My first day at Burwood Technical College began with catching the bus in Box Hill, where we had purchased a home, for the half hour drive into school.
I had been in Australia for only three months and couldn’t speak a great deal of english and all my fellow students jabbering away in a language completely foreign to me was quite frightening. I can well and truly sympathise with new migrants who are trying to come to grips with the english language. However I soon learned the lingo, especially all the naughty words, and settled into some years of secondary education.
I was a bit of a scoundrel in those days and consequently not really the favourite pupil of the old fashioned, stoic teachers who in my not so humble opinion at the time were a lot of “boring old farts” from “old school“. They grew up in an era when discipline was supremely important, when men were men, women were women, pansies were flowers, aids was something that nurses gave, the work “gay” meant happy and herpies was a walt disney volkswagon.
They used to wield an eighteen inch leather strap called “the cuts” and to enforce discipline they would smack you across an outstretched hand facing upwards, the number of times depending on the severity of the “sentence“. I used to be on the receiving end of this particular punishment quite a few times, mainly because I used to have this uncontrollable compulsion to be a smart-arse at that particular stage of my life.
During the 1956 Melbourne Olympics I “wagged” school for about two weeks without telling my parents and managed to get to see a lot of the events such as that infamous Hungary-Russia water polo game, some of the athlethic events and quite a few of the soccer matches including the grand final. Upon returning to school I finished up in the principal’s office and to my utter surprise he accepted the note, which I had forged the night before, claiming I had been ill for all that time.
I did take the last year of my stay at college quite a bit more seriously and knuckled down, did some serious studying and finished the yearr with some credits and in fact came sixth in a form of 120 students. I was by that time pretty bored with schooling and my Mum and Dad agreed that if I could acquire a job with some kind of an apprenticeship they would allow me to leave school.