Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Hi folks, I hope you can assist me with  a bit of local Canberra history. I'm seeking more information about the Bruce Hall incident in the 1960s. Can anybody remember the date?  It's embarrasing to admit, but I was there and I can't even remember which year it was.

Mick

Malcolm B Duncan: "Explains a lot really, Eliot Ramsey."

Well, I'm not ashamed to admit I have come to rely on the generosity of strangers.

Paul Walter: "And how the heck did you keep the house cat on the back pick-up tray?"

I would say, eg, "My taste in music is catholic, " meaning that I embrace all within a wide range of categories from Peruvian folk tunes to gangsta rap.

Or, I could say, "My taste in music is eclectic," meaning that I am selective

within that wide range.

That is the sense in which I would call them antonyms.

Yes, "catholic",  diverse, an antonym to "eclectic", I would say.  Of course, by "catholick" , old prickle,  you may well  mean "anglickan", according to your earlier post.    

I gather that you were objecting to my comment:  "There will be no voice of abuse from the GPS schools and such."   I have since remembered Richard Walsh as an exception, and, I think, Geoffrey Dutton re physical abuse.  So I will amend "no voice" to "few voices".  Happy?

Paul Walter asks:

"Were the pedals on the front wheel, or was it a chain drive to the back axle and wheels? And how the heck did you keep the house cat on the back pick-up tray?"

It was front wheel drive. The cat just sat there, no matter where I drove it. Completely trusting. Stupid, most likely. I think it may have been very fat and lazy.

I must have been a real nightmare as a little tacker. One of my neighbours was the proud owner of a vintage Morris Bullnose.

I got into the garage one day with it and painted it with silver-frost and black and yellow house paints.

Had pretty well done all of one side before I was apprehended.

There were no personal repercussions that I can recall, either.

In fact, the owner of the Morris went to the trouble a while later to rescue me after I'd got stuck by my head under our house. He jacked up floor boards to set me free.

Looking back, I think the entire series of Dennis the Menace cartoon strips may have been based around my early childhood.

It was, to my mind, in many ways "better" in the past

Robert Dessaix describes a school experience that was very similar to my own: rich, diverse, exacting, instructional, boring. Enriching children with their own culture, while educating them about others'.

As I experience it, the only quality from the above that remains is "boring".

But now it is wrapped in more opaque language, eg, 'sums' have become "algorithms".

Take "subtraction". Once you used to borrow and pay back – a concept kids were familiar with.

It changed to "trading". What does that mean? Ironically, the process is in fact a very cynical view of trade. You take something. The other number loses. That's it.

This recommended process in fact doesn't even work very well. So, if you are taking , say 65 away from, say 6000, then you have to change 6000 into 5 90 90 10, before proceeding. Try explaining that to 10 year olds ... or, explain the thinking behind teaching such to kids to anyone with a brain, actually.

I assumed by what I read as a rather hostile post addressed to me, that I had in some way offended Malcolm B Duncan.

I still have no idea why, although I invited him to explain it to me.

In some obscure way my comment, clearly about protestant schools, seemed, in his response, to somehow to involve a secular school: Sydney High ... (lord, Malcolm: for heavens sake keep quiet about that screaming chauvinist Norman May being an old boy. I mean, many of us were hoping that he wasn't even Australian. Sydney High has done much better than that.).

The rest of Malcolm's post seemed rather concerned with Cranbrook, and the wish of GPS heads – presumably not the head of Sydney High – to have Cranners as one of their own. Why wouldn't they? It's a very special, independent school. But I have never heard any student/old boy from Cranbrook echoing that sentiment. Hey, but that's just my experience....

Empire Day - May 24. Cracker night to the kids, a half day off school and with fleeting recognition for the pink bits on the map we youngsters had the time of our lives. So did the parents; poor pets took it hard but hey it was only one night a year.

Sadly kids don't get the opportunity to blow themselves up these days.

euthanased, I now understand.

Many of the boys wore black sewn-on armbands on their shirts: girls, rosettes. I wore neither, as my mother thought it was a lot of tosh - although my grandfather had been decorated by this king's predecessor. Between the death and the funeral, we practised Abide with me and The king of love my shepherd is, with the whole school, because they were the king's favourite hymns, we were told repeatedly: and, on the day, there was a huge, boring ceremony.

I mention "the whole school" because we were the opportunity classes, who didn't interact with the rest of the large school at all, as a rule. There is not one person from outside those oc classes who, not only would I not recognise a name or face now, but I would not have at that time.

Obviously, this was a public school. How times have changed. Quite a lot for the better, in my opinion … the bathwater needed to go, but they could have kept the baby.

Days of childhood, they were the days, when bread and milk were delivered by horse and cart. Fruit and vegetables were sold from the back of a delivery truck. No large shopping centres and only the very rich could afford a car. The iceman delivered ice for the ice chests and the night man took away the dunny can on his shoulder.

I can remember getting up at 4am to hitch a ride on the milkman's cart. Empire Day and Guy Fawkes Day were cracker nights, nights when the neighborhood gathered together to build huge bonfires. The corner grocer shop sold broken biscuits in paper bags. Fish and chips cost one shilling and sixpence.

Petrol was three shillings a gallon.

Yes, those were the days.

Michael de Angelos: "I ended up in another town about 10 miles away where the driver discovered me giggling in the back."

As a three year old, I rode across Musgrave Road in Brisbane's inner city Red Hill on a Cyclops Dinky trike with the house cat in the back pick-up tray. During peak hour.

The bloke who owned the local butcher's shop wheeled me inside when I got to the other side then called my Mum to come and get me.

He recognised me because he still did home deliveries in those days.

Mum set some kind of land-speed record up ZigZag Street to the shops, apparently.

Such things might be more common than we realise. Don DeLillo describes something similar in White Noise, a kid crossing a freeway on a trike while old ladies watching from an apartment balcony go nearly apoplectic with fright.

I vaguely recall Mum making me promise not to tell Dad.

I gave the wrong order though, Jenny, I realised afterwards. The hierarchy was God, king, flag. King before country? That reflected the times of empire, I suppose. Or maybe it just scanned better.

I honour my God, salute my flag, and serve my king.  A judicious and interesting choice of verbs. 

I have only the slightest memory of this but my mother filled in the gaps.

When I was 6 my brother (a year older) hauled me up and put me in the back of a open, covered top delivery truck-which took off a few minutes later . I ended up in another town about 10 miles away where the driver discovered me giggling in the back.

I dread to think what would happen to that poor driver now. Probably accused of child kidnap and God know's what.

Which particular generalisation of mine were you objecting to, Malcom B. Duncan?

I can remember when Australia had no culture. None whatsoever.

That was before Al Grasby started wearing coloured ties.

We had no performing artists of note, it was years before Nicole or any other Australians of any virtue went to Hollywood, and long before our artists were known in France.

There was no science in Australia. No literature.

There was no decent ballet here and none came here from anywhere else.

The talented were utterly despised by the greater mass of people who were the products of dull, unimaginative, boring schools bereft of cultural value.

Our cities were small, dark and gloomy. Architecture in the suburbs was dull and unimaginative.

Women were drab.  Our menfolk lacked sophistication and charm.

Then Whitlam fixed everything.

I did indeed grow up in the bush. My older sister and I would strip off our clothes when the rain came and end up over a mile away in the middle of town paddling until our uncle found us and took our drowned rat 3 and 4 year old bodies home.

I remember hating shoes so much because we never actually really had any, so when I started school the first thing I did was kick them off and got in the shit for it. A friend was so terrified of school that she wet her pants in her first assembly. Poor little girl was shy for life.

Then I remember moving 25 miles to another town where we finally got our first electric lights and that 25 miles seemed to be the longest journey on earth for little kids who had never been more than 10 miles to nanna's house one way or 15 miles the other way.

It was in 1959-64 that my conservation streak started when Menzies started paying farmers to strip clear my beautiful country to grow wheat. Not much grows there anymore and most of the people have left.

In my teens we used to drive out to the sand hills, wherever they were that day, and build bonfires to sit and sing around and skull long necks to prove our courage.

It was the best of times, Jenny, because my parents didn't know where I was or who I was with.

I have only just seen these comments - not very interested in perverts - but I must take issue with F Kendall.

I went to a GPS School as did my father and his three brothers. I have never really understood why but I was sent to Scots (after having spent 5 1/2 years at Coogee Preparatory School where the education was excellent and caning was a daily event for most of us for the most trivial of transgressions - it is where I first acquired my sense of injustice when, in Transition, Jack Birney's sister caned the entire class because we wouldn't dob in the transgressor - she was a Roman Catholic though).

Dad and his brothers, however, were not well off. They lived in Paddo (now called Woollahra to keep the prices up) when it was a slum. They all went to a GPS School - Sydney High. It is also a Goverrnment School. It is the only school in the State that competes both in the GPS and the Associated Schools competitions. It produced Lionel Murphy, Norman May and Peter Clyne amongst others. Ever since Cranbrook was established, the rest of the GPS Schools have been trying to get High out and Cranbrook in. In Dad's day they said that High could not remain because it did not row. The Old Boys got together, bought the School a boatshed and that was the first year High won the Head of the River.

So, F Kendall, a little less tarring with the one brush, thanks.

Fiona, so it was you - well that would be your choice - good one my dear. Poor old Sullivan is rather dry these days.

Bruce Hall boys. They never and the Duntroon boys never got along in my day. There was virtual open warfare between them. Unforgiveable act when the Bruce boys burnt a mini car on their sacred parade ground and as I recall floured the place, so in retaliation they amassed at the end of the then open all the way from Civic University Avenue and marched on Bruce.

Bruce boys barricaded the place but the army, well it was the army after all, got in and the damage was extensive. One poor bloke nearly had a nervous breakdown when his PhD thesis went missing, but he got it back. The powers that be ordered a halt to hostilites and an Amnesty Day was held to bury the hatchet. It took the form of a sports day, row boat race up Sullivans Creek - can still see them trying to sink each - a footy match with a ball the size of twenty pumpkins or more, tug of war over Sullivans - uni boys lost of course.

The day became a feature for a couple of years, then died I suspect.

Remember the Treasure Hunts or were they gone by your day? Prize was for the most imaginative thing you could lift in the town. All came unstuck when some lads led by (I better not name him) handsome big Burton boy- now a leading authority on Gallipoli and WW1 history - hid in the War Memorial and after hours removed some valuable paintings- quite a scoop. I believe they wanted as much as anything to demonstrate that the place was not secure. Raised a hell of a storm, the police were called - the paintings of course were safe - but as I recall that was the last of those big treasure hunts.

The Bruce boys at one time came over to Burton in the night and bricked up the front entrance on our boys. Never seemed to have occurred to them what a fire might do. But of course no bars on the windows in those days. Look at them now - all bars on the ground floor.

But a friend of mine had the best claim to fame - lost touch with her and she completely changed her name. On the night of the annual ball she managed to fall from the third floor window of her room stark naked. Landed softly for obvious reasons on the grass below. Survived without a scratch. Ian ran into her years later and remembers her for some rather notable graffiti about the late Sir John Kerr. She was in fact one of the brightest students when I was there. 

Ah, they were the days. What do the students do these days? The seem to keep a rather low profile.  

I wonder how they would react though to the all boys out of the girls block by 10pm rule we had, with the warden patrolling the corridors at night to enforce it.  No chance of perverts in our rooms, at least not after 10pm.   

I was lucky as a kid, because we lived in the outer suburbs which meant we had some of the country close at hand and milder versions of the factors that troubled you and your mum – whereas you had snakes by the ton, we had stumpys and bluetongues, which were still better than nothing. Given the brainpower of me and my mates would we have survived the real deal anyway?

The old man was airforce. This meant postings and the one constant in the outer suburbs, where we always lived, was house and suburb building.

The older rural scenes always morphed into something harsh and muddy, then translating into new streets and new families where trees and paddocks and creeks had once been. If there was an anthem for that era, it was a song called "Tar and Cement".

Now, I know for a fact that Marilyn Shepherd was a bushbrat and she would be so, so much closer to your sort of childhood. Perhaps it’s the bushbrat that explains the assertiveness – pains in the arse both of you. And Fiona sometimes, too (Justin sounds like he'd be familiar with my sort of ladhood and he would have been a guaranteed pain growing up, also and maybe Kathy O'Farrell was more of a suburbanite as well (?) )

And of my generation, I know for a fact Marilyn did my trip of listening to white trash Gene Pitney style music, or the Rondelles, or soul music from Motown, or folky stuff on the top40 wireless late at night in winter, or herbing in an FJ Holden 'round back roads. She's the one who oughta write a thread – like yours, full of danger and ingenuity. Fiona seems to fit a third category of streetscapes, involving the older suburbs, a bit like Phillip Adams. My aunt in Melbourne lived like this, with the trams and urban cognitive map ("they live way out Brunswick way...") and so forth, so its a different story again.

By the time I was contemplating university, at the start of the 1970s, Jenny, the degree had become Bachelor of Arts (Asian Studies). Exactly when name change happened I'm not sure, but certainly when I became a student at ANU in 1973 that's what it was called.

I didn't start studying psychology until 1993, at The University of Melbourne. I read philosophy for my BA in Canberra.

Ah yes, the halls of residence. I was at Bruce Hall for my first two years, and what fun that was. I will make a confession: it was during that time that I and the two young gentleman for whom I used to navigate in the annual car rally managed to persuade the powers that be to name the newest hall of residence Toad Hall, rather than Huxley House or whatever other stodgy name they were considering. After all, what else could it have been called - on the banks of Sullivans Creek, ducks paddling around, probably the odd ratty...

Paul: The whack did the trick. I'll run with that.. Looking back I feel for my mother - four of us running wild and she working from dawn to dark. It was a lonely place for her, miles from help, scrubby hill leading down to the floodplain. But we loved those floods on the Macleay - buried the road for weeks - no school. 

I think all kids love playing around creeks and with water. We had an old leaky tub we spent all day rowing across the dam - four of us on board baling furiously. Saved the little fellow there when it finally sank. He was about three and me five, up to my little neck but managed to haul him in by the leg.  Asked mother years later wasn't she worried and she said I would look out and count heads - if there were four you were OK. But one wonders if she only saw three whether it would have been in time - it was a hundred yards from the house.

Moved on to more dangerous pranks - but not too often, the stick did the trick. Look back now in horror. The boat, one of those old wooden rowing things - two kids 11 and 12 from the next farm rowed round the side of our hill in the flood which was running strongly across a vast plain, receding but still about 10 -15 feet deep. I was going on 9, little fellow 7, other brother 10 plus the other two. It was weighed down to the gunwales. We wanted to see what a silver thing was a way out on a hillock sticking up. Got there but getting back the boys lost it and the current started to wash us away. I was terrified and can still see that muddy water close to my face and remember saying: I can't swim. Then mother running screaming down the hill, waving the stick... no it was the rope that time. We got back somehow and she hauled us out one by one but we got off lightly. I think she was in shock. She sent the other kids home, put us to dig burrs.

There were emptly places in the primary school after that flood, four kids drowned along with 20 000 dairy cattle - ruined most farmers including us. We went broke and lost the farm one year later after a repeat flood. My mother's concern that we got a good education and a training of some kind was paramount in her life. The brand of the school was not important to her. It the Catholics offered the best, then she set aside the Proddy concern. She begged them to take the little fellow and they did, and never abused her trust or him. If the high school had been the best, it would have been it.

The snake. Copper head and the bloody thing was supposed to be dead - Dad had hit it often enough. But mum was totally paranoid about snakes. I've seen one try to climb a six foot fence at her screams. I think she thought they could rise from the dead and so she forbad us to touch it so we only threw rocks from a distance.  I got away that time, fleet of foot but not the older ones - too slow by half.  Mind you old mum, seeing a snake half down a verandah hole as a child and scared it would come back and get her, raced over and grabbed it by the tail, pulled it out and ran screaming through the house dragging the poor thing lashing behind her, only to drop it at her father's feet in the hall when he emerged at the commotion. She lived in abject terror of him - rigid Danish Lutheran - and snakes. 

I do not share her fear. The fascinate me so long as they don't come in the house.  Never seen one in the house out on the plains though the browns are everywhere up there, but at Goulburn I could not count over the years the number of tigers and browns that got, and still get  in - at least two every year. One was wrapped around the tea caddy at midnight, one in a rolled up carpet, only found when the little fellow, now big, unrolled it. That does freak me out but WIRES are good. If they can get there in time, they come and take them away these days. I admire the way they catch them but they can have that all on their own.

So from perverts in the shrubbery to the snake in the kitchen. Probably the same thing in some homes. Bastards who molest their own kids. How lucky I was never to know such a thing. 

Cheers. Seems your childhood was like mine - good times and bad. But a different world for most kids these days - not sure it is any safer. Story of those two girls in Melbourne. Just sickening. I think I would have murdered that bastard priest. In fact I know I would have. Thou shalt not kill but I think even God might  acquit at times.

That's my last blast from the past.  Cheers - you should write a thread about your Australian childhood. I have often wondered what it was really like for kids in the towns and cities way back then. I assume you were not a bush brat like me.

Perhaps the whack you gave him did the trick?

Liked the bit about chucking rocks at the snake. What if it had been a brown, or a tiger?

The canoe bit reminds me of this bridge across Carum Creek. If you were four yo wonky, you could get stranded out in the middle where the water was deep. Fortunately my Mum was keeping an eye out for me and reckoned last year that she freaked when she found me. Am sure  I wasn't scared - just came back when she spoke quietly.

Mully grub hunting to feed to the chooks Paul. You know those big white grubs that live just under the soil. The chooks loved them. I was about seven, I dug with the hoe, and little brother (five) grabbed the grub. I never had much control over the hoe, so when it was on the way down and his nibs spotted a grub's head and dived for it, well.. you kow the rest. Out cold with his head split open and I split too as fast as I could go, screaming all the way back to the house. Then quit the scene to crawl up under my bed and hope that it would all blow over. Hours later..well again, you know the rest.

To give the folks their due, we only ever got the stick when we had endangered our own or our siblings' lives - paddling a kid laden canoe out into 15 foot flood waters; throwing stones at a snake when told not to; climbing through fences with the gun loaded - usual stuff kids on farms do, or did back then. I reckon that stick probably saved our silly lives, We never repeated the crime once punished though our store of same was pretty extensive. Must have been hard for mum - and yes how they slaved over those bloody coppers.

Kids in supermarkets. Don't get me started. I could not resist one day and said to one woman who had caved in to a real brat who was demanding this and that till she finally got it - you wait till she's 14.  

But a supermarket gem from my 3 year old grandson.  Likes to point to and name all the things in other people's trolleys when they line up behind his mum. When he got to the packet of peanuts in this woman's trolly he looked puzzled and she helpfully said. They're peanuts dear . Not to be outdone he informed her: I've got a penis too. Children, they keep you young.

BTW: Brother survived and went on to a brilliant career. He was the brains of the family but not for want of me trying to remove them.

Fiona, BA (OS) as in Oriental Studies when I did it, or did they change it later to (AS)? Either way, it was a very new faculty when I first went in 1965 and the halls of residence were only just being built. Bruce Hall was the only one there. We moved into Burton as it was being built. Two to a small room as the second block was not finished, then later a room to ourselves. The dining hall was not built so we had a walk to the Union building every morning for meals, paddling over Sullivans Creek. And none of us had cars to get around town in, we walked or had a bike. Pioneering days. Wonderful days. Lifelong friendships lasting 43 years to date. Professor Seagrim's daughter is one of them - she became a marine biologist - now one of Gore's disciples. Did you do Psych under the Prof? Diana Boswell, Phd in Clinical Psychology - shared a room with me - still working with troubled kids in Canberra. We've all become grandmothers over those years. You cannot measure the value of such enduring friendships. 

Yes Fiona, those Foresters, well I remember them, in fact went out with one for most of my four years there. We had a farmhand who used to pass out at the sight of berlud too. Very annoying in the middle of the milking; usually meant I had to take over.

Asian Studies, the bit - careful now, that was my Faculty, though I also had one foot over there with the Arts mob. Asian Studies, if anything, was primarily language orientated with history, philosophy and religion of Asian countries covered in a congolomerate called Asian Civilization which one did as a major.

It was the Italian patients (yes, the boys) I found the biggest sooks of all when nursing in the NT, while the indigenous ones never complained, no matter how serious their injuries. 

Cheers my dear. Another year older.....hope the job hunting is going OK.

Fiona: I was, Jenny - as you noticed - being deliberately cheeky. After all, the degree was BA(AS)...

 Sorry Fiona, I'm a clumbbsy odl abatross.

"It was enough to drive one to drink." is in fact what I meant to write but didn't.

Fiona: Never apologise, never explain, Justin...