Primary School Confidential (31 page)

When I'd regained consciousness, I gently broke the news to my son that he had as much chance of going to South Korea as I had of winning Mr Trump's Miss Universe competition. He asked me what my chances of winning such a competition were and I told him. Zero. He protested for a bit, listing for me
which of his friends' parents were happy to fork out upwards of $3000 for this ‘culturally rich' experience, but I shut the whole conversation down in a mature fashion by simply leaving the room.

It is probably worth noting that my kids did not go to an expensive private school where trips to Paris are the norm, but to the local primary school down the end of the road.

While I look back on my own school excursions fondly, they could be decidedly bizarre. One time, when I was a slogging through a course called Maths in Society (commonly called Maths in Space because it was for those of us who were having trouble counting up to one hundred), we were told that we were going on a very special excursion—a maths excursion!

And where do you go on a maths excursion?

McDonald's!

The educational objective of the excursion was to study the tessellations on the tiles in the restaurant. Hey, that was fine by me! All of a sudden we were the envy of our brainier peers; it turned out there was a silver lining to being dumb.

So the seven students of Maths in Society and our teacher, Mrs Prescott, went along to the nearest McDonald's and looked at tiles before chowing down on cheeseburgers and fries. I do believe that was the best day at school I ever had.

One of the things we really got stuck into when I was in primary school was good old-fashioned Australian history, which now goes by the rather more glamorous moniker of Human Society and Its Environment. (That is what HSIE stands for, if you have ever wondered.) An excursion was arranged to Old Sydney Town
(now defunct, as there were no longer enough bums on seats to make it a viable concern).

Old Sydney Town was about a three-hour bus ride away. From memory, it was a collection of ye olde buildings, including a kiosk at which you could buy a carton of Ribena or a packet of Toobs from a busty wench.

It seemed that everyone who lived back in the olden days was either a soldier or a convict. We watched as a crime was committed, followed by a chase scene and an arrest. A courtroom drama was acted out, and the punishment delivered. A flogging!

The criminal was tied up with his hands above his head while some sadist went to town on his back with a cat-o'-nine tails. I had my eyes closed and my hands squished firmly into my ears the entire time.

When finally the crowd's lust for gore was satisfied, it was revealed that the deep red welts on the criminal's back were in fact caused by food dye that had been liberally applied to the whip. And the bloke had not been writhing in real pain but was, it turned out, a mighty fine actor, whom we later saw smoking a cigarette and chatting to his erstwhile tormentor.

After watching a lady make a candle from beeswax and another lady spin some wool, we were hustled back on the bus for home. I cannot recall it being a fantastic excursion, but it sure beat the time we went to see a sewage plant . . .

I will never forget the excitement I would feel when my teacher announced to the class that we were going on an excursion. A day off school! YES! But these days, the fun of an excursion comes
with a little something called a risk management plan, in which any potential risk must be identified and assessed.

But while I might roll my eyes at this prim expression of pessimism, it does occur to me that educational authorities might have good reason to make these plans mandatory.

There was no risk management in 1991 when I, along with the rest of the Year 12 art class, boarded a bus and travelled eight hours and forty-three minutes from Sydney to Melbourne to visit some art galleries. Though, being seventeen, we were less interested in art than we were in shaking off the teachers and painting the town red.

So after a day of looking at art, we had dinner with the teachers and demurely bade them goodnight. (They were no doubt desperate to get rid of us so they could get stuck into the gin.) But what they didn't know was that we had a cunning plan that involved one of Melbourne's famed nightclubs, which happened to be not far from our digs.

It was like a whole new world. The music was completely doof-doof and I knew none of it. What was wrong with Color Me Badd? Cher? Heavy D & the Boyz? Nuh. This edgy Melbourne nightclub was having none of that. This was house music. And I was not a fan.

I sat with my friends, sucking back on a Sub Zero (with grenadine because I was at a funky Melbourne nightclub, trying to be cool), while men approached and tried to crack on to the prettier girls in our group, little realising that we were all under eighteen.

But that was no problem. We were all in possession of a folded, creased, dirty piece of paper created to assure the authorities that we were of legal drinking age.

Did I say ‘created'? I did.

So, either you bribed your older sister to photocopy her driver's licence for you or, if your older sister was a bitch face from hell and refused, you did it the hard way. You photocopied your birth certificate and typed up a new birthdate on a fresh piece of paper, then, with the steady hand of the brain surgeon you were not destined to become, you carefully cut out the new date and pasted it over the original date on your birth certificate. After a few minutes' drying time, you photocopied the result. Then you studied the photocopy. Were there any shadows? Was the new date perfectly aligned? Yes? Then let's get back to that nightclub . . .

After a while, those Sub Zeros kicked in and, all of a sudden, I fucking loved house music! The lights and music throbbed through my veins as I spun around that dance floor, bumping into people and doing some exceptional interpretive dance with complete strangers. I spied a few of our posse doing shots of tequila at the bar. The night wore on, and our group of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed teenagers became less bright-eyed and less bushy-tailed.

And then I saw something so outrageous that I immediately raced over to the bar and screamed: ‘Kirsty Owen is PASHING A GIRL!'

Kirsty was one of my friends. She was very cool, exceedingly beautiful and now, apparently, gay. We watched her suck face for an eternity on that dance floor. Was this a cool thing? Was this what you did in Melbourne?

After a while, Kirsty came up for air and I realised that she had not been pashing a girl, but pashing a beautiful man with long flowing locks. Long flowing locks on a man was not something that you saw every day on the streets of the conservative North Shore in Sydney. The fact that she'd pashed a man with long hair
just made Kirsty even cooler in my eyes. Long hair! Who would have thought it?

The sun was starting to pop its head up to say hello, so we bade farewell to all our new mates and headed back to the hotel. Many of us lost our guts on the way back, and by the time our heads hit the pillows, sleep came very easy to us all.

About an hour later, our teacher banged on the door, reminding us to get our shit sorted because we had to be on the bus in twenty minutes. When no one replied, she opened the door, to be greeted with a great big pongy waft of tequila.

You could tell by her face that she knew what we had been up to, and that she was aware that if anyone found out we'd wandered the streets of Melbourne hideously drunk while on her watch, she was screwed.

So she did what any teacher would do in this situation. She said nothing. And up until now, none of us ever divulged the truth of that evening. If there were such a thing as a risk management plan back then, it would be worth no more than the paper it was printed on.

32

ARE WE THERE YET?

Let's face it, when you're a kid, the best part of the school year is the holidays. When I was growing up, our school year was divided up into three terms. When you consider how stuffed, emotional and cranky kids can be at the end of nine weeks, can you begin to imagine what they'd be like if they were schooled for fourteen weeks without a break? The situation would be DIRE. And those poor teachers . . . No wonder the four-term model was welcomed with open arms.

For me, school holidays were heaven. My siblings and I were mainly left to our own devices, but the best thing—the best thing
ever
—was going to our grandparents' farm in the country. We would all squish into Mum's Mazda RZ7 and take the Putty Road through the Yengo National Park, stopping at Mellong for a wee (and, more often than not, an enormous spew) before
continuing on the windy road to Singleton. From there it it was on to Aberdeen and then Scone. Once you reached Scone you had a sniff of hope that you might actually one day reach your destination. It was also the point at which we would begin the time-honoured chant: ‘Are we there yet?'

After what seemed like eleven years, the farms would start to thin out and big signs would appear, alerting us to the fact that we were about to reach the Country Music Capital of our fair nation. The atmosphere in the car underwent a shift from frustration to anticipation.

Tamworth: the city of my conception and birth. A town not unlike Paris in that it, too, is divided by a mighty river (in this case the Peel) and was known at one time as the City of Lights, by virtue of the fact that it was the first place in Australia to have electric streetlights installed.

We would often drive down Callala Lane to look at the house where I spent the first few years of my life. Every year, it seemed smaller than it had the year before. And then we'd be leaving Tamworth behind, and farming land once again took over the landscape. We were headed for the tiny hamlet of Kootingal. Kootingal was everything a small country town should be: it had a smattering of houses, a school, a pub, a town hall, the cop shop and, of course, the bowling club.

Nanna and Poppa lived on a couple of acres. As we cruised up the driveway, they'd appear on the front verandah. After hugs and kisses, we'd always rush straight to the kitchen to be measured. The back of the kitchen door told the story of our growth. There would be minor celebrations over how much we had shot up since our last visit. And with that formality over, the rest of our stay would be devoted purely to pleasure.