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!