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SINGING IN THE SIXTIES

When it was time to go to high school, I went to Wickham High, a little school on the harbour with the apt motto ‘All sails unfurled’. It wasn’t the most prestigious school, but it had a new principal, Mrs Whiley, who was intent on pulling it back from the brink. We students diligently wore our hats, gloves and stockings through winter and summer, and were proud of our school. I spent four of the best years of my life there. My teachers instilled in me a love of drama, music, poetry and history, but not of maths.

I was elected class captain in my first year. It was only because my cousin and two girls I’d met on the 104 bus voted for me, but I felt joy at the honour. I must have developed a taste for leadership, because by the end of four years I’d earned – well, I hope I’d earned – the titles of bus prefect, house vice-captain and school vice-captain. It was an era when such titles were losing their status, and I was acutely aware that I had to earn respect rather than assume it as a right. The students and teachers seemed to like me, and this made a huge difference.

My parents were active Labor Party supporters, like their parents before them. As kids we helped Mum and Dad letterbox during election campaigns, fending off the occasional feral dog, and on election day we handed out how-to-vote cards outside the polling booths. We imagined that the Labor Party was a big party that went on all year, and we couldn’t wait to join it.

In 1962, soon after I started high school, Dad was elected to Newcastle City Council as an alderman for North Ward. In those days we attended Mayfield Methodist church. At a service shortly after the local government election, the minister congratulated several parishioners who’d been elected to council, mentioning them by name. All but one – Dad. I was sitting in the pew next to my sister Margaret, who started crying quietly. Fortunately the minister’s wife realised the omission, and Dad was duly congratulated. I suspect that Labor was the wrong party for that conservative Methodist church.

Dad took his responsibilities as an alderman seriously and responded personally to many calls from residents. He’d ride his bicycle around Mayfield at night, clearing gutters, removing rubbish and pruning the odd branch for the elderly, but political life didn’t suit his quiet, shy personality. During his stint on the council, he often said that Mum would be the better politician.

Music became an increasingly important part of my life. At primary school, I’d already learnt piano from Shirley Carter, a member of a well-known family in the world of classical music in Newcastle, and at Wickham I had a talented music teacher, Miss Elkin, who fostered my love of singing. I was part of a six-girl choir that sang in three different harmonies. I was absolutely in my element when our voices blended together to make music. We entertained patients in the hospitals around Newcastle during the Christmas of 1964.

My singing got me into hot water at times. When I was thirteen, I decided to have a go at an annual talent quest held in Dangar Park as part of the Mayfield Festival. I’d learnt a catchy tune about a truck driver called Mandy Lane who did her ‘drivin’ from the hips on down’. Having no idea it was a tune about a prostitute, I belted it out on a microphone in a public park. Mum and Dad just shook their heads, obviously shelving another story for the family archives.

In my later years of school, I picked up basic guitar very quickly. The folk era had begun, and the songs my Poppa had sung to us as kids were now being performed in concert halls around the country. Soon I was entertaining my teachers and classmates with renditions of ‘Botany Bay’ and ‘Working on the Railroad’. Within a year I had a repertoire of about thirty songs. It was easy to work out the tunes and chords. Mrs Carter must have been right when she said I had a good ear, though I used to wonder what she meant.

I went on to perform traditional Australian folk songs around the town. My first gig was singing at the wedding of Bobby Evans, one of our many playmates from Nelson Street, who had at last found his sweetheart after losing his foot in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier.

By the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan was singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ and I was coming to the end of my school years. Under the new Wyndham scheme, our three-year intermediate school became Wickham Girls Junior High School, and in 1965 for the first time the majority of girls stayed on to fourth form. I left school at sixteen, having completed my School Certificate, doubting perhaps that I had the capacity for further education.

After a brief stint in the office at a motorcycle shop, I joined the public service as a switchboard operator and girl Friday working for two federal politicians, Charlie Jones and Bert James. I loved my job. I ate yoghurt for lunch, answered the phone, did the banking and had a crush on the teller.

The year after I left school, Mum and Dad helped me purchase a musical instrument that changed my life – a beautiful Australian Maton guitar, which came in a cream case with soft deep red velvet lining. I was still too young to sign a hire-purchase agreement, so my parents signed it for me. It took me a few years to pay the guitar off, but it immediately became my most prized possession. Now Mum wasn’t the only one to sing all day in Nelson Street.

The movement against the Vietnam War was gathering force, producing many protest songs. I sang these as well as folk songs, taking my guitar everywhere with me. Talented singer–songwriters were popping up all over the world. Songs such as ‘Say a Little Prayer for Me’ and ‘If you’re going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in your Hair)’ were replayed endlessly on commercial radio. I was discovering artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Buffy Saint-Marie and Gary Shearston.

My favourite singer–songwriter, though, was an American named Phil Ochs. I loved his poetic images, which communicated his profound disappointment at his country of birth for its involvement in the war. On his guitar he had a sign that said ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’, and I copied it on my own guitar case. I had great faith in the power of music.

I got to know Bob Hudson, who was a bit of a folk legend in Newcastle. He’d written the famous ‘Newcastle Song’, with its chorus ‘Don’t you ever let a chance go by’, about a young man who cruises around Newcastle in an FJ Holden and encounters a giant Hells Angel in front of the Parthenon Café in Newcastle West. Bob took me along to the YMCA Folk Club in King Street one night, where I met several young people who became my lifelong friends. It was a turning point in my life and the beginning of tumultuous change in the world.

My best friend at the ‘Y’ was Sally, who was the daughter of a bank manager and lived in the seaside suburb of Merewether Heights. Sally and I sang many songs together. At Mayfield we were all on our best behaviour when Sally came for tea. She complimented Mum on her fine cooking and won our hearts by proceeding to lick her plate clean. Sally is still one of my dear friends today.

The YMCA organised many events. Each group had an older leader who watched over us, but never cramped our style. One memorable sunny Saturday, we chartered a bus, took our guitars, put flowers in our hair and headed to Sydney to sing songs at the Wayside Chapel and go to a concert by Peter, Paul and Mary in the evening. I came away yearning to be tall, blonde and beautiful and sing like Mary Travers. Much to my sadness, Mary died while I was writing this story.

One night, a handsome boy came into the folk club with some friends. His name was Greg, and he had huge brown eyes, jet-black curly hair and the best clothes in town. He was my first true love.

Even though the drug culture was percolating below the surface in the late 1960s, our passion was music and our cause was peace, not drugs. Most of the gang were typical young folk, happy and carefree and not much interested in any artificial stimuli. Our most sophisticated vices were to sip a cappuccino in the Vienna Coffee Lounge at the top of town, drink sweet white Porphyry Pearl or share a rattan-covered bottle of Chianti over spaghetti in the cafés of Beaumont Street, Hamilton.

Greg and his friends were more adventurous. At weekends, they regularly drove up the Hunter Valley to a spot an hour or so out of Newcastle where they could fill the boot of their car with marijuana. We didn’t know much about this weed back then, other than it was illegal and grew abundantly wild along the banks of the Hunter River. Inhaling a smelly weed to feel good never captured my imagination then or now, and Greg to his credit never asked me along on those weekend trips.

One night after leaving the ‘Y’ to walk to the Vienna for coffee, I was picked up by the police and taken to Newcastle police station. It was rather intimidating, but I wasn’t all that alarmed because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. The police had already arrested Greg and knew I was his friend. A detective asked me about trips to the valley and smoking drugs. Eventually, they let me go because I had nothing to add to their investigation. I went straight home and told Mum and Dad. Mum was a bit more upset than Dad; I sometimes wonder if she momentarily thought I was up to no good.

There was a court case, and Greg was sentenced to six months’ prison, which he served in the notorious Maitland jail. It was a long sentence in an awful jail for a young man, especially considering that he hadn’t sold, smuggled, imported or even bought the weed, but had simply picked it from the wild, as many young people did then. The local newspaper ran photos of bulldozers clearing this illicit drug from our riverbanks.

Greg and I corresponded, and I visited him when I could. He was released from jail just after my eighteenth birthday, but he broke up with me not long afterwards. That was my first painful heartache. Mum sat with me while I cried inconsolably over him.

By now, Margaret had left home and was teaching in Bingara, a small country town in New England about 400 km north-west of Newcastle. Kathy, Ray and I were still at home in Mayfield with Mum and Dad and Nanna. I felt grown up and somewhat unsettled in our overcrowded home. As I pondered how to ease a broken heart, I decided to spread my wings.

In the meantime, as other families escaped the noise and pollution of industrial Mayfield to greener suburbs in Newcastle, we lived happily on in our very working class hometown in all its richness.

That was my life back in the fifties and sixties in a rather long snapshot. That was then, and now the course of my life was about to change forever.