golden point

In January 1976 I vacate my beloved room tacked onto the old Bemboka Road farmhouse with mixed feelings. I am now a qualified teacher about to begin my first job at Castlemaine High School.

In the last Friday of the 1975 school year with my girlfriend Cate and I drive to Yandoit for a final weekend together in a revitalised bed-and-breakfast cottage of local stone on the old Cobb and Company coach road. Yandoit is not to far from Castlemaine.

I ring ahead and arrange to meet the principal of my new school. Somewhere along the Calder I realise that I have no shoes on or with me and will meet Tom Kavanagh barefoot. It is his last day before retirement. The campus is empty; the rest of the school is away on an end-of-year picnic.

Mr Kavanagh assures me that no new teacher at ‘his’ school turns up without shoes and dismisses me. Mollie Brennan is the principal when I arrive six weeks later to be her drama teacher.

I spend my first week sleeping in my minivan in Peter Hill’s backyard in Maldon before moving into a room the size of a cupboard under the stairs in an A-frame house on the Golden Point Road. Barbara and Denise are my house-mates, both first-year-out primary teachers. We get on well enough but I don’t stay long enough to know if we might be friends. Denise shares my age and birthday.

Up the road is Golden Point reservoir with its Major Mitchell plaque tacked onto a tree. I swim in its chill brown water with The Pod and Grogan after school in the late summer heat. We explore the gravelly hills behind the A-frame where the hippies—potters and leatherworkers—have moved into the area and built muddies.

I teach drama in a former biology lab at the top end of the school. It still has functioning gas-taps for Bunsen burners. A dazzlingly well-made year 7 girl named Trudy stripteases during an improvisation in one of my classes. Some of the year 9 girls innocently but deliberately provoke my lust; it’s in the paradoxical nature of year 9 girls to do this.

  

The school year still has three terms, not four. By the time the May holidays come round, the dogs sleep in the A-frame’s driveway, wake covered in autumn frost. I accept an offer to move in with two second-year-out female teachers from my school. I pack up my cupboardful of possessions and drive them to an old farmhouse in an apple orchard at Elphinstone.

I sell the minivan and purchase a white Kombi—KWB 270, my home away from home.

Rock on.