Steve Gray YHS 1971 - continues with his High School - the early bits - Part 2: Form 2 The school persisted with “General Studies” despite some parent’s protests about the lack of resources seeing as the “smart kids” grabbed all the good resources first. We were now in the double portable next to the basketball court; yes still 70 odd kids and yes still with a lot of noise. I have come to realise it’s no wonder I did little work, the noise was (and still is!) a big downfall of mine. I had a great year of day dreaming and my results reflected that.
We now had Mr and Mrs Phillips, Mrs Anderson and Ian Wallis (an English teacher). Mrs Phillips had a mesmerising effect on some of the boys, she would talk to them and they would listen but not hear a word, the eye contact was amazing… a few minutes later she would come back and enquire why they had not done as she had asked… “What Miss?” their heart was still pounding from the first encounter! One day she managed to turn Wayne Frost’s face VERY bright red by running her finger under his collar and saying… “Wayne, don’t get hot under the collar, just concentrate on your work…” Our table fell apart laughing after that.
The school camp this year was at the Basin, at the base of the Dandenongs. The camp had two main sets of dormitories - one which was for most of the girls and a ramshackle collection of broken plywood walls mostly for the boys, although we had a group of girls next door who babbled on about nothing until very late, often telling scary tales of doors slamming in the wind and what not.
Day one saw one bus arrive, the other was delayed, so we unloaded some sports gear and a baseball game was started. A few shots in and Graeme Rooney was hit by a flying baseball bat from Ross Magnusson’s batting effort, WHACK knocked him straight out, a trip to the doc and then straight home to get over concussion - no camp for him.
Mr Gubbins was on the prowl late at night, watching for young lads who wanted to wander about and climb in windows over at the girls’ dorm. He managed to also get us lost in Sherbrook Forest on a hike - whatever map he was following had some serious issues.
We had a camp Social night in the main hall - most of the students were keen as mustard; I wasn’t. I was still into Billy Karts - girls and dancing were a bit foreign to me… Mrs Anderson wanted a story out of us during the day, a full page before we could be allowed to go to the Social. I saw it as a great way to not go. She was surprised to not get even a few lines… I wasn’t. She argued with me, pushed me all afternoon to produce, everyone went, but I stayed in the room scribbling out some lame story, even with a third of a page she let me go… pity. Actually she had to almost drag me to the thing. I recall they had a hard time trying to figure out what songs to play, but other than that, the rest was a noisy blur for me.
There were a few interesting incidents that took place. Firstly breakfast, the thickest porridge I have ever seen. Some of the girls were into séances and invoked a few interesting spirits, they had freaked themselves out something rotten! They would run out of a room screaming at the top of their lungs about Ned Kelly chasing them… five minutes later they were back into it. The boys tried out levitation which was amazing to see, not sure how it works but it did that week!
One other thing which stands out was the blowfly incident which later became a poem and a short film. In the library, the blowies would congregate at the windows, short lengths of fine thread were employed via deft fingers to “lasso” a collar on to one and so a fly on a string became a novelty, then it got interesting as two were attached and left to fly about the room. The follow on was a bunch of them put into the drawer where the librarian kept the stamp for the books, open the drawer and out came about five sets of blowies on strings! Very funny at the time.
Andrew Bicknell wrote a poem called Bazza Blowfly (we were doing topical things in English) which caused a stir, and more poems were written, the teacher finally called for the death of Bazza and the final poem became a short film shown at Speech Night.
Of course there were many other things that happened that year, I got hit with a football during recess and was concussed, (or was that in form 1…?) The school fete was a highlight and a few other bits and pieces that slip my mind just now…
But a fun year was had…