I loved being down by the lake, on my way somewhere, maybe trundling past on a tram, wandering around, sitting about, having a smoke in the later years. This photo from 1968 says it all for me, even though I never went fishing with the missus...
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Ah, Lake Wendouree!
I loved being down by the lake, on my way somewhere, maybe trundling past on a tram, wandering around, sitting about, having a smoke in the later years. This photo from 1968 says it all for me, even though I never went fishing with the missus...
Chook Club, c. 1965
Ernie Gray at the door of one of the chook sheds.Chook Club was popular with kids in my year. You were excused from morning prep while you fed the chooks and collected the eggs.
Highlight of Boat Race, 1964
Flour bombs! (I'm told Grammar won the actual race that year.)That's Dennis Lindsay in the top picture (Lindsay III? IV?). In the background is a suave Form 6 boy who seemed more like an adult to me (I was only 13, after all), with a girl who used to hang out with that group of senior students. She always wore a duffel coat. To me, she looked too old to be a student but she could have been from Queens or Clarendon.
On the far left in the bottom photo is Wettenhall, near Chris Money.
Lake Vernon, 1964
Early 1964: the remains of the old dining room, with the new hall at the back.
After it rained and a "lake" formed, some wags from the senior forms uncharitably signposted it as "Lake Vernon", after the school's architect.
For a later view of how this was transformed see here.
After it rained and a "lake" formed, some wags from the senior forms uncharitably signposted it as "Lake Vernon", after the school's architect.
For a later view of how this was transformed see here.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Chairs, 1965
Waddell (Graham?), Rat Porter, Ernie Gray. Taken outside the new Kinsman Wing classrooms, near the oval.
This looks like the cover for their debut LP.
This looks like the cover for their debut LP.
Tommy & Phil, 1966
Seated is one of my closest friends at Grammar, Phil "Rat" Porter. We arranged to meet up in Brisbane a few years ago but he got lost and never turned up.
The clothing (tie, sports jacket) suggests that this was a Saturday morning. Rat & Tom look as if they're off to town or just back.
Ernie Gray takes to his sick bed, 1966
Visited by Michael Boyle, Waddell, Charlie Abrams, "Rocker" Davis (at the radio), John Teschendorf.I notice that Waddell pops up in a lot of my photos, like Woody Allen in Zelig or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.
Rocker Davis did a lucrative trade in cutting hair until the Boss, noticing that the school barber's trade was falling off, investigated and closed him down. He was a true rocker who was scornful of the Beatles and long hair, but he knew how to cut our hair so that it was just long enough to be within regulation length.
Ernie's radio seems to be a plug-in mantel model. (Is that the aerial trailing out the window?) Most of the boys' radios were transistors of various sizes. One or two had home-made crystal sets which would pick up only 3BA, the local station, and had no speaker. In fact, I think Ernie had one of those at some stage.
This was a downstairs dorm of Leaving kids (Year 11 in today's terms) with prefect Graham Clark (back from exchange in the US), opposite the old Masters' Study, by this time a prefects' study.
Ian Brown inspects the Form 4 dorm, 1965
Poor quality, but understandable: the inspector would not have been amused.
Swinging the leg, 1965
Waddell and Nuttall on sick call, same dormitory as the Ian Brown inspection, first up the stairs on the way to Jones's and Boyle's studies, full of Intermediate (now Year 10) students.
It was always just "swinging" at Grammar: the full term was never used. Even if you were genuinely sick it was assumed, for jocular purposes, that you were swinging.
