The town that was:
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School Call it boredom or call it creativity, but words were a fascination for me and inevitably for my two friends. Radio was only occasional and books were sparse. We only read the newspaper when we were lighting the fires. News was old and had little relevance. Individual words were a source of great amusement. None were serious or sacred. Common words were broken up into bits that we could make sense out of. Today I might call it wit or making puns, but then it was just having fun trying to make sense out of nonsense. ‘Simple’ - was a pull on a sim. there was great amusement trying to work out what a sim was. Any words could be made into N E thing. And so it went on. Our vocabulary was so naiive and restricted, that we searched for fresh new words and compared them and even sadistically dissected them. Often probably making nonsense out of a perfectly legitimate language tool. We intensely listened to people talking and secretly destroyed all meaning or intended communication. Stupid, maybe, but it was fun. Kids kidding around. It was not something that we could tell anyone about, but between friends we enjoyed the excursions into obscurity, comparing our wierdest thoughts. Far removed from the Tasmanian Reader.At school we had slates for drawing on. Ruled paper exercise books to practice our copperplate handwriting and parts of the blackboard for drawing with Belco. Any drawing considered good, was left for a few days before being erased with a duster. Teachers had large sheets of cardboard with little holes all over them. By tapping on the tiny holes with the duster, they could magically make the outlines of foreign world countries appear. Most of the blackboard was taken up with prepared lessons. This was painstakingly written in coloured chalk by the junior teacher’s aid. Usually a young girl who was too old to be at school, but clever enough to help the teacher. She was called a monitor. Because all age groups were in the one room, sitting at double desks in different rows, lessons for everyone could be found across the blackboard. If there was any space spare, it would be filled with parts of the twelve times table. General writing implements were supplied by the monitor. Slates and slate sticks, pencils, nibs and nib holders. Some girls had treasured coloured glass nib holders. Incidentallty, nib holders with the nib were then called a pen. We supplied our own rubbers with our initials on them (if lost, we could always use a piece of bread) and rulers. Each double desk had two holes for the white porcelain ink-wells which were shaped at the top like a saucer with a hole in the middle to pour the ink down into. If you got too much ink on the nib, you could tap it on the saucer-like lip to get rid of the excess. The monitor also reluctantly handed out small sheets of blotting paper. This was used to dry or soak up the excess ink after writing. Inevitably, the careless would evenually have to tear off little remaining white corners to complete the blotting process. Each day particularly well behaved students were selected to be ink monitors. Not only were they to fill each ink-well, but they got to mix black ink powder with water to make the ink. It was a very prized and responsible job, especially if they could proudly accidentally on purpose show large ink stains on their hands. Inkstains on clothes were best removed by soaking in milk from small bottles supplied with the Oslo lunches. These small containers had silver coloured tops to which the cream clung, waiting to be licked off. The milk tasted a little funny as we were being introduced to pasteurised (and later-homogenised) alternatives to fresh milk. The crates with the milk had to be kept inside as the Black Jays had learned to peck the silver paper. Our school, along with most other Tasmanian schools, were supplied with daily Iodine goitre tablets which were very small and tasted horrible, but we ate them because they were presumed necessary. The thought was that because we did not eat fish, there was a lack of iodine in our diet. Later, there was an innovation where iodised salt was freely available and deemed necessary. 1 Back to
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