another country

My mother has a cup she won at school. Best sprinter, Preston Girls High School. Maybe 1942. She left school that year but had aspirations to go further. School was easy for her, in the top two or three in every class. But the government turned the school into a hospital for returned soldiers that year and my mother went out to work in a Collingwood boot factory.

In the afternoon when I travel from Collingwood to Parliament Station girls from PGHS are on the number 86 tram, Muslim girls with head scarves and dresses down to their ankles. Black girls. My mother could never imagine her school populated by black Muslims.

The primary schools I attend in the fifties in Warrnambool, Fairfield, Bentleigh and Glenhuntly are attended by kids exclusively of European stock, mostly British. No Asians, no Africans, no Jews, no Aboriginals. Neither were there integration aids, or ancillary staff. The past is another country.

I have a photo of my grade 4 class at Glenhuntly. I count 46 kids in that class. French girl Dominique Rouvet is by far the most exotic creature I’ve encountered to this point in my life. In our classroom on the third floor we listen to the tortured howling of a stray dog the headmaster has caught in the grounds. It’s no coincidence that Mr Tyrrell and tyrant share their first three letters.

Bottled milk in steel crates curdles in the summer sun. Each student is obliged to down a third of a pint of the stuff each morning recess before being released for play. We boys play cricket in the public park behind the school and neither yard duty teacher nor paedophile ever bothers us. At Fairfield we walk along the railway line to school and come to no harm.

On Monday mornings we salute the flag and each week we practise marching. On Wednesdays we do folk dancing, though I never heard the name of any country mentioned. Boys play in the boys’ playground, girls in their playground. The shelter shed behind the incinerators is the only common ground.

The steel climbing tower at the farthest end of the yard is high enough to fall off and break your neck. No one does.

Half way through grade 4 Gordon Williams comes to our school. He’s from India and bowls faster than any of us white boys. I get on well with him, not because he’s from another country, but because he’s good at cricket.

Rock on.