Sunnybank74

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.

Australian Top 40 for 1 January 1970

	this week	last week			weeks in
	1.	(2)	Suspicious Minds	Elvis Presley	7
	2.	(1)	SOMETHING/COME TOGETHER	The Beatles	9
	3.	(3)	Penny Arcade	Roy Orbison	11
	4.	(4)	Picking Up Pebbles	Matt Flinders	13
	5.	(5)	And When I Die	Blood Sweat & Tears	5
	6.	(7)	Take A Letter, Maria	R.B. Greaves	5
	7.	(10)	Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head	Johnny Farnham	4
	8.	(6)	I’ll Never Fall In Love Again	Bobbie Gentry	10
	9.	(11)	Tracy	The Cuff Links	7
	10.	(12)	Try A Little Kindness	Glen Campbell	5
	11.	(28)	Holly Holy	Neil Diamond	2
	12.	(13)	Arkansas Grass	Axiom	5
	13.	(18)	Down On The Corner/Fortunate Son	Creedence Clearwater Revival	3
	14.	(9)	The Star	Ross D. Wyllie	13
	15.	(16)	Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday	Stevie Wonder	4
	16.	(14)	Jesus Is A Soul Man	Lawrence Reynolds	6
	17.	(21)	Hey, Western Union Man	Max Merritt & The Meteors	4
	18.	(15)	Good Clean Fun/Mommy And Daddy	The Monkees	5
	19.	(8)	Jean	Oliver	10
	20.	(20)	Wedding Bell Blues	The Fifth Dimension	7
	21.	(17)	He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother	The Hollies	6
	22.	(22)	Sacha	Hank B. Marvin	6
	23.	(31)	COLD TURKEY	Plastic Ono Band	2
	24.	(19)	RUBEN JAMES	Kenny Rogers And The First Edition	8
	25.	(29)	SMILEY	Ronnie Burns	3
	26.	(34)	Oh Well	Fleetwood Mac	3
	27.	(32)	SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN	Ray Stevens	3
	28.	(23)	LITTLE WOMAN	Bobby Sherman	8
	29.	(33)	SILVER THREADS AND GOLDEN NEEDLES	The Cowsills	3
	30.	(36)	RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD	B. J. Thomas	2
	31.	(38)	CARROLL COUNTY ACCIDENT	Bobby And Laurie	2
	32.	(26)	SOUNDS OF GOODBYE	Kamahl	12
	33.	(-)	YOU’RE EVERYTHING	Don Lane	1
	34.	(25)	WITHOUT YOU/HAIR	Doug Parkinson In Focus	14
	35.	(37)	You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling	Dionne Warwick	4
	36.	(-)	KATY JANE	Ronnie Charles	1
	37.	(24)	Sweet Caroline	Neil Diamond	15
	38.	(-)	THE HUNTER	Pacific Gas And Electric	1
	39.	(30)	SO GOOD TOGETHER	Andy Kim	5
	40.	(-)	NOBODY’S CHILD	Karen Young	1

–Go-Set Magazine

Pete’s Jukebox

Carroll County pointed out – photo by PeterMac

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.

–Peter Mac

1969 Number Ones

1.1.1969 - 15.1.1969	3 weeks	White Room	Cream
22.1.1969	1 week	Going Up The Country	Canned Heat
29.1.1969 - 5.2.1969	2 weeks	Eloise	Barry Ryan
12.2.1969 - 5.3.1969	4 weeks	Lily The Pink	The Scaffold
12.3.1969	1 week	Build Me Up Buttercup	The Foundations
19.3.1969 - 23.4.1969	6 weeks	OB-LA-DI OB-LA-DA/WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS	The Beatles
3.5.1969 - 24.5.1969	4 weeks	Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)	Peter Sarstedt
31.5.1969	1 week	The Real Thing	Russell Morris
7.6.1969 - 5.7.1969	5 weeks	GET BACK/DON’T LET ME DOWN	The Beatles
12.7.1969 - 19.7.1969	2 weeks	Hair	The Cowsills
26.7.1969 - 16.8.1969	4 weeks	THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO/OLD BROWN SHOE	The Beatles
23.8.1969 - 6.9.1969	3 weeks	In The Ghetto	Elvis Presley
13.9.1969 - 11.10.1969	5 weeks	Honky Tonk Women/You Can’t Always Get What You Want	The Rolling Stones
18.10.1969 - 8.11.1969	4 weeks	Part Three Into Paper Walls/The Girl That I Love	Russell Morris
15.11.1969 - 22.11.1969	2 weeks	THE STAR	Ross D. Wylie
29.11.1969 - 6.12.1969	2 weeks	Penny Arcade	Roy Orbison
13.12.1969 - 27.12.1969	(4 weeks)	SOMETHING/COME TOGETHER	The Beatles

Source: Go-Set

School

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.

–Peter Mac

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.