Tim Harvey YHS 1971 continues with Part 5 - Sound, Colour & Light

This is the last of my essays on memories of Yallourn, and it ties together a few odd things that I thought of, hence the odd title. For example, after moving to Newborough, I remember wondering why it was so quiet - where was everyone? You could walk around the streets painted blue and there wouldn’t be anyone to notice. Yallourn, by comparison, seemed to have people everywhere. It was alive with sounds and colour and light. There was the station that hummed in the night, or the summer noise of hundreds of kids in the swimming pool, that would carry for half-a-mile in all directions. And there was more ...

Autumn trees. When the wind blew in Yallourn, there was one of the oldest, most primeval of sounds – the sound of leaves rustling in the breeze. For Yallourn had trees upon trees upon trees. And most of them lit up in autumn. Silky oaks, pin oaks, claret ash. Plane trees, cypress, fruit trees of all sorts. Pines. Eucalypts. Yallourn was full of trees. At one stage, I had a plan to take pictures of every street in the town, and particularly all down those streets which were so beautifully lined with autumn colour. You see, even as a teenager, I could see that the trees down Latrobe Avenue, for instance, were stunningly beautiful in the autumn and I thought that that pictures would be one way to remember Yallourn. (This was me inventing Google Street View three decades early!) But paying for that many photos seemed too much to ask. I took a photo of a single particularly beautiful tree in Moondarra Place, but it could have been the whole town - streets and houses and places and a thousand memories instead of the few I have left. And that dull thumping noise you can now hear in the distance is the sound of me kicking myself, again.

Green Lawns. After my second year of uni, I got a vacation job (about 4-5 weeks' worth, I think it was) working for the SEC at the Yallourn Nursery. It was an odd time. The work was nice – mowing the town parks and the gardens of the elderly folks who still lived in the town. There seemed to be a certain amount of tension in the air at the nursery though. We had to have a certain number of breaks during the day, for which we had to be returned to the depot, by car. And, generally, we weren't allowed to walk from job to job, we had to be driven. Sometimes we ended up waiting for our lift and the old folks would invite us in for cake and lemonade, an offer we were only too pleased to take up. It was summer and it was hot. And you got the feeling that they didn’t get a lot of visitors. But the boss wasn’t happy when he found us sitting around inside, even if we couldn't go anywhere without him. And we weren’t allowed to work too hard either. One day, we were assigned a series of houses that actually were sufficiently close together that we were allowed to walk between them without needing a lift. And we ploughed through fifteen lawns in a day, front and back, all beautifully done. We were quite proud of ourselves. We were told to slow down. As I said, there was a certain amount of tension about the place ....

Paint. The SEC was a benevolent landlord, and periodically, it re-painted every house in the town. I only became aware of this because, one year, I was allowed to pick the colour of my room. I don't remember what the ceiling was, but I picked a pale apricot for the wall colour. It was a rather nice colour, even after I saw it on the wall. But I think having too much choice was probably a recipe for disaster at a time when the concept of interior decoration was restricted to hanging up the decorations at Christmas. I think every plastered surface in the house (walls and ceiling) got a different colour, so there were some fairly sharp and lairy colour changes in going from one room to another which probably wouldn't pass muster now, even in these garish days of feature walls painted red or brown or (shudder!) plum.

Music. We were brought up in St John's Church of England in Yallourn, and I have a great affection (if not a great memory) for many of the old church hymns. But it was a time when church attendance (except maybe at Easter, Christmas and the odd funeral) was on the wane and the congregations were often pretty small. In fact, sometimes it was just our family there, in a church built to hold 300 people. As a self-conscious kid, I didn't like to sing too loudly. But, happily, my Dad did. I used to be very grateful for my Dad, singing loud and clear to give a vocal lead for those great old hymns, in the church he had attended since he was little. Dad was very accomplished musically, being in the Yallourn Band from about ten years of age and, as an
adult, he sang with the Yallourn Madrigal Society. I don't remember attending many concerts of the Band, but I remember going to a number of concerts by the Yallourn Madrigals. Going along was partly to support Dad, and partly because it was “culture”, and “culture” was Good For You. Everyone in the Madrigals dressed up beautifully, and sang these very serious songs. Although the thing was, even to my uneducated ear, some of them weren't very serious at all – they were ditties, or in some cases, what seemed to be centuries-old drinking songs. Beautifully sung of course, but some of them had extremely odd lyrics, somehow set to beautifully complex vocal arrangements.

Traffic lights. There was one set of traffic lights in Yallourn (although, my mother has reliably informed me, there were fifty-six stop signs). This paucity of active traffic control might not seem very important to anyone, except it gave me an entirely false sense of how traffic lights behaved, because I was never around for the Yallourn rush hour which was probably what they were there for. To my mind (on the basis of extensive non-rush-hour observation), a car drove up to the lights, stopped, and waited for its turn, even if all other roads were empty. A car on the intersecting road, possibly the only car for miles, might then be stopped to let the first car go, so it stopped and waited for its turn. There was no rancour, no revving or honking of horns. Everything was Very Polite. Very Honourable. Very British. The traffic lights were, to me, rather like Seconds in a Duel. Respectful, silent. There to see that certain formalities were observed, but not really critical because it was a transaction between Gentlemen, and Gentlemen knew The Rules. It therefore struck me as rather ludicrous when I found that its city cousins were nowhere near as respectful. In fact, they seemed to have no bloody clue at all. A traffic light’s a traffic light you might think, what could be different? Well, it was the fact that these ill-bred city beasts could stop you twice or even more as you crawled towards them. A set of lights might stop you once, but never more than once. It was Not Done. It was Not On! And especially not as they were the ones responsible for your appallingly slow progress in any case! – it was as though they got bored and held people up for the hell of it. I remember staring at these things, and then laughing in disbelief because no-one else seemed to see the problem. For all their sophistication, city folk had failed to grasp the simple manners and etiquette of the situation. It was as if everyone was perfectly happy wearing their underpants on their heads, and I laughed because I realised I could not explain it to them. It would be like teaching quantum physics to a Cornish pastie or the importance of oral hygiene to a small African dung beetle ....

Bicycles. Christmas Day was when dozens of shiny brightly-coloured new bikes appeared on the streets of Yallourn, all magically transported from Mr Oliver's without us kids ever knowing how. The first bike I got I think was when I was in Grade 2. It was a blue Runwell and I can still remember the joy (and utter surprise!) of the first time I sailed out our front gate on two wheels - I even remember thinking “don't think about it or you'll fall off”. A few years later, the Runwell was replaced by something slightly larger - it was red, it had a long banana saddle and beautifully curved upright handlebars - a Malvern Star Dragstar! It also had three gears which must've been a real novelty at the time, for I remember being challenged for races by kids years older than me. The fact that their bikes had 28-inch wheels and mine were 20-inch (or 18inch??) was outweighed, they said, by the fact that I had gears! Mind you, I don't think they expected to lose, although it was not for lack of effort on my part. On a Dragstar you sat upright and just enjoyed the view. You cruised. Having wheels the size of your average shopping trolley, there really wasn't much choice. I loved that bike though. The Christmas day it arrived (1969? 1970?), I rode it almost continually from six in the morning to eight at night, with short breaks for Church and lunch. I could barely walk the next day, or sit down. But after a few years (at the end of Form 3?), I had grown a fair bit and Mum and Dad must've decided I needed something bigger. The weird thing is that I saw it, before Christmas, on the footpath outside Mr Oliver's. Usually, he had heaps of bikes there but this day, there was just this one. It was a bright apple-green with a leather saddle, three Sturmey-Archer gears and flat handlebars, later replaced with racing bars. I did a lot of miles on that bike, covering the back roads to and from Newborough, Moe, Morwell, Traralgon, Yallourn North, Tyers, around Lake Narracan, to Coalville and out to the Narracan Falls. It never let me down. No punctures, no breakages. I can't even remember any serious accidents on it. We parted company when I went to Uni. From disuse, it fell into disrepair and was finally discarded. That I allowed it to go so easily was, I think now, rather ungrateful.

Drive-In Theatres. The drive-in theatres get a mention, not because there were part of Yallourn
(they weren't, being at Moe, Morwell & Traralgon), but because they were part of how I remember life at Yallourn when I was little. Going to one was a great event because we got to stay up late, as we piled into the car in our pyjamas to go out into The Dark. It was all terribly thrilling. I remember going to Morwell's drive-in only the once, for a double-bill of James Bond's Thunderball and the animated epic A Man called Flintstone. Rather perversely, that was the order they played in too. I was half-asleep by the time the good movie came on, unlike my younger brother and sister who were by then completely out of it and they missed it altogether. We seemed to go to Traralgon drive-in much more, but my fondest drive-in memory was, I think, the last time I went to a drive-in at all, at Moe. I have no idea what the main bill was, but there was a cheesy Dracula film on with it, which I remember with great fondness. Because at one point about mid-way through the film, during a very dramatic, but relatively quiet, moment we realised that someone nearby had decided that, rather than walk all the way to the toilet and miss any of this most excellent film, he would simply empty his bladder in the dark on the gravel next to his car. This started off quietly enough, then became louder and steadily more insistent until it seemed to blot out the dialogue on screen. What was more impressive than the volume, however, was the VOLUME. It was like a tanker had sprung a leak. It ran (if you will pardon the pun) for what seemed a complete act of the film. Our whole family sat in the car in stitches, and almost in tears, desperately trying to stifle our hysterics. Needless to say, the dramatic edge of the film was entirely lost. Ah, the Moe drive-in. Now, decades later, I don't remember the films. But I remember the laughter.

And while on the subject of films, any recollections of sound and light in Yallourn would be incomplete without some mention of the Yallourn Theatre. Even now, it seems to be one of the landmarks I remember best. It was, reputedly, the best theatre in the eastern half of the state. I did watch a lot of junk there though. Elvis movies (at least Clambake and Live a Little - Love a Little, and probably others), Dr Goldfoot and his Bikini Machines (okay, this was junk), Oliver! (which I hated), The Poseidon Adventure (more rubbish), Jaws (which ruined many subsequent beach-side holidays) and Blackbeard's Ghost (which was quite good fun). There must have been lots of others, but it has been too long ago now. When I was a kid, the Saturday afternoon matinee was less than a dollar, so it was cheap entertainment. And whatever film was showing, they always showed a couple of Warner Bros cartoons first and there would always be an almighty cheer when the opening notes to the Looney Tunes music were played. It was a funny time, because I remember when I was little they used to play the National Anthem first up and we used to stand up for it and hold our hands over our hearts. It was a simpler time, I guess. Gradually fewer and fewer people stood until, finally, no-one did. I lived at a cusp. Later, the Theatre became something of a source of dread. When I was in High School (1971-1976), our teachers dragged us to some dead-set horrible films. Our teachers were nice people. They were intelligent people. But they insisted on taking us to some of the worst films ever shown to kids. Papillon, Soylent Green, Kes, ZPG, The Go-Between. And of all things, Polanski’s Macbeth, which leaves blood-soaked stills in the brain to this day, more than three decades later. What the hell were they thinking?? My mood improved as I grew older and I went on my first dates there. The films were still rubbish (Airport 1975, Griffin & Phoenix), but the company was better. Sadly, I can’t remember the last film I saw there, although it was probably Gone with the Wind….And while the theatre represented a landmark, it also poignantly emphasised the death of the town as well. I have shown a couple of ex-Yallournies the middle photograph on page 37 of the YOGA book Back to Yallourn. Like me, they stared at it for a few seconds, not quite sure of what they were seeing. Then, as their eyes moved from the centre of the photo to the periphery, they recognised the half-sphere sound reflectors and this suddenly put the destruction in the centre into context. And, like me, they felt a bit sick. Like watching a funeral passing and realising with a shock that it was someone you knew. Vale Yallourn Theatre.