The right one was to go faster, the middle one slowed you down, and the other one had something to do with the gears.

I doubt too many of us had even that theoretical knowledge in 1970. A few kids might have driven a car around the backyard under the careful eye of a parent, and a handful from the backblocks probably had an old Morris or Ford Zephyr to go “bush-bashing” in until it expired against a gum tree.

But our parents owned cars, and car advertising was everywhere on the radio, on television, in newspapers. Still is.

The big divide was Holden versus Ford. My Dad drove a Holden, so I was a Holden man, and if I saw a Ford Falcon, I’d glare at it and make machine-gun noises to shoot the enemy down from my back seat window. Biggles had played a huge influence in my childhood, and if there had been Sopwith Camels and Fokker Triplanes around, I would have been a Camel man.

A few parents drove imports. British cars were still selling. Morris Leyland and Austin 1800s. European Fiats and Renaults. Japanese Datsuns and Mazdas were making an appearance.

But for most of us, it was Ford, Holden or Valiant. The General Motors Holden plant at Acacia Ridge was cranking out Kingswoods, and my Holden heart would beat faster every time we passed by on Beaudesert Road, rattling over the railway crossing.

The HT Holden range was the epitome of modern Australian cardom. Angular and sharp-edged, they looked aggressive and futuristic on the roads. Heads turned as they went by, and if your Dad had one, you were the envy of every kid on the block.

The Monaro was the ultimate. Winning races at Bathurst, it looked fast just standing at the pumps. We wanted to grow up and drive one, hooning down the highway, sunnies shading our eyes, Rolling Stones blasting out of the cassette player. Everyone would bow before us.

They only cost a couple of thousand. You could afford one after a year of hard saving in a base-grade job if you didn’t worry too much about eating or paying a mortgage or personal grooming.

Just look at that auction estimate. $150 000 to $180 000. You know anything else that could appreciate at twice its purchase price every year for four decades?

What we should be doing is going out and buying a specced-out Holden Cruze, parking it in the garage until we are about ninety, and then auction it off in mint condition.

Ah, dreams!

–Peter Mac

Australian Top Ten – 14 March 1970

	this week	last week			weeks in
*	1.	(2)	I THANK YOU	Lionel Rose	10
*	2.	(4)	Venus	Shocking Blue	7
	3.	(1)	Raindrops Keep Falling on My head	Johnny Farnham	14
	4.	(3)	SMILEY	Ronnie Burns	13
*	5.	(5)	SUPER STAR	Murray Head	8
*	6.	(7)	DON’T CRY DADDY/RUBBERNECK	Elvis Presley	4
*	7.	(8)	Whole Lotta Love	Led Zeppelin	5
	8.	(11)	Two Little Boys	Rolf Harris	7
	9.	(10)	Arizona	Mark Lindsay	8
*	10.	(18)	All I Have to do is Dream	Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell	3

–Go-Set Magazine

Pete’s Jukebox

Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell. A world away from The Beatles. And Elvis Presley. These are my songs. Songs of yearning and love and memories. Sentiment dripping out of every note. My wife can’t stand them, but I’m misty holding her hand.

Glen Campbell hits my spot. My Glen-Spot. My Gentry-Spot. These two were a natural pairing to sing songs of middle America’s secret passions. Bobbie Gentry – despite the name, female – had a huge hit with Ode to Billie Joe in 1967, an intriguing song contrasting the banality of everyday life with tragedy in Carroll County.

Campbell had a long string of hits. Gentle on My Mind, Wichita Lineman, Galveston, Little Green Apples. I love them every one.

All I Have to do is Dream was a huge hit for the Everly Brothers in 1958. When Campbell and Gentry went looking for joint projects, this one popped up. I guess that, both being singers of middle America, they had visions of acres of golden corn in their minds.

Dream, dream, dream, dream
Dream, dream, dream, dream

An inspired opening. It ends, as we shall see, with the same wording, and there were some half-strength lines in a couple of place between.

…I want you in my arms
…and all your charms
…I can make you mine,
taste your lips of wine…

Now, who was it said that corn doesn’t sell? Certainly not an American!

Schooldreaming – photo by melodi2

Cliches and worn rhymes aside, the basis of the song is that a lover is unnecessary. All you have to do is dream. While there is a certain amount of pleasure in this thought, I can state with some certainty that holding the girl in your arms beats any daydream. Perhaps this is the unspoken message of the song, but given the unbroken stream of corn, I think we may safely take it at face value. It’s not that subtle.

I spent a lot of my high school years dreaming. I suspect I wasn’t alone. Perhaps this was just as well. If our daydreams had been reality, there wouldn’t have been as much academic work going on!

Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Dream, dream, dream, dream
Dream, dream, dream, dream

–Peter Mac

Bonus video: live performances by Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry

Related posts:

1. 7 March 1970: Popular leaders
2. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
3. 14 February 1970: Hearts and soles

I might swing away from school for the moment, poking my nose, eyes and ears out into the wider world.

Australia was a very different nation in those days. You could probably count the number of students who could use chopsticks on the fingers of one hand. If not for a trickle of Greeks, Italians and other odd Europeans, Australia was a monoculture. We were slowly moving out of the British orbit, but drawing closer to America than Asia.

ANZUS was a reality. We and New Zealand were fighting in Vietnam alongside the USA. The UK was not. American troops were on the streets of Sydney for R&R breaks from the war, American television shows were edging British programmes off our screens, and “All the Way with LBJ!” had been a recent election slogan.

Gough Whitlam, not quite there

It was Richard Nixon in 1970. Former US Vice President Nixon, elected as President two years earlier after a narrow loss to John F Kennedy in 1960, was to end American involvement in Vietnam. Watergate, re-election in 1972 and resignation two years later were still in the future, and for the rest of our high school years he would entertain us with bizarre scandals.

In Canberra, the long-standing dominance of Robert Menzies had come to an end, and Australia was governed by a succession of leaders who, like Nixon, assumed they were masters of their destiny. Harold Holt had been sucked away by the sea, the Country Party’s “Black Jack” McEwen had been a caretaker PM until the realities of coalition politics kicked in, and though his Liberal successor John Grey Gorton had won a slender victory over Labor’s Gough Whitlam in 1969, popular support was leaking away from his government.

It was to drain even faster under the ridiculous figure of Billy McMahon, a loser in the “It’s Time” landslide of 1972. Whitlam, with his contempt for middle Australia, found support slipping, faster than any of his predecessors, until he was shown the door by Kerr and booted through it by the voters. It was a time of political leaders who thought that all they had to do was occupy the top spot and they would rule forever.

Joh, Queensland's powerhouse

In Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who from his ever-tenous support base of less than 30% of the voters never took any election for granted, was a recent arrival in the Premier’s office after the surprise death of Robert Nicklin in late 1968. He presided over a period of growth and prosperity for the state. Every month there would be news of new suburbs, new mines, new opportunities.

His local counterpart, Clem Jones, was the Labor Lord Mayor, as much a powerhouse as Joh. He took what the rest of Australia saw as a big country town with dirt roads and outhouses and made it into a capital to be proud of. Throughout our time there were bridges and freeways built, skyscrapers rising, suburbs spreading. And schools and universities established. I scored a few minutes with him when he came down to Canberra for the Constitutional convention, and all I could do was ask him about the time he personally prepared the Gabba wicket for a Test Match.

Exciting times for any observer of popular culture. The conservative views that had reigned for generations were dissolving as the Baby Boomers entered adulthood, the workforce and politics. Global communications of satellite transmissions and ever-increasing bandwidth brought the world and outside influences closer.

Black and white became colour. In television, newspapers, opinions.

–Peter Mac

Australian Top Ten – 7 March 1970

–Go-Set Magazine

Pete’s Jukebox

Elvis Presley was by now a classic part of the American influence in Australia. Not yet the pathetic, bloated figure of 1977, the 1970 video shows him in his prime.

“Flaming Star!” Mrs Podevin exclaimed when somebody mentioned the 1960 Elvis film. “That was the first movie I went on a date with someone.” For a moment she was sixteen once more, and I resolved to look up when the movie had been released here. 1923, I imagined.

Knocking out hits in music and film since the mid-50s, Elvis was a cultural icon. For the Baby Boomers, he was a role model, a heartache, an inspiration. He could make middle-aged women weak above the knees.

Like President Nixon, his future was bizarre and downhill. In December 1970 the two got together, with an uncomfortable Nixon making Presley some semi-official anti-drugs crusader. Ever after, Nixon was remembered for corruption and Presley for drugs, with both implausibly regarding themselves as innocent.

Today I stumbled from my bed
With thunder crashing in my head
My pillow still wet, from last night’s tears,,,

Don’t cry daddy
Daddy please don’t cry
Daddy you still got me and little Tommy
Together we’ll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh daddy please don’t cry.

The song calls for a return to the good old days, a call that Elvis – and Nixon – should have heeded. Sad, like so many of Elvis’s songs now, Don’t Cry Daddy did well in the charts, reaching Number Six in the US and Number Three in Australia. Burning Love in 1972 was the only later Elvis song to do better. His last Number One had been Suspicious Minds in 1969. The trend was downhill.

Don’t Cry, Daddy was one of Presley’s last good songs. The hits were getting scarcer and the performances, both live and studio, increasingly shakier. Kentucky Rain, released in 1970, described a search for a woman who had left the singer, perhaps echoing the increasing distance between Elvis and his wife in real life.

The Beatles (still together, more or less, in 1970) were embracing new themes and musical styles, but Elvis, rooted in gospel and rockabilly, was not one to go with the flow of the times. Other bands, other performers took over Elvis’s territory.

Elvis’s death in 1977, and that of Michael Jackson in 2009, prompted many to mutter “Good career move”. I have no doubt that shrines to Jackson will prove as popular as Graceland, Elvis’s home in Memphis, where “The King” reigns and the middle-aged worship.

I visited, years later, staying at the Peabody downtown, rather than Heartbreak Hotel, just along Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland. But I couldn’t pass through Memphis without a stop along the way to think of Elvis. Elvis had been a familiar part of my childhood, part of the soundtrack of my early life, always there in the background, like the Beatles and Frank Sinatra.

There’s an Elvis song for every occasion, and if his later tracks were sad and sentimental, the earlier ones were full of love and fire, life and passion sizzling out of them with every fling of those famous hips.

I’m not one for flock posters of Elvis in his prime, nor do I have the complete set of his films, sighing over smouldering romance in the wee hours. But he’s on my iPod, here and there. Not Don’t Cry, Daddy, though. Some songs are probably best described as “interred”.

–Peter Mac

Related posts:

1. 14 March 1970: Dreaming
2. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
3. 14 February 1970: Hearts and soles

The shortest path from Art to Woodwork – photo by sundstrom

Looking back on Grade Eight – from Grade Nine – I was kind of disappointed in it. In many ways it was old ground recovered. Language and gender-related subjects aside, everyone had the same syllabus. Boys did woodwork, metalwork, and technical drawing, girls did typing and cooking.

I think the intention of the first year at high school was to even out any differences in primary school teaching. Everyone got the same grounding in basic subjects of English, History, Geography, Maths and Science. The big difference from primary school, where one teacher had taught everything, was that here in high school we had different teachers for different subjects.

I’ll talk about each subject in later posts, but looking back on high school as a whole, it’s strange that the most useful learning came right at the beginning.

When I eventually got a job in the public service after university, the minimum educational requirement was matriculation, i.e. senior high school graduation. But for the five years I worked as a clerk in the Department of Defence, so long as I could read and write, the most advanced learning I needed was arithmetic and percentages, so that I could calculate discounts on claims due for payment. That was an exciting job, that was!

Computer programming in Canberra, I was mostly self-taught. Discovering the computer room in Griffith University pretty much put an end to my arts degree, but I didn’t care. Computers were the big thing and paid a lot more than I could ever expect to gain from a career in the humanities.

As a political journalist, cynicism was the main requirement for success, and finally, as a second-hand internet bookseller, a dab hand with packing tape and enough strength to haul crates of paperbacks about in my garage was about all I needed.

I doubt I’ll ever find work as anything but a taxidriver now. What else could possibly be as much fun?

Which brings me to the useful stuff from high school. Useful in employment, that is. Statistics and probability have kept me out of casinos and away from games of chance.

Geometry. Fair dinkum. Right from the first day at Sunnybank, learning about circles and angles and triangles has helped immensely in plotting the shortest paths between two points in Canberra. The Parliamentary Triangle, where I do a lot of driving, is all angles and circles, and it warms my cabbie heart to hear a passenger say that “that took less time than I thought!”

“Oh, we can drive around a bit longer if you want,” I venture, but they never take me up on it.

View Larger Map

The classic case is Captain Cook Crescent. It’s a double-size wedge of pizza and which is the shortest distance between the two ends? If that angle is less than 360/π, then it’s the chord. Which it is.

S&P also comes into working out the best areas to go to get work. I look at the Stats screen on the taxi despatch computer, which shows the number of radio jobs in the last hour, divide by the number of cabs in the booking area, and whichever ratio is higher is my best bet.

–Peter Mac

Australian Top Ten – 28 February 1970

–Go-Set Magazine

Pete’s Jukebox

Rolf Harris. Funny man. He did funny pictures with cans of housepaint. He sang funny songs. He looked funny.

He was funny. I loved his corney jokes and his silly paintings, his winks and beard and big thick glasses. He was a role model to me. A dork made good. Except he was obviously a great deal more extroverted than me, and that was something I had to work on.

I’m getting there. Never you fear. One day I’ll be Rolf Mackay and I’ll be painting portraits of the Queen and amusing a smile or two out of her. You’ll see. I can even tell jokes to my passengers once they are strapped in and we are hurtling through the city at well over the limit. I know where all the speed cameras are. I’m careful. I can pick my moment to tell corney jokes.

I sail through the last moments of an amber light. “Taxi green,” I wink at them, and they smile. Possibly to humour me, but it’s a smile nonetheless and that’s a bonus.

Anyway. Rolf Harris could make people smile and he could sell hit records with the most ridiculous material. Six White Boomers. Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. Jake the Peg, for the love of God. So long as it had a catchy tune and got people smiling, Rolf was laughing. All the way to the bank.

Two Little Boys was as silly as they came, and people loved it. Funny thing about it is that it isn’t funny at all. It’s a story of two boys who later become soldiers, where one rescues his wounded and dying comrade. That’s poignant stuff. It’s straight out of a previous age when gallantry and chivalry and cavalry still had a place in the front line.

We were fighting the Vietnam war in those days, and for half a generation of male Aussies, there was a very real chance of ending up dying. It wouldn’t be a comrade on a horse, but some hero in a Huey doing the rescuing.

Years later, well six years, to be precise, the war had ended, we weren’t likely to get into another scrap for a bit, and I had joined the Queensland University Regiment Drinking Club, any resemblance to a military unit pure coincidence.

We sang Two Little Boys in our own lusty manner, fuelled by a few Fourexes, leaving out a word here and there, making a “blank” motion as we hushed.

Two little boys
Had two little _____s
Each had a wooden ____
Gaily they played, each summer’s day
_____s both of course

One little chap
Then had a ____ ____
Broke off his ____s head,
Wept for his ____
And cried with _____
As his young playmate said:

Did you think I would leave you ____ing
When there’s room on my ____ for two?
Climb up here, Jack will soon be ____ing
“I can ____ just as fast with two!”

As I said, silly. And funny as all hell to we little boy soldiers.

–Peter Mac

Bonus video – Rolf Harris paints and sings

Related posts:

1. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
2. 7 February 1970: Smarties
3. 14 February 1970: Hearts and soles

View Larger Map
Park Ridge State School was easy. One building. Sunnybank High was pretty much an order of magnitude bigger in every respect including complexity. We now had different teachers for different subjects in different classrooms. That was a challenge. We had to learn the geography of the school and at the end of each period, navigate to the next classroom. In 1970, there were, if memory serves correctly, five main blocks. Four blocks of classrooms and one of workshops.

The classroom blocks were all of a pattern. One classroom wide and about ten long, they were built on two levels. Access to the classrooms was by covered verandahs, always running along the sunny north sides. The verandahs had covered bag racks, where students left their bags outside their home rooms. Every government school in Queensland used the same efficient style.

Block One faced onto Turton Street. Upstairs were the administration offices, the library and the staffroom. Downstairs were classrooms. Two “tunnels” between classrooms allowed groundlevel access to the rest of the school.

Block Two was behind Block One. There was a large open area underneath allowing rainy day activities, doubling as a place to sit in the shade to eat lunch. The toilets were also located here.

Between Blocks Two and Three was the assembly area where we would line up for roll calls and school announcements. Block Three had the school tuckshop and bookshop on the ground level and this area was always busy with students lining up to buy a pie or a salad roll or a notepad.

Block Four, in 1970, was under construction. The eastern end was complete, with two classrooms upstairs and two down, and the rest of the block was a building site. I think by the end of the first year the whole thing was finished.

Block Five was the workshop block where woodwork and metalwork instruction was given. One level, but the rooms were far bigger, with solid benches and stools grouped around various saws and anvils.

Mondrian – photo by LaDeon

The school was continually growing to accommodate rising student numbers, and in my memory there was always construction going on. A science block and a “Commonwealth Library” were added early on, and temporary classrooms were parked in inconvenient corners.

8-12 was assigned a homeroom on the second floor of the Block Four stump. Our room was probably called 401, but I’m relying on a very tenuous memory here. One thing I do know is that it was a death scene.

Because it was the end classroom, the verandah likewise came to an end, and there was a half-height wall guarding the drop. A convenient place to rest one’s elbows, looking out over the roofs of the temporary classrooms and beyond to the well-treed streets of Sunnybank.

Or, if one were foolhardy, a place to sit, or stand, or skylark around.

In 1969 a student had done just that, and toppled over onto the supports for the not yet installed temporary classroom beneath. One of the short steel poles had pierced his body and he had died a short time later.

Mr Hill, my primary school teacher, had mused aloud that one of the staff would have had to lift the dying student off the pole, and he was sorry for that teacher.

The student had come from Greenbank – incorrectly reported in The Courier-Mail the next day as Greenslopes – and would have been one of the regulars on Danny’s bus. We were never officially told or warned, but none of us ever got up on that wall. We leaned our elbows on it and thoughtfully gazed out on the school.

After Block Four, there was the “oval”, a green rectangle big enough for four football pitches, though of course it was overlaid with markings for cricket and baseball, track and field. The ground fell away in two gentle banks, forming natural viewing areas. The bottom area, where the volleyball courts were lined up, was distant and out of direct sight from the main school buildings, and was a natural venue for smokers and other illicit passions.

All told, it was a large and well-ordered schoolyard. Seen from above, it would have looked very blocky and rectangular, with very few trees or circles to relieve the eye. But we saw it from ground level, or one storey up, and after a while, we didn’t see the rectangles and lines – they fell into the background. We saw the flowing patterns of schoolchildren, walking, running, talking or even skipping along between the classrooms, dodging around the slower-moving taller shapes of the teachers.

No one person could remember every one of the thousand or more names, but odd fragments return to me. There were those who were close to me, and those who taught me lessons I remember to this day. Their forms and faces are hazy now, but as I look back through black and white class photographs, they dance in my mind yet, their young voices rising through the years.

Australian Top 10 – 21 February 1970

	this week	last week			weeks in
	1.	(2)	Venus	Shocking Blue	8
	2.	(1)	I Thank You	Lionel Rose	11
	3.	(6)	Don’t Cry Daddy/Rubberneckin’	Elvis Presley	5
*	4.	(7)	Whole Lotta Love	Led Zeppelin	6
	5.	(5)	Superstar	Murray Head	9
	6.	(3)	Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head	Johnny Farnham	15
	7.	(4)	SMILEY	Ronnie Burns	14
*	8.	(10)	ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM	Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell	4
*	9.	(12)	HONEY COME BACK	Glen Campbell	3
	10.	(8)	TWO LITTLE BOYS	Rolf Harris	8

>–Peter Mac

Pete’s Jukebox

This was an odd song. As a song, it wasn’t much. A sweet love song with a catchy chorus.

The singer was the sensation. Lionel Rose was the first Aboriginal Australian to gain a world boxing championship title. And the first Aboriginal to become Australian of the year. Along with Evonne Goolagong, who was a world class tennis player in the mid-Seventies, Rose was a tremendous role model for Aboriginal Australians.

Lionel Rose, double star

Rose was very different from the normal pop star, by being Aboriginal and a boxer. His earnest delivery was also at odds with the more flamboyant style of Aussie rock. After retiring from boxing, he toured with Ashton’s Circus, the singing boxer in a three ring circus.

When a boy becomes a man,
He must do the best he can
To live his life and find his childhood dream
I’m glad that the biggest break I’ve had
Was when I found that girl that thought of only me.

Thank you for your smile
And the love that’s in your eyes,
Thank you for a heart that’s big and true,
Thank you for the many things you are, my love,
Let me thank you for just being you.

Looking at Rose’s entry in Wikipedia, there is no mention of marriage, though he is noted to be the godfather of an MTV VJ. His childhood dream, one would imagine, given that his father was a boxer on the tent-show circuit, was realised with his world title.

In 1970, he and this song inspired those of us with ears to listen. Only a few years older than us, he had reached a world pinnacle. Talent, training, skill and determination enabled Rose to overcome all barriers to make it, not only as a boxer, but a singer. If he could do it, so could any one of us.

–Peter Mac

Related posts:

1. 14 February 1970: Hearts and soles
2. 7 February 1970: Smarties
3. 14 March 1970: Dreaming

Valentine’s Day in Sunnybank. Two weeks into high school, and with all these pubescents thrust together, i’m sure that there were some hormones flowing. Relationships were being forged.

But were there any declarations of love being made? I’ll take a punt and say no. We might have been looking, but we weren’t playing. Not just yet, anyway.

Sneaker love – photo by Piotr Bizior - www.bizior.com

You know that classic novel and film The Princess Bride? In the first chapter of the William Goldman book, Buttercup is rated on beauty, steadily climbing the charts as those above her succumb to chocolate or age or accidents, working her way through the top twenty until by the end of the first chapter she is Number One: the most beautiful women in the world.

I think that we Grade Eight students who walked to school, got off the buses, or were dropped off by their parents were much like Buttercup. Working our way up the charts. And our own personal bests. Growing into fresh, healthy handsome boys and beautiful girls.

Not that I personally would ever have made anyone’s top list for anything but gawky and geeky. With the emotional intelligence and social grace of a half-brick. I might like to think that I have made my way up to the full brick in my later years, but my children would say different.

And my wife has just told me that the beard I’ve grown since New Years Day is not a good look. My daughter flat out hates it. And my son, who is generally supportive, helpfully said, “It makes you look older.”

So I’m no oil painting, and never was. But my fellow students, I remember different. The boys I had no eyes for, but the girls were beautiful to begin with and just got better as they filled out into their curves and hips and things.

Something about young women. They mature a lot faster than young men. In their bodies, in their brains, in everything. They are generally real adults a long way before their male schoolmates are anything like reasonable company.

I remember one day early February 1970. There were a group of us sitting on the edge of the oval. Maybe it was during one of the many bomb threats, maybe it was while everyone else was playing rounders or something, maybe it was lunchtime. I forget the occasion, but it was I, Noel Davis and Allan Madelaine. Not sure of the girls, but the conversation turned to sex, and they named a price.

And then added to it with all sorts of extras, culminating in the obstetrician’s bill. And food and clothing for the infant.

It all worked out to more than any schoolboy could afford.

It was pretty much flirting, to begin with. Crushes came later. Hands held and kisses stolen away from the gaze of the teaching staff. And real romance, well, I had no direct knowledge of this, except to note that Sandra Young and Peter Caldwell were sweethearts for a long time, and later married. Still are, according to Donna Dancer’s list of contacts.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of my schoolmates at the reunion. I am sure that the beautiful girls will be even more beautiful women.

Maybe with figures more matronly than maidenly, but if there is one thing that life has taught me, it is that real beauty isn’t found in fashion magazines. Nor in adolescent fantasies. It’s found deep inside, somewhere in the region of the heart.

Will hearts soaked in twenty or thirty years of parental or marital affection be lovelier than before? I think so. I think that there will be smiles and embraces, laughter …and love.

– Peter Mac

Australian Top Ten – 14 February 1970

	this week	last .week			weeks in
	1.	(1)	Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head	Johnny Farnham	10
	2.	(4)	SMILEY	Ronnie Burns	9
	3.	(2)	Down On The Corner/Fortunate Son	Creedence Clearwater Revival	9
	4.	(13)	I Thank You	Lionel Rose	6
	5.	(10)	Jam up and jelly tight	Tommy Roe	6
	6.	(3)	Holly Holy	Neil Diamond	8
	7.	(8)	Arkansas Grass	Axiom	11
	8.	(6)	Suspicious Minds	Elvis Presley	13
	9.	(21)	Venus	Shocking Blue	3
	10.	(11)	Penny Arcade	Roy Orbison	17

–Go-Set

Pete’s Jukebox

Only one possible choice in this list for a Valentine’s Day post. Venus by Dutch band Shocking Blue. Not to be confused with the 1986 Bananarama hit cover. Nor the 1990 remix of the same song, which likewise hit the Australian Top Ten.

Nor the 1959 Frankie Avalon hit of the same title, nor Jamie Redfern’s 1973 hit cover. (“Venus if you will, please send a little girl for me to thrill…”) All very confusing, really.

A goddess on a mountain top
Was burning like a silver flame.
The summit of beauty and love
And Venus was her name.

I’m going to disregard the various hit rankings. This song is crap. Crapper than most pop songs of the era, anyway. Various bits of it are stolen from other songs, most notably the opening guitar riff, lifted straight out of The Who’s Pinball Wizard of the previous year. A 1963 Mama Cass song is also heavily mined.

Two words into the song, and the Dutch vocalist mispronounces goddess as “godness”. It might make some sort of sense, but Venus is the goddess of love, okay? It’s a song about Venus, if you will.

Only two verses. Most of the song is chorus, and looking at the clip, I think that the group is kind of embarrassed about it all. A few wry smiles at the camera, boredom creeping in here and there.

Her weapons were her crystal eyes
Making every man mad.
Black as the dark night she was
Got what no-one else had.

Aaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh!

Well, I’m your Venus
I’m your fire
At your desire.

Yeah, I know that I can mangle syntax with the best of them and my spelling can be archaeic, but honestly, this song is just painful to listen to. That bit of screaming just then, that was me, venting.

But I’m sure it was just fine for dancing. And screaming.

And any jet-black crystal-eyed chick of the Seventies, well, she had it made.

–Peter Mac

Related posts:

1. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
2. 28 February 1970: Learning curves
3. 7 February 1970: Smarties

Smarties – photo by andyculpin

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.

Australian Top 10 – 7 February 1970

	this week	last .week			weeks in
	1.	(1)	Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head	Johnny Farnham	9
	2.	(2)	Down On The Corner/Fortunate Son	Creedence Clearwater Revival	8
	3.	(5)	Holly Holy	Neil Diamond	7
	4.	(9)	SMILEY	Ronnie Burns	8
	5.	(4)	Take A Letter, Maria	R.B. Greaves	10
	6.	(6)	Suspicious Minds	Elvis Presley	12
	7.	(7)	Picking Up Pebbles	Matt Flinders	18
	8.	(11)	Arkansas Grass	Axiom	10
	9.	(8)	SOMETHING/COME TOGETHER	The Beatles	14
	10.	(12)	Jam up and jelly tight	Tommy Roe	5

– Go-Set

Pete’s Jukebox

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.

–Peter Mac

Related posts:

1. 14 February 1970: Hearts and soles
2. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
3. 28 February 1970: Learning curves

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.

– Peter Mac

Australian Top 20 – 31 January 1970

	this week	last week			weeks in
	1.	(1)	Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head	Johnny Farnham	8
	2.	(8)	Down On The Corner/Fortunate Son	Creedence Clearwater Revival	7
	3.	(6)	And When I Die	Blood Sweat & Tears	9
	4.	(7)	Take A Letter, Maria	R.B. Greaves	9
	5.	(9)	Holly Holy	Neil Diamond	6
	6.	(3)	Suspicious Minds	Elvis Presley	11
	7.	(5)	Picking Up Pebbles	Matt Flinders	17
	8.	(4)	SOMETHING/COME TOGETHER	The Beatles	13
	9.	(17)	SMILEY	Ronnie Burns	7
	10.	(2)	Penny Arcade	Roy Orbison	15
	11.	(10)	Arkansas Grass	Axiom	9
	12.	(16)	Jam up and jelly tight	Tommy Roe	4
	13.	(12)	Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday	Stevie Wonder	8
	14.	(11)	Tracy	The Cuff Links	11
	15.	(14)	Hey, Western Union Man	Max Merritt & The Meteors	8
	16.	(13)	I’ll Never Fall In Love Again	Bobbie Gentry	14
	17.	(19)	Oh Well	Fleetwood Mac	7
	18.	(25)	I Thank You	Lionel Rose	4
	19.	(18)	Try A Little Kindness	Glen Campbell	9
	20.	(32)	Think About Tomorrow Today/A Dog, A Siren & Memories	Masters Apprentices	3

Pete’s Jukebox

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 need you again.

–Peter Mac

Related posts:

1. 1 January 1970: Rose-coloured glasses
2. 7 March 1970: Popular leaders
3. 28 February 1970: Learning curves

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

Related posts:

1. 31 January 1970: Born Free
2. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
3. 7 February 1970: Smarties

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

Related posts:

1. 7 March 1970: Popular leaders
2. 1 January 1970: Rose-coloured glasses
3. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.

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.

Related posts:

1. People
2. A morning email from Donna
3. 1 March 2010: Newsletter