Sunnybank74

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