The Reunion

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Stirring my coffee afterwards, I thought ruefully that it was lucky I’d seen Hoon and I hadn't rushed along bellowing "Coon! Coon!"

With just a little bit of licence in her pocket, Tasmanian freelance journalist MARGARETTA POS — one of the first baby boomers — looks back on her 40-year school reunion and reminisces on an adequate if somewhat WASP-ish education.

''MY FIRST HUSBAND was a bigamist, my second was bisexual,'' the old school friend said. "I’ve been married to the third for twenty-three years.''

It was the first time I'd seen her in 40 years. Stylishly dressed, with gold streaks in tawny coloured hair — which I vaguely remembered as mousey at school — she had become a successful businesswoman.

''Do you remember my sister?'' she went on. ''She was so square she was almost cuboid! Can you imagine, she was arrested three years ago for cultivating cannabis in Tasmania.''

Taken aback, I asked where her sister was living. “Unbelievable as it sounds, in a little place called Paradise,” she said airily.

I had arrived in Melbourne on an early flight from Hobart for a school reunion - the 40-year reunion of Toorak College’s Class of '63. Almost all of us were born in 1946, making us the first of the Baby Boomers. It meant that not only were we the Class of '63, we were in a class of our own. And given everything that has been said and written about us, I was curious to know how we had fared.

The reunion was held at The r bar, in Beach Street, Port Melbourne, a stone's throw from the Spirit of Tasmania’s berth. The floor length windows of the upstairs room in which it took place framed the Spirit and to break the ice when I arrived, I joked that I had sailed across Bass Strait on my own yacht.

The event began at midday but I had time to kill and went in search of coffee. Strolling along, I saw someone I recognized on the other side of the busy road. It was Hoon.

''Hoon,'' I shouted across the traffic. She was walking fast and didn’t hear me. ''Hoon,'' I shouted again. ''Hoon!'' I speeded up, clutching my shoulder bag with one hand and waving the other to try to get her attention. ''Hoon! Hoon! Hoon!'' But she disappeared around the corner.

I stopped. To my astonishment, some passersby also stopped. ''What happened,'' asked one. ''What's the hoon done?'' Stunned, I realised they thought I was trying to stop a thug. The 'thug' in fact, was an Old Girl, one of the Colquhoun twins, Coon and Hoon as we called them at school. Stirring my coffee afterwards, I thought ruefully that it was lucky I’d seen Hoon and I hadn't rushed along bellowing "Coon! Coon!"

I WAS A BOARDER at Toorak College for five years, an independent girls' school on the Mornington Peninsula at Mt Eliza, long since subsumed by Frankston.

In my last year, the 1963 school magazine records that from Term II, I was a member of the Witan, thereby a prefect and glory of glories, Convener of the Pound. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit it but I was a good Pound Convener, collecting lost property daily, putting weekly lists on notice boards and ensuring owners paid fines before getting their things back. The magazine records the money raised by each class for social welfare — to which the Pound monies I collected so assiduously were added.

Midday arrived and I wasn't at all sure I wanted to go anymore. I loitered across the road and saw three middle aged women meet outside the restaurant and embrace each other. I didn't recognise any of them and wondered if they were forgotten classmates, but the trio moved on down the street and taking a deep breath, I went inside.

We were given nametags by the organizing committee, with past and present surnames, but not alas, the nicknames that I remembered. Some I knew straight away, as I had Hoon, but I couldn’t put a name to others and it was a shock to realise that I was equally forgettable. In my mind's eye, I couldn't see in their faces the girls I had known but curiously, by the end of the day, a 40-year ageing process had been reversed.

There were thirty girls in Form VI, of whom fourteen matriculated, which was the norm for the time. About half were boarders and although by then Toorak had far more daygirls — daybugs we called them — the core of the school was still the boarding house. At any rate, we thought so. Most boarders were from country Victoria, with some from Melbourne and a few, like me, from interstate.

The boarding house was a 1928 building designed by Philip Burgoyne Hudson, of Hudson and Wardrop, architects best known for Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, with the school gardens laid out by Edna Walling in her first commercial commission.

The central, two-storey, brick building was wrapped around a quadrangle. We shared small dressing rooms on the inner side where we kept our things, while sleeping in dormitories open to the weather. Each balcony had an external wall of steel mesh with canvas blinds to let down if it rained, while the beds had pale green canvas covers to ensure the bedclothes didn't get damp. There were no bedside tables, no bedside lamps and no hot water bottles, but we were allowed to wear bed socks.

It was a very WASP establishment, although a Chinese girl from Singapore joined our class mid term one year, and in our last year, a second Singaporean arrived, both of whom were at the reunion. These days, I ‘m told, all the boarders are from Asia and a new boarding house was built with air conditioning and central heating. It was built in The Wilderness, so-called in my day because it was an area of the extensive grounds with a remnant of native bush where bad girls went to smoke (cigarettes).

Before the first Chinese girl arrived, we were asked to help her because she might not know how to make her bed or clean her shoes, which we found astonishing. It was true, but only because there were servants who did it for her at home. She was far more sophisticated than any of us and must have found it astonishing that her family was paying to send her to such a primitive place.

We shimmied down the ivy from her second floor bedroom window, said hello to the milkman and joined him on his run. There was no traffic and I can still see Louine doing hand flips right down the middle of Cotham Road.

WE WERE ALLOWED two exit weekends only a term and boarders spent a lot or time together, so a lot of boarders in classes above and below us joined us for the reunion. As a result, there were fifty at the lunch.

Walking into The r bar, the room seemed filled with middle aged women with classic jackets, gold chains and platinum hair - certainly, there were more 'blondes' than there had been at school. In fact, I was one of only three women with gray hair.

Despite the vicissitudes of life, we were all alive except the head girl. No one could tell me the cause of her death the year before, not even those who had kept in touch with her. I was told she had 'faded away.'

''Anorexia?''

''No,'' said one of her friends. ''She became very alternative.''

''But people don't die just because they become alternative!''

''She did. She just faded away.''

One of the organizers paid tribute to her, but it wasn't a sombre occasion and she raised a laugh in saying she remembered the head girl doing cartwheels everywhere and how she used to envy her for being able to do something she could only dream about.

"Maybe she was someone who wasn’t meant to grow old," she said.

I was sitting at the same table as Louine for lunch, who had often invited me to stay for exit weekends — flying home to Tasmania for a weekend was out of the question in those days. Louine's family lived in the Melbourne suburb of Kew and one hot summer's night we were talking in the early hours as girls do, when we heard the milkman. It seems extraordinary now, but milk was still delivered by horse and cart. We shimmied down the ivy from her second floor bedroom window, said hello to the milkman and joined him on his run. There was no traffic and I can still see Louine doing hand flips right down the middle of Cotham Road.

We had a limited education at Toorak, but we were fairly well grounded in what we were taught. The emphasis was on sport, at least, that's how I remember it. I could run fast and played hockey but if you weren't sporty, it was pretty dull if you were a boarder. So I was surprised to read in the 1963 school magazine just how many plays Mrs Hammond, our Form VI English Literature teacher, took us to see in Melbourne. We saw Richard II, Oedipus the King, The Wild Duck, King Lear and The Crucible, while the Elizabethan Players visited the school with Richard II and The Merchant of Venice.

I loved acting but don't remember anyone seriously encouraging me to become an actress. From time to time, we were asked what we wanted to do when we left school but I never knew. The magazine records that we had four careers' talks during the year, on kindergarten teaching, dietetics, occupational therapy and physiotherapy.

The magazine reports that Miss Cosh from the Physiotherapy School told us: The good physiotherapist must be healthy, with a keen sense of touch, muscularly skilful rather than strong, and interested in medicine and science. The course is a three-year one, spent at the University of Melbourne, the Physiotherapy School and teaching hospitals, and, of course, students must have an adequate mental capacity.

We didn't consider them role models. Heaven forbid! With the thoughtlessness of youth, we thought of them as spinsters without a life. I mean, who would want to teach us?

LOOKING AROUND the restaurant, I wondered what everyone had done. Some were showing each other photos of daughters' weddings, others their grandchildren. One was a jump ahead; she was still a teenager when she had her first child and was about to become a great-grandmother. Few were working and I don’t know what they all had done, but one had become a doctor and another a dentist; there was an Army officer, a florist, a kindy teacher, a dietician, an occupational therapist, a journalist — me — several nurses and former secretaries, but no physio. Alas, Miss Cosh!

Germaine Greer reportedly said that the nuns at her Catholic school were good role models as strong women. Our teachers were nearly all women but they weren’t nuns, although many were single. We didn't consider them role models. Heaven forbid! With the thoughtlessness of youth, we thought of them as spinsters without a life. I mean, who would want to teach us?

Some of the staff I disliked and the feeling was mutual. But I liked Miss Hancock and sensed she liked me, so she was able to make me feel contrite if I behaved badly, which I often did. Miss Hancock spent decades at Toorak. She had a photograph of a smiling young man in Air Force uniform on her desk, who, we presumed, had been her fiancé and must have been killed in World War I. She never mentioned him, but I realise now that they must have smiled at each other every single day of her long working life.

Looking back, some of our teachers were erudite women, such as the headmistress, Miss Christina Brown, and her sister, Miss Mollie Brown, the librarian. Graduates of the University of Melbourne, both had been pupils at the school before it moved from Melbourne to Mt Eliza and Chrissie, as we called her, was the head girl in 1914. Regrettably, I didn’t learn much from them — apart from a string of Latin graces said before meals that I can still recite. I’m afraid I wasn’t interested in being educated.

Miss Brown retired in 1961, to be replaced as headmistress by Miss Lillian Bush, a rather severe Englishwoman, whose saving grace for me was that she had a television in her house on the grounds, which few among us had at home. Miss Bush allowed senior boarders to watch her TV at weekends from 7.30 to 9.30pm and for my last two years, I saw every episode of Rawhide and Bonanza. Truth to say, I nursed a secret crush on the dark and saturnine Adam Cartwright, one of the Ponderosa sons. Miss Bush went on to raise scholastic expectations, I’m, told, but that was after I left.

All the same, forty years on, I can appreciate the school motto: In Labore Quies (In Work Lies Rest). And I was surprised to read the editorial in the school magazine. It was a passionate denunciation of the White Australia Policy by Wendy, the one who became a doctor. She wrote: There are many who object to allowing Asians into our country. But these objections are made through fear, and fear stems from lack of knowledge ... the answer lies mainly in education.

Whereupon someone piped up: ''Never talk about sex, politics or religion.'' I’m not sure whether she was serious or not, but as well brought up girls, we had been drilled by our mothers to avoid these contentious subjects.

WHAT DID the others think of our schooling?

''It was a poor education,'' one said. ''We weren't taught to think.''

Despite the editorial and our theatre visits, she was right. The first time I questioned an idea was in a Form VI Social Studies class and I still remember it as my first original thought. We were studying the political system and the workings of the Liberal and Labor parties, when our teacher said in disapproving tones, that faceless men determined Labor policy. She added: ‘‘None of your parents would vote Labor.'' And I thought, why not?

I had no idea about the political affiliations of my former classmates although a few weeks earlier, I had read a story in The Age about one of them. In a bitter battle between conservationists and developers, she had led a successful campaign to prevent farms on the fringes of one of Melbourne’s sprawling out suburbs being split into development blocks.

I was sitting next to Gil, who asked if I knew the Australian Greens’ leader, Bob Brown, who lives in Hobart.

''Yes.''

''I envy you,'' she said. ''I really admire him.''

Jenny chimed in, shaking head: ''He does nothing for me!''

The conversation moved on and Jenny told me her mother had married a younger man. This was particularly interesting because her mother and mine were at Toorak together in the Class of ’35, sleeping on the same balconies we had. I couldn't wait to tell my mother and rang her on my mobile. ''No!'' she said. ''How exciting! ''

The winter day began to fade. The party was over. People were leaving, but a few of us went downstairs and pulled up chairs around a table in the bar and the subject of our classmate’s three husbands came up.

How had she discovered that the first was a bigamist, we wanted to know.

“When the Federal Police knocked on the door,” she said.

She had no idea what had become of him, but the bisexual husband was living in China.

This triggered Gil's interest. She had a friend who had divorced her husband because of his bisexual proclivities, and he too was living in China.

''What's your ex doing in China,'' Gil asked.

''Teaching.”

''So’s he,'' Gil said. ''What's yours teaching?''

''He's teaching Chinese students to speak English.''

There was silence.

''So is he,” Gil said.

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