as the years go by, I’m becoming a better person. Less selfish, more tolerant of others. I think I’ve got a long way to go in many respects, but I like the person I am now a lot better than the person I was ten years ago.
–Peter Mac
* The photograph of two young women above is taken from a free stock photography exchange. The photographer makes no claims about sexuality of the subjects and neither do I, despite the caption and the post subject material implying a close relationship. They are just good friends.
Just another morning in Canberra. The heat of the past week or so has vanished and it was cold last night, dropping down to four degrees. My wife, making a quick visit home to retrieve a forgotten item, reported a light dusting of snow on the Brindabellas.
Snow in summer.
I worked my way through my emails. One from Schoolfriends Reunited caught my eye. My high school year was having a reunion. I didn’t think there’d been one before, but I’d moved away and fallen out of touch. Maybe they all got together each month, got maudlin drunk and swapped stories about what went on at the other end of the ovals when the teachers weren’t looking.
Apparently not. This was to be the first one in thirty-six years. 18 September 2010 in the bowls club beside the school. It’s a long hike from Canberra to Brisbane, but I’m not noted for my aversion to travel, so I marked it down as a possible, filled in a few details on the site, and shot off an email to the contact, Donna Dancer (Griffiths), noting my change of name and that my memories of those days were pretty hazy.
She responded:
Hello Peter
Can I tell you that you are not alone in the hazy memory department. I guess it is coming back to me as I access Graduation Lists and people are sending photos they have. It will be essential that we have our school photo on our name tags at the reunion. I have attached correspondence that I have sent to everyone and a list of 1974 Graduates that may help that memory. If you have any contact with others on the list that I have not found please let me know Donna
And it went from there. I looked through the spreadsheet, sent back a few details to fill in a hole here and there, and before I knew it, I was being drawn into it all.
I’m a packrat of the finest kind, and it seems to me that my house is crammed full of stuff that really should be thrown out. One day. I’m sure I’ve got some material of Sunnybank State High. Old photographs, timetables, assignments that I haven’t handed in yet. That sort of stuff. Boxes of it. Somewhere.
That evening Donna emailed me again, forwarding a note from Doug Wait.
Ask Peter McKey if he remembers writing a parody of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. :-)
(John Eggleton has a copy. It’s quite funny.)
Ask Adrian if he remembers who it was that Keith Price married. That’ll give you one more if you can find Keith. Maybe Peter & Sandy know of Keith.
I can’t say that I remember the parody, but I wrote parodies of everything in those days. Hamlet, Kublai Khan, the school newsletter… Laden down with awful puns and injokes, and possibly mildly amusing in a geeky sort of way. Horribly embarrassing, of course.
I won’t say it was all coming back to me, because although I remember Doug and John very well, Keith Price had slipt out entirely.
But someone knows. All these flecks of memory, painstakingly swept together and assembled by Donna and Doug to contact people out of sight for half a lifetime.
I thought I might like to help, and though I’m useless for anything much except driving a taxi and organising weekends in Kansas City, I still retain a few nerdish skills.
Hence this blog. Read the About page, think of ways to make it all happen, I’ll prod WordPress into action and I’ll see you in Sunnybank in Setember.
/
or 
, it’s a song about, and supposedly performed by, a fictional band. CCR dressed up as “
” on the cover of the album, and when they performed the song on the Ed Sullivan Show, playing the gut bass and washboard.
album are proof enough of this.
, the theme song of the 
about orphaned lioncubs in Africa rescued and returned to the wild. No music, no nothing but her beautiful pure voice. I was enchanted.
was her encore, now that I think on the day. Barbra Streisand’s quirky song about being the daughter of a second-hand dealer.
/
and 
, dealing with the First World War and the Korean War respectively, were huge hits of that time. Bright bouncy songs intercut with doomed soldiers going over the top, and humour in the bloody wards of a front-line surgical hospital. The contrast in emotions could not be starker. And of course both got the viewers thinking about the folly and waste of war.
/
/
/
all over again. Marie-Claire is an odd name for a Neopolitan, but not impossible, and the rags to riches story is one that is as familiar and comforting to the listener since bards told tales of mighty kings from humble roots.
, and friends of 
.
Recent Comments