Sunnybank74

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