Trashion Junkies

It is high time I wrote about the inspirational class I took at Geelong in September this year: Kirry Toose was the tutor, and recycled fashion was the theme. Our brief was to collect a range of op-shop clothing for reinvention as Steampunk, Flash-trash or Trashion. What to choose…??? I had always enjoyed op-shopping, but the need to gather a usable stash for heaven knows what creative masterpieces sent me on countless very fruitful op-shopping sprees. Fortunately the class filled us all with so many skills and ideas that we just may be able to use up all those wonderful bargains  one day….in the meantime, storage becomes an increasing problem! 



The Trashion Junkies (with Kirry Toose just behind my right shoulder)

 To say that we all had a ball would be an understatement:  the 14 of us who took the class were reluctant to see an end to our recycling addicton, and so we formed an email group and called ourselves “Trashion Junkies” so that we could go on developing and sharing ideas. Kirry suggested we set ourselves regular challenges, and it is the deadline for the first challenge that has finally set me writing this blog entry.

Kirry got us all started on creating with men’s suits. The first piece that most of us completed in the week at Geelong involved building a stylish woman’s waistcoat out of a man’s jacket and, in some cases, pants. While Kirry supplied the inspiration and basic pattern block, the resulting waistcoats were refreshingly diverse. The front of the waistcoat utilized one of the jacket lapels, while the back panel was cut out of either a sleeve or a section of the pants. Other design details were added from suits: pockets, sleeve buttons, or whatever seemed right at the time. My waistcoat utilized parts of three op-shop garments: 2 men’s coats and one woman’s silk jacket. To commemorate the contributing garments, I added the labels as design features.



My waistcoat




Detail of waistcoat back



Many class members went on to create amazing asymmetrical skirts featuring the second jacket lapel, but I was more drawn to Kirry’s wonderful shoulderless peplum jackets. I decided to make one featuring the sleeves of my second jacket, and spent the best part of a day strip-piecing the bodice out of fabric gleaned from op-shop clothing and offcuts. Sadly, this top section of the jacket was all that I completed during my week at Geelong, and while I had planned the peplum and photographed my layout, this would have to wait until I found time at home.



Peplum planning



Note the bird theme on the peplum: those who know me will not be surprised! 

Well, it took 2 months, but eventually I made the plunge and worked on the peplum. The delay was partially caused by my trepidation in the face of what would be my first attempt at free machine embroidery. I knew that everyone else in the class was adept at it, but wasn’t confident that I would be able to do it at all.  Remarkably, I found it not only do-able, but also enjoyable, a fact which has caused me to optimistically book into a course involving free machine embroidery at next year’s Geelong Fibre Forum! 

The neckline of the jacket proved to be too plain when I completed it, so, in true trashion junkie style, I found the remaining piece of collar from the original coat and cut it to fit my jacket neckline. Perfect solution!



The finished jacket




The sexy cut-out shoulders!




Detail of peplum machine embroidery and applique




Detail of bodice strip-piecing




Front view, featuring suit-coat collar




Detail of side front of peplum



And now to the first Kirry-challenge which was scheduled for December 31^st: Kirry had made a wonderful evening bag out of a used drinking chocolate tin, and after explaining her method of construction, our task was to create one of our own and share the photos.  After completing the jacket, I decided that it would be useful to have an evening bag that matched, and anyway, a matching bag did not necessitate any new thinking about colour and design. It also meant that the sample machine embroidery I had made in preparation for my jacket could be used as the central bag panel. Well, procrastination with the coming Christmas season was a major hassle, and I am sure you will not be surprised to hear that apart from buying the necessary coffee tin and some braid, I had not started the project by December 30^th!  So….at 4.20 pm last night, I bit the bullet.  At that point, I really wished I had asked more questions in class…but somehow, shyness had overcome me.  It all started when Kirry explained that the ends of her bag were made with 2 Suffolk puffs. Everyone else in the class said “Ah…” and nodded knowingly, so I was a little reluctant to admit that I didn’t know what a Suffolk puff was.  But being a modern, semi-computer savvy lady, I decided that if 14 women knew what a Suffolk puff was, Google would surely know too!  I was right, of course, and turned up a great little site which featured cute little Suffolk puff hair clips. (http:www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/suffolk-puff-hair-clips).

 They seemed like a fun way to practise, so I unashamedly copied the website’s designs to make my own Christmas clips. Being a new expert on Suffolk puffs, I decided that I didn’t want my puffy bits hidden on the inside of the bag as Kirry’s were, and resolved to have double puffy ends to my bag like the hair clips.



My suffolk-puff hair clips



Sadly, though, that wasn’t the only thing I needed to ask questions about. I made my central panel and lining into a sleeve which I pulled over the core of the coffee tin. Later, after I had hand-sewn the Suffolk puffs to the ends, I found that the panel would not stay put, and really needed to be glued. Applying the glue after finishing the ends was really not the easiest task! I also realised, as the bag neared completion, that I should have sewn the lining Suffolk puffs in earlier; the small size of the bag did not accommodate my hand and a needle for intricate manoeuvres. Fabric glue came to my rescue there, too, but I am not overly sure that it will stay the distance. Nevertheless, as I have not owned an evening purse for the last 40 years, I suspect that this one will not get sufficient wear to try its construction strength! Anyway, the bag was happily finished over coffee at 9.30 on December 31^st, so I have only to email  everyone now to complete the deadline.

So, Trashion Junkies, I hope you enjoy viewing the fruits of my often hurried labours, and I hope to see the lovely bags you have all produced.



The bag, featuring suffolk-puff sides




And another view



And one day, I will do something with that lemon silk jacket you all shuddered at!

Mum's 90th Birthday

With the kids

Mum on her wedding day, 1946.

My mother turned 90 on October 13^th.  What a milestone!  I hope she has shared the gene for her good health and longevity with as many of us as possible!  We all flew up to spend the day in Gosford with her, and did lunch and birthday cake and stuff.  Much of what we did, of course, was talk…and Steve had sensibly organised to buy a new mini video camera (do they still call them video cameras, or are they DVD cameras now???). Anyway, we took heaps of footage of Mum talking about her life. For Irralee, Bryn, Merrin and Matt,  it provided many insights into the distant past that their grandmother inhabited; for Steve, it was a marvellous reminder of the bravery and struggles of our parents’ generation; for me, it was a trip down memory-lane as I relived the stories that have shaped my view of the world.

Mum grew up in London, youngest daughter of a butcher. Her tales of life in the butcher’s shop reveal a way of living long past: Her father, making his own black puddings, with his arms plunged to the elbows in a vat of warm ox blood; the preparation and cooking of ‘faggots’ and ‘pease pudding’ which were highly sought after on set days of the week; the big gas jets hidden under the wooden counter that were revealed at the end of the day to cook the dinners for the customers, who also brought their Sunday roasting pans, ready with the vegetables, to go in the big ovens. Amazing to think of homes without adequate cooking facilities!

And the war!  Mum’s tales of life in London during the Blitz are riveting. Her dressmaking apprenticeship set aside, she worked as an engineer making bombs for much of the war. Somewhere in there was a stint in which she was employed to sew snow-suits for the Russians. 

Mum told of life with the routine of nightly air-raid sirens as darkness fell, and the rush to the air-raid shelter in the garden where the family slept each night. One night my mother was a little late home from work, and entered the house to find the family ready and waiting to go down to the shelter. “Come on”, said my grandmother, “just leave your coat and let’s get down to the shelter, quick!”  My aunt Hilda was the last into the shelter, and as she attempted to pull the wooden door closed after her, it was ripped out of her hand by the force of a bomb blast making a direct hit on the family home. Everything gone. My mother has always regretted the loss of the family photos. Her father had died of TB before the war, and all she has to this day is one photograph of him as a young man. The part of this particular story that touched me most as a young child was the fate of the family dog, a Pekinese called Wendy Fou.  Wendy Fou always refused to go down to the shelter, preferring to hide under the legs of the kitchen stove whenever the bombs started to fall. Miraculously she survived the bomb hit: the stove was one of the few items left standing. Sadly, though, she did not survive emotionally. Thereafter, she trembled uncontrollably every night as soon as the sirens started. She could even hear the bombers approaching well before the sirens, so good was her hearing and so great was her fear. Of course, she had to be put down…

And the morning my mother encountered one of the first ‘buzz bombs’ in London: she was returning home after a night shift at the bomb factory – the only passenger on the early bus. Glancing out her window, she saw a fiery missile flying parallel with the bus. The conductor saw it too, and spent the next few minutes desperately trying to gain the driver’s attention in his cabin. Finally he succeeded, and the bus pulled over. Not far away, the buzz bomb wreaked its destruction.

There was also the tale of the hundreds of people who died at the end of my mother’s street, an area now called Bamford Hill. The basement of a block of shops was being used as an air-raid shelter, and while the shops had received a direct hit, the authorities believed the people to be quite safe due to the minimal damage to the upper stories, and so did not act immediately to rescue them. Sadly, the bomb had damaged the gas and water mains, and so the people succumbed to the gas and the rising water.  Local folklore told the tale of a well-known singer who was trapped there. With his child held high on his shoulders, he sang to calm the people until the water covered him and he could sing no more. The basement was later sealed up as a mausoleum; it was impossible to get the people out. The site is now a memorial gardens to the many hundreds who died there.

Through all the horrors, however, life went on. My mother’s humour remained intact, and we heard of the ‘parcel’ that my father sent her from Algiers where he was stationed as an air force radio operator.  All that my mother received from British Post was a piece of wooden box on which her name and address were written. It seemed that the ship had been sunk, and the addressed piece of wood salvaged from the wreckage. British Post always delivers!  Mum wrote to Dad to ask him what the parcel had been, and ages later received the information that it had been a box of lemons. During war time rationing, such a gift would have been greatly prized!

There were many other stories too: I saw Bryn’s eyes widen in amazement as Mum told of the house they lived in after their’s was bombed, and the uncle who haunted it. It seemed that he used to enter the bedroom each morning and sit in a wicker chair beside the bed for a while, before getting up and going out the door again! I always loved this story when I was a child, and Mum used to tell it with all the embellishments!  And my mother’s foray into the Jewish quarter to buy fabric for her wedding dress after the war ended…Rationing was still in force, and Mum did not have nearly enough coupons for fabric of any sort. Fortunately my grandmother was Jewish, although this was something she did not admit to during the war, for obvious reasons. My grandmother took Mum to the Jewish markets, and although Mum had no coupons, one look at my grandmother’s appearance was enough to have the market people offering Mum whatever she wished, no coupons required!

These are some of our family stories, the stories that define who we are, where we come from. But they are also stories to share, as they have much to teach us all about good times and bad.  Growing up in the post-war boom, I am fortunate to have no stories of hardship and struggle to pass on to future generations. May it remain so for our children too!

I hope that Mum enjoyed her 90^th birthday as much as we did!

Musings of a Natural Dyer

I am posting an article I wrote for the Victorian Feltmakers' Magazine ("Feltlines")  a couple of autumns ago. As I will be teaching a class in natural dyeing for the Victorian Feltmakers next weekend, I hope that this article will inspire my students in the run-up to our busy day of dyeing.



natural dyed scarves


The morning sun has already chased the last of the dew from the corners of my garden as I slip outside and reach for my Blundstones.  This March day promises to be warm and dry, and I have much to do outdoors before the heat intensifies. “Tiny”, my son’s Jack Russell, barks frenetically as I stuff some old supermarket bags into my pockets – she knows that when my farm boots go on, adventures are in the offing. She is joined by my daughter’s more staid West Highland Terrier as we cut through the vegetable garden, under the quince tree groaning with its furred and fragrant load, and into the open sheep paddock.  “Tiny” barks excitedly as she runs ahead and the sheep turn to give her baleful stares before retreating to a safer distance. From the roadside hedge I hear the unmistakeable cho-cho-wee of a grey shrike-thrush calling to its mate and my mind trickles back to the joy of watching them raise two broods over summer in a niche of our mud-brick-walled house. As we near the natural bushland on the perimeter of the property Tiny’s exuberance puts up a pair of pippets from the dry grass and they scramble and leap into the air in a whirring panic.  The dogs vanish through the sagging wire fence into the dense tree-cover beyond as, temporarily dazzled by the change in light, I gingerly cross the threshold into cool, flickering shadows.

The dogs are only a memory now; snuffling their way into far-off wombat holes and dancing in search of lizards and snakes, they are all but lost to me.  I skirt around a large pine tree and remember how deliciously its needles coloured a piece of my felt in gentle shades of olive and sand. Purposefully I duck under some black wattles which I remember gathering many years ago to produce a dark brown skein of knitting wool. They are prolific here in this young regrowth, jostling each other for shoulder-room but outstripped by the sturdier blackwoods which are badged with lichen.  I must dye again with this lichen: Lichen umbilicaria – when soaked in ammonia and water it releases a strong purple dye to produce shades ranging from pink and lavender to plum. I seldom work in these shades, but the colours are so riotous and unexpected that the thrill of looking in the dye-pot is all the reward needed.

Today, however, I head straight for the native cherry trees – alias Cherry Ballart (Exocarpus Cupressiformus).  Their fine, pendulous branchlets range from olive green to a luminous lime in their new growth, reminiscent of the beautiful green shades it bequeaths us in the dye-pot.  This is my target plant this morning, and I fill my two shopping bags to overflowing with the stripped needles, taking care to spread my collecting across a few different specimens. Reluctantly I retrace my steps towards the fence; further exploration would be fun, but the dye-pot calls.

As I push my bundles through the wire I hear the dogs return.  Panting and tongue-lolling they grin as they rejoin me for the dash back to the house.  Impatiently they stop at regular intervals until I catch up, then they surge ahead once more while I contemplate my dye-pot.  My felt, already pre-mordanted in alum (aluminium sulphate) is curing in a plastic bag.  I run through my sketchy plans for this piece of work – a panelled jacket, 3 panels of which will be resist-dyed in green using modern hardware items to create the impressions.  I smile to think of my horde of interesting metal washers, air-conditioning vents, clips and clamps.  The ancient Japanese shibori artists little knew how their art would be adapted! In homage to their work, however, I plan to dye the contrasting coat panels using traditional shibori techniques, hoping to achieve a marriage of the old and the new. As I enter the house garden, my mind slips off to a contemplation of the pomegranates ripening on the bush before me.  The rosy skins are beginning to split on the larger fruit, exposing jewelled beads of intense red.  They are almost ready to eat, and I have read that their skins produce a good, fast dye - this year I will boil up their skins to see what mystery colours they can produce!

Once inside I chop my cherry ballart into the dye pot, cover it with water and set it to simmer for 45 minutes or so. This allows me to pause for a cup of tea (also an excellent natural dye) and then it’s a quick scoop-out of the leaves and in with the felt. In about 40 minutes I have my first colour – a slightly lime tinted yellow. This will be a perfect background for my resist dyeing. After removing the felt, I apply my first resists – using as many of the washers and hardware thingy-bits (I don’t know what they are called – they just look useful!) as I can clamp onto the pieces. Then it’s back to the dye-pot, this time to simmer for 10 minutes with a teaspoon of copper sulphate added.  Untying the bundles is the best part – and I am pleased with the marks I have made and the bright lime of the second colour.  The next stage is to re-clamp the pieces with different hardware thingy-bits and put it all back in the pot with a teaspoon of iron sulphate for a final 10 minutes. Out of the pot…untie it…and wow! Third colour is a deep olive.  The pieces are just what I want!

For my contrasting panels I want a rich, chocolate brown – and walnut hulls produce the perfect colour.  Having no walnut trees of my own, I have arranged to collect some hulls from a friend’s tree, but as it is chestnut gathering time on her farm, I know a visit won’t just entail picking up walnut hulls!

The sun beats hotly on my shoulders as I walk down the hill to join my friend in the chestnut orchard. She has raked the nuts into piles and it is pleasant to sit under the broad, leafy trees and twist the fierce chestnut-porcupines apart.  We fill two large buckets with plump nuts while chatting, and then I am free to examine the walnut tree.  Alas, the season is later than I thought, and although there have been many nuts falling, rodents of various descriptions have plainly been coveting the soft hulls too.  Together with my friend I half-fill my trusty supermarket bag with what we can find under the tree (staining our hands black in the process!) and I prepare to leave.  English ivy cascades over the garden wall next to my car, and remembering my unfilled supermarket bag, I stop to gather a load of leaves.  These will be my dye experiment tomorrow!

Back home I transfer my black, earth-smelling hulls to a bucket, cover them with water and leave them to soak for three days or so. Their odour is of leaf-mould from a primeval forest floor, I muse…must be either an ancestral memory or an over-active imagination!  I have already dyed my felt with blue-gum leaves to produce a background colour of light tan.  The next few days will be spent in applying stitched and tied shibori resists to these pieces in the traditional Japanese manner before boiling up the walnut hulls and adding them to the water.  Sadly the quantity of hulls is only about half what I needed, so I will likely get a mid-brown rather than the richer brown I had envisaged – but that is the joys of natural dyeing – you never get exactly what you expect!

So, if life seems a little hectic and predictable to you, take a ‘leaf’ out of my book and experiment with natural dyes on your felt – you will be surprised.

P.S. The ivy leaves were a great success – they yielded gold, mid-olive and dark olive!



Detail of the finished felted jacket



Maggie

Maggie & Merrin, Jan. 2007

Merrin’s Maggie: September 1997-October 5^th, 2010.

Maggie:  the guru of ‘Good-O’ games, the fluffball of foolishness, the tailwag of tummy rubs, the mascot of Merrin.

We remember her first foray into motherhood: …..Merrin was away on school camp but the puppies would not wait. Maggie gave birth on Merrin’s bed, then ran to waken Bryn and spread the good news…. And the night one of her fat little pups drank so much milk he had a belly ache:  After trying for ages to settle him, Maggie came and appealed to us in desperation, the distraught new mum at 2.00 am!  Steve cuddled the puppy on his chest, as he used to do with our colicky babies, and with Maggie and the other pups beside him on the bed, we all went back to sleep.

We remember Maggie proudly enjoying the limelight at Merrin and Matt’s wedding: until the heat and the crowd became too much for a 10 year old dog.  I can still hear the shrieks of alarm from the hired help when she discovered “the dog in the food tent”.  In search of somewhere cool and quiet, Maggie had snuck in and curled up in a basket under the table – containing the bread rolls!  They must have made a frightfully lumpy mattress.  I explained that it wasn’t just any dog, it was Maggie, the bride’s dog, and so everything was OK.  Later, she was found asleep on Merrin’s wedding train at the bridal table.

We remember halcyon holidays camping and canoeing on the Wonangatta River. Maggie loved holidays even more than regular car outings, but best of all she loved the canoe rides. Balanced on the front of the boat, she was both figurehead and lookout. Unconcerned about the slippery surface of the plastic prow, she occasionally fell in, but was readily scooped out by her collar when Merrin came level with her dog-paddling dilemma.

We remember lazy walks along our creek: Merrin’s doting shadow, Maggie helped with the photography, the pesky ducks that needed chasing, or the wombat dens that needed a good barking. In later years she often waited to be lifted over logs, and sometimes just wore out and had to be carried back.

We remember 13 years of companionship and love, with never a cross bark or a nip – while some of us grew up and some of us grew old.  In the twinkling of an eye, our frolicsome fluffball became our dozing doorstop and all too soon we were uttering our stricken goodbyes and casting forget-me-nots into her grave.

Sleep peacefully in the sun, our Maggie. You are part of us all.

Sir Joseph Banks High School Reunion

 

Coming down in the Great Glass Elevator, Bankstown Sports Club



This blogging thing is totally new to me, so please be patient!  Richard Lamont suggested I start up a blog in order to share my photos of the recent school reunion with other attendees as well as with those who couldn't make it, so I am giving it a go. Truth be told, I love the sound of my own voice, so no doubt this is just the first of many entries...

Bankstown Sports Club was the venue for our Joey Banks 50^th Anniversary Reunion cocktail party, obviously a new and much prized establishment. As we drove into Bankstown amidst peak hour traffic, it was easy to spot the Sports Club, taking up a whole block with its central Travelodge tower acting as a beacon.  Parking was easy, though the underground area was so huge that courtesy buses seemed to be required to get patrons to and from their cars. The inside was predictably massive; we really don’t have such establishments in Victoria, so I was all agog at the need for 6 or 7 restaurants, several bars, a grand ballroom and a lesser ballroom, together with gaming rooms and an integrated Travelodge, all under the one roof. (I think there were sport thingies there too, but I didn’t pay much attention to those.)  The décor was remarkably tacky: a mixture of tropical rainforest with Grecian columns and stone railway station, plus a railway carriage restaurant thrown in. Entry to our hotel room was via a Great Glass Elevator, which catapulted us into the sky with dizzying views of endless, flat suburbia. We noted that there seemed to be more trees than there were 40 years ago, but otherwise it was pretty familiar.



Me under towering concrete and plastic strangler fig...tasteful!



Steve going up in Great Glass Elevator with carp pond in foreground



The Grand Ballroom was certainly grandiose, and we were all given sticky name tags to wear and huge paper carrier bags containing commemorative SJB champagne glasses. As we had to stand all night, the ability to juggle the carrier bags with drinks (I didn’t even try to add the complication of finger food on dainty plates) became a fine art. You will notice everyone in the pictures maintaining the appearance of people on a shopping spree!

 And as for names! Despite some discussion I had with the school office staff when I booked my tickets, it seemed that most married women were given tags with only their married names. We women were forced to handwrite our maiden names, along with some indication of the year we left school, to make it possible to meet up with others. No attempt was made to locate decades in particular areas, so we all spent the first hour or two milling around and peering at every chest that came close enough to read. Often this was complicated by the fact that people wrote the year while wearing the label (if you took it off, it probably would not re-stick) – with the entertaining result of some digits appearing upside down!

Possibly this all sounds somewhat critical, but I have always found that the more formal the occasion and venue, the sillier it all seems to be.  Now for the good part: the old friends we eventually found!  Lynette Scott, Frans Boot, Judy Quayle and her sister Lyn, Sue Taylor, Suzanne Collum, Kay Soper, Anne Yeadon and even Lone Jensen (Lene is in Hong Kong). We had only just got together as a group when the current school principal decided that it was time for boring speeches, and started to use school-teacher style bullying threats along the lines of sending those of us still talking to go and stand in the corner. I think my loud guffaws nearly had me thrown out at that point, but I am sure I was not alone. It was so lovely to talk to old friends, and I must say that the time spent with each person was all too brief. While it may have been great to see more of our year level there, I am sure it would only have further limited the real talking time. Somehow, though, I still managed to hit the dance floor with Sue Collum to the memorable strains of ‘Meat Loaf’! Sadly we seemed to miss getting Sue Taylor in our photo shoot – don’t know how! I suspect she must have been away standing on the long bar line to get her drink refilled: a sure-fire method to limit how much alcohol is consumed as part of the ‘drinks included’ ticket! (Oh no! Not critical again!)  Anyway, despite the lining up, I still managed to drink more than was good for me, which made the return catapult in the Great Glass Elevator even more dizzying!



Judy Quayle





Lyn Scott



Suzanne Collum

 Having a bit of a problem working out how to allign these pix, so don't be too critical of my yawning spaces....

Kay Soper

Frans Boot

Anne Yeadon



Saturday brought the Open Day at the school, and I was really looking forward to checking out the old place again. My goodness, so little had changed:  the canteen, hall, buildings – all as they had been so long ago. Some new paint, granted, but what there was appeared to be in garish brights; lots of maroon badly tinted with too much bright pink and acting as feature walls and feature doors. We went for a walk through the old corridors (carpeted now) and peered into the rooms that used to fit over 40 of us in the 1960s.  They looked so small!  F1, where I spent so many periods in 1A is unchanged, and F2 even features the old, original chalk board!  There had been some jockeying of positions re staff rooms, but generally most things were where they used to be. The senior wing, so new in our day, looked rather tired, and we were open-mouthed at the heavy steel door frames and Fort Knox locks that seem to be necessary to guard against crime in this era.

The best part, for me, was finding Keith Hartmann in the quadrangle. Always my favourite teacher, he was the paragon against which I measured my own teaching style. He made us feel clever and important in those days when we were such minor beings in a school of over 1000 students. Unchanged (though his blond has turned quite white) he remembered me from 40 years ago after only half a beat. It brought a quaver to my voice to feel so valued by someone I revered so much. And he is still teaching! His last HSC class, he says!  What a marvellous contribution he has made to NSW education! 





 With Keith was Mr Buckland, the art teacher. Sadly I didn’t do art at school so knew him by name only. One key focus of the day was the dedication of the new Science wing to Jack Pollock. As he was probably my least favourite teacher, I didn’t hang around for the ceremony. The new Julia Gillard building which was being officially opened by the local poli was to be the new language laboratory. Strangely, it was not dedicated to Joan Reid, who, love her or hate her, was a particularly dedicated and effective teacher.  Note the pictures: internal storeroom doors like Fort Knox, window bars to rival Alcatraz! Sheesh!

New Language lab internal storeroom

New language lab window (unlike a prison, the bars are horizontal!)

Plenty of memorabilia displays, photos, old uniforms, even the “old principal’s chair” on display which our year level gave the school as a gift when we left Year 12. Predictably, they seem to have forgotten who gave it to them: proudly displayed, it bore a sign attributing it to the Year 11 of 1971, not Year 12. The official history book published for the anniversary bears the same error!  Apparently Mr Barter sat in it for his official principal portrait in 1972.  Perhaps we shouldn’t have bothered!

The students: such a demographic change!  Many islanders, Asians, Moslems – we would all look out of place now. When reading the school philosophy in the commemorative history book, it seems that valuing diversity, equal opportunity and similar politically correct waffle has superseded academic success as a principal aim... Time to shut up, Della, and move on to the next topic, which was lunch.

Those of us attending the Open Day had agreed to meet at 12.00 outside the canteen/hall and retire to the pub for lunch. There we met up with Richard Lamont, Frans Boot, and John Bradshaw. Graham Carr was expected to turn up, but at about 12.20 we gave up on him and went over to the pub. Sadly, he was waiting in the same place from 11.30 to 12.15: none of us recognised each other!  Apparently he and his wife had been in room F1 when I was in there, and listened to me rabbiting on about the size of the room and where I sat. Ships in the night! So sad to have missed him! Anyway, lunch was a most pleasant affair – so relaxed, more time to talk than we had at the cocktail party. Lovely to catch up with John, for whom, I confess, I have hardly spared a thought in 39 years. So accomplished and successful, and those 5 beautiful daughters and wife that are central to his life!  The uncanny thing about meeting up with old school friends is discovering that they haven’t changed, only grown: our smiles are warm and open where in adolescence they barely hid our insecurity. So much easier to rekindle friendships without the hang-ups we had at 17!

John Bradshaw, Della, Richard Lamont, Frans Boot

And so the balmy, warm Sydney spring day ended. Before taking our return flight to overcast and drizzly Victoria (I know, the drought is finally over, so don’t complain) we took a drive past my old home in Revesby. Not much has changed, other than the dual occupancy: a massive Archie Bunker building now takes up our back yard and barbecue area. Our quarter-acre paradise was too much to waste on only one nuclear family!  Revesby has rather a down-at-heel look; it seems as if few take pride in the appearance of their houses or gardens. Perhaps the cost of living there consumes all their time and energy, and aesthetics don’t get a look-in!

The old home in Revesby with dual occupancy dwelling behind



And as it was circa 1971



I am so glad I made the trip – rekindled old friendships and revisited my roots. I am grateful to all who came and made a fuss of me, and to the school who, despite my whingeing, made a huge effort to welcome us all.  Most importantly though, I am grateful to Steve, who was my constant companion, driving me hither and yon, never showing signs of boredom, camera at the ready when commanded, and who, miraculously for a male on a trip, never once lost his temper with me. How fortunate I am!