Couple of notes

Happy about these.

1. I notice my article in The South Sydney Herald is the lead feature. Hadn’t expected that. Love the artwork that accompanies it; hadn’t seen that before either.

2. Tikno in Indonesia has been inspired by me, he says, to post on Climate Change and to set up a new page. He has some things there that supplement what I’ve had to say. Well done, Tikno.

Update 4 March

Went over to SBHS this morning. Thought the boss would like to see my feature article, especially as I had quoted him so much! No worries – he liked it; so did quite a few of my ex-colleagues there. 🙂

Goodbye Cracker Night!

Somewhere recently I read that we spend our youth trying to change the world and our old age trying to get it back! Keep that in mind…

Yes, of course I remember many a Cracker Night, that celebration once called Empire Day which fell in May on Queen Victoria’s birthday – even in the 1950s – and enable us to indulge in a little pyromania and mayhem. Blowing up letter boxes was such fun. We no longer have Cracker Night, having vast expensive pyrotechnic displays instead at New Year and just about any other time there seems a good enough excuse. We do love fireworks. Dogs don’t.

I see Canberra kept the old tradition going right up to last year, presumably on the present Queen’s official birthday in June.

I haven’t written about Cracker Night before, but I have had a bit of a go at childhood memories here and here.

Childhood memories: me in 1955

My last entry in the second reference there is Revolutionary new experiences in The Shire 1967 to 1968, and it is odd to think that by then I was a teacher, but the author of Goodbye Crackernight (2009), Justin Sheedy, was just entering the world. In fact, if I have done my sums right, he must have been in the Class of 86 – not at SBHS, but at Riverview –which Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce also attended.

 Goodbye Crackernight is a great read and great fun, though not without its moving moments and wry social comment. The author has been generous with extracts on his site, linked in the previous paragraph.

For any young child growing up in the suburbs of 1970s Australia, there were three days of any year that you held as holy. One was your birthday, one was Christmas, one – and by far the most primordially sensual, wondrous and potentially lethal to your young life – was Crackernight.

Crackernight was a night of skyrockets, bungers, po-hahs, thunders, Tom Thumbs, ball-shooters, throwdowns, Roman candles, blazing parachutes, Catherine wheels and more. If my birthday celebrated my birth, Christmas the birth of Christ, then Crackernight was my childhood’s annual pagan festival. One night a year, the infinite normality of the suburbs was shot with utter magic.

It was a childhood full of fireworks, and not without attendant injuries. A time of manic innocence, of euphoric adventure and discovery in adult hindsight the equal of any designer drug experience and of which, surely, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would have been envious.

Let me take you back there. Join me on a ten-speed Malvern Star bike ride back to where we came from. To a lost era, and a vastly different Australia. If you’re really lucky, I’ll let you ride my dragster complete with sissy bar, chunky gearstick and speedo, but only if you give me a Peach Moove. Hell, a half-sucked Sunnyboy’d do. In any case, I’ll have you home in toime for tea.

I never had a Malvern Star. I never had a dragster. I had a second-hand, single-gear Oxford with a frayed couch cushion tied on for a seat.

It was bloody wonderful.

That bike guided me through the streets of the childhood we shared.

Home was Howard Place, North Epping NSW. Yes, it certainly does exist.

Urban blight in Epping 2009 – click the photo for more.

In Howard Place

A succession of cracker nights down to the banning of the event (which gives the book its title) frame the narrative.

I marvel at Justin Sheedy’s power of recall! It strikes me too that there was more in common between my 1940s/50s childhood and adolescence and Justin’s in the 70s than there may be between either of us and people growing up in the late 90s and 21st century. Just a thought.

I’ll leave you with another snippet…

Milk came to Howard Place in glass bottles with cream at the top of each. Mothers were where they should be – at home – hence the daily bread came around in a panel van. It had to. In the suburbs, the nearest shop could be a mile away and mothers had no car. There was only one per family and father drove it to work.

Dad had an olive green 1967 Valiant Regal. In fact, we all had Valiants, Juliette’s and Steve’s families included. The interesting point about my father’s, however, was what he did to it. These were the days before fathers traded up the car every few years. They just kept the car they had for a long time instead. So, when its paint faded, my father hand-painted the Valiant lime green. I honestly don’t know how he chose that precise shade. It was hideous. A really bright lime green, almost fluorescent. Now, let me think…

He couldn’t have been radically colourblind. As a young man he’d passed the medical for the navy, so I can only assume he went into the paint shop, thought: Now, what colour was the car again? Ah, yes. Green. I’d like some cans of green paint, please. What shade of green? Oh, what’s cheapest? That stuff you’re trying to get rid of because nobody would want it in a pink fit even though this is the mid seventies, a decade infamous for its disgusting colour schemes? Yes. Yes, that’ll do nicely.

Then he went and hand-painted it. With a house brush. With house paint…

My next question about the National Curriculum

This modifies the first question perhaps.

How much is actually going to change?

I ask this after reading Syllabus makeover spells danger for HSC in today’s Sydney Morning Herald.

…A spokesman for the federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, said yesterday a draft curriculum for senior years for science, English, maths and history would be released within months.

Science would include physics, chemistry and biology, and history would be broken into ancient and modern strands.

”The implementation timeframes for the senior years will be determined during this year,” the spokesman said…

He said state and federal education ministers would decide later in the year when the senior curriculum would be introduced.

”Implementation for senior years is much more problematic than for K to 10 [kindergarten to year 10],” Mr Hill said.

He rejected claims that a national curriculum in years 11 and 12 signalled the end of the HSC in NSW, and said the national curriculum subjects would be incorporated into the existing HSC credential.

”It will only affect some subjects, not all,” he said. ”We are developing content and achievement standards and how they will be reported. It will be worked out over the next few years in consultation and collaboration with state examination boards.”

Certainly in English K-10 the current NSW syllabuses could absorb the National Curriculum without too much difficulty – including the much vaunted “back to basics” in grammar. Anyone who thinks that means we’ll be doing parsing and analysis again is dreaming. I am pleased, I must say, that attention is paid to the history of English at Year Nine level, as I’d been doing just that around that level for decades! I find it easy to make interesting and invaluable for students. I even make sure ESL students learn about it, often by finding out also what they know about the way their mother tongues have changed over time. Speaking a bit of Old English has been one of my teaching party tricks since 1966!

Not a bad article the other day by Tim Hawkes from The King’s School.