Paul Feldman Remembers Reg.

REG BYRNE – SOME NOTES FOR AN OBIT


Reg Byrne taught at Sydney Tech High from 66 to 68. He was assigned to look after the junior debating team and stayed with us for the next two years. I also had him for Level 1 History in sixth form, until he left to go overseas. At the time he was a hero of mine, along with Bob Dylan and George Orwell. The ruling spirit of our school was a pompous officiousness made ludicrous by professions of deep sentiment about the Queen and God. Here and there, individual teachers expressed their humanity, shared their humour and taught in interesting ways. There were certainly those with more creative energy, and one or two who were more outwardly radical than Reg, but he appealed to most of the kids because of his laid back attitude to the rules and his easy approachable manner. Through his enthusiasm for horse racing, his casual dress and his motorbike, he gained a reluctant popularity. But for those of us who knew him a little better and were introduced to his circle of friends, his example suggested other possibilities for our lives.


In school photographs he appears with a lopsided sullen stare, suffering a tie and sportscoat. More commonly he appeared in class in an old black jumper, his shirt collar just visible, his hair dishevelled. He would sit a chair and stretch right out, with his arms back and his hands behind his head. I remember his voice - a sort of nasal hooting drawl, often bearing a tone of cynicism, the amusement conveyed with a half smile and a knowing look.  When he wrote in your book, the writing was a curious mix of printed and capital letters, though in an adult hand. One comment I recall: ‘I’m not being critical, but aren’t dictatorships always formally popular?’


When he drove us to debates away from school, it was in an old grey VW.  He dropped us off as he drove home, and when we thanked him, he said ‘It’s a pleasure’, and he seemed to mean it. He did not force things, and it took a while to get to know him better. When we had our post mortems, he was always on our side, and rarely critical. In a mock debate, he called to me ‘You’re standing like a prize fighter’. The adjudicator for most of our debates was a serious-minded Catholic priest who appeared in a black cassock. When he awarded our final debate to the other side, Reg refused to shake hands with him, saying ‘the man brings out all my anticlericalism’. The subject of the debate was the future of Australian secondary industry.


When I took part in a public speaking competition at Hurstville one evening, he was interested enough to ride out there on his motorbike. He arrived late and apologetic after I had spoken, but stuck around to listen to the other speeches. He correctly picked the winner, a girl who drew her talk from the teachings of Eric Fromm.  He stayed to chat to my father, and they quickly found common ground on the evils of US foreign policy.


In class, he called us by our first names, unless it was someone chattering that he didn’t like, in which case the voice would loudly say ‘Shut up, Barber!’ (or whatever). One person talking at a time, that seemed to be his only rule.


Why did he teach? As a history teacher he obviously cared about the issues, from a left wing perspective - however he was often underprepared for his classes and at times sheepishly honest about this. Consequently, whatever his educational philosophy, he had a measure of self-interest in turning his lessons into dialogues. In the Level 1 history class that was quite OK, because we were all swots and knew our stuff – we spent the lessons looking at documentary evidence and generally benefited from his comments made from a broader educated perspective. However some of the kids in his Level 2 class were annoyed with him, because they wanted to be taught.

Still, when he left for England and Sweden, that class farewelled him with a deskful of orange peel (he professed to hate oranges) and a sex magazine featuring buxom blondes.


Because he did seem to support left wing causes, and was clearly opposed to US imperialism, I expected him to be politically active. So I was surprised when I came across him one Saturday afternoon late in 1967 near the rallying point for a Vietnam War protest march. It was in Hyde Park, near College Street. He appeared to be writing something on footpath in chalk and then he stood up to talk to someone.


I greeted him with ‘Hello Sir’ and he grimaced. ‘Hello Paul’, he said. And then ‘Paul, this is Darcy Waters’. I turned to the other fellow who offered his hand. He seemed older but friendly. I shook hands awkwardly and turned back to Reg. ‘Are you going to go in the march?’ I asked expectantly. ‘No Paul, we’re going off to the pub now’. This disappointed me, which must have been obvious. As they walked off I looked at what he had written. It was ‘Viva Che’. At the time, I didn’t know what it meant.


I can see now that there must have been a tension between his left wing political sympathies and his adherence to the Push ethic of non-involvement in organised politics, which left open only a private form of anarchy.  When we talked about history, he obviously admired the radical trade unionists of the early twentieth century, particularly the syndicalists. However I can recall him commending to us that terribly depressing film ‘La Guerre est Finie’ and telling us that it expressed his views about the futility of political action.  It is good to see that his son Darcy has avoided that state of paralysis and is now in local politics, with a practically focused radical agenda.


It seems unfair for a lazy old public servant to be making these judgements about a young man he knew forty years ago. This is obviously the fate of faded heroes


Reg left for Europe in 68.  I think it was past the middle of the year, around August. He told us that Qantas had a deal going for people under 26 to travel at half fare, and he had to act on it. Another teacher Robert Mackie, a more active radical who took everything seriously, wanted Reg to make a speech dumping on the school and the education system, but Reg preferred to ‘disappear in a puff of smoke’ as he put it – he wanted to keep his options open about a job when he came back.


After he came back from Europe I saw him only a couple of times. He came to a pub near Sydney Uni and drank with us once, around August 1970 – but once past the initial greetings, we didn’t have a lot to talk about. He had obviously decided to focus on the horses and said he just couldn’t tolerate being involved in teaching any more. I was feeling quite down at the time because my academic ambitions had bit the dust and my parents had separated – he picked up on that, and his last words to me were ‘see you Paul, hope it’s not too long…’. Later on, we used to drink at the Forest Lodge Hotel, and he would be there too with a different group, but he didn’t go out of his way to talk with us.


A year or two earlier, I’d exchanged letters with an excellent teacher from Sydney Tech, a gawky Anglican minister’s son who’d moved to Bathurst. He wrote to me that contact with Reg and his circle of friends had made him aware just how good human friendships could be.


So I guess from his own point of view, Reg was making the right decision, leaving teaching and pursuing the Push lifestyle. For anyone with an imagination who didn’t enjoy wielding authority over children, leaving the teaching service of the 1960s would simply have been a rational decision

I Remember Geoff, Instead

From Derek Lewis:

My memory of Mr Byrne is a bit vague,other than the name is associated with the good guys.
Speaking of which, I was in the Bankstown Sports the other night (ok, I was having a quick beer waiting for a takeaway) and anyway, Jeff Bull's jazz band was playing.  After taking food home I went back to hear the band...in the break I said to him..."you were my commerce teacher in 1965 at STHS"...he said, yep I was there, but you do know it was 45 years ago"...yep..he was always good with numbers....theythe band)  were great and will be back there on the last Tuesday in July....I'll be there...cheers
Derek

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Gard comments: Yes, I guess Geoff Bull should have been listed on our website along with the STHS Staff Good Guys, but I remember so little about him... Yes, he taught me commerce, too. And he confiscated my wristwatch once, when I was playing with it in class instead of studying commerce. And I walked past a classroom once, when I was on my way to not study something else, and I glanced into an open classroom and there was Geoff, standing out the front on the dais, not teaching commerce, but playing a trumpet while several students stood looking on, rapt and listening. A burly fellow, with a Fred Flintstone shock of hair over one eye and a beatnik ziff, Geoff Bull wore goose-neck sweaters and sports jackets. There may have been desert boots. In 1965, Geoff had 'jazz' written all over him.

Just as well no-one confiscated his trumpet for not teaching commerce.

Jump forward with me now, to 1989. The place is the Mittagong RSL and the occasion is the 'Jazz in the Highlands' Festival. I'm seated by the stage, with my recording gear, capturing the concert for the local Community Radio Station. Geoff Bull and His Olympia Jazz band come on. Geoff out front, trumpet in hand, ziff on chin. Geoff looks down at me, and nods. I press the Record button, and nod back at Geoff. The band strikes up...

According to one website, 'Geoff Bull is a renown New Orleans style trumpet player who has lead his own bands since the early sixties' 

'Renown'? 'Lead'?  

Back in the Sixties at STHS, whatever we studied, we used the words 'renowned', and 'led'. Never mind, Geoff's jazz always transcended scrappy grammar.



Stephen Gard

Vale Reg. Byrne

Lads,

STHS English/History teacher Reg Byrne passed away recently.


This just in from Mr Jack Rozycki:

I went to Reg Byrne's wake last night, Fri 2 July 2010. Reg died on 27 June of complications following an operation on his oesophagus. He was 66. The wake, held at the Balmain Bowlo, attracted what's left of the old Push plus Reg's drinking companions and a gaggle of punters - Reg never lost the taste for the gallops. It was a bitter-sweet evening, with quite a bit of laughter about Reg's antics. Reg leaves behind his wonderful loyal life's companion Susan Martin and son Darcy Byrne, a political activist of note,  affordable housing advocate and Leichhardt Councillor.





Jack adds:

I am thinking of writing an obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald on Reg. I occasionally write them on old Push characters having done one on Darcy Waters, George Molnar and others. If you have any anecdotes about Reg that stand out and illustrate his character and the years he was at your school that would be useful.

If you care to send your memoirs of Reg to Jack Rozycki, his email address is jackrozycki@optusnet.com.au


Boomalacka,

Stephen Gard

I Remember Reg.

Reg Byrne was not exactly a dog among the fairies, because in that Beatled era, the universities were producing more and more cool and groovy young Graduates with Attitude and shipping them out to schools. Reg had the glowering look of the campus Lefty, and of course, wore the uniform: the desert boots, the pegged pants, the tweed jacket, the necktie no wider than his nose, its knot delicately askew, the side-burns, and a billow of side-swept fringe, straw-streaked brown and bouncing upon his dark eyebrows, which were permanently lowered – I never saw Reg smile, much less laugh. Schoolboys have a ferocious and a felicitous talent with nicknames; Reg was known as ‘Side’ Byrne(s), which was obvious, and ‘Ronnie’ after the pop-singer (Burns) whom he in no way resembled. One can read off much from a nick-name pinned upon an authority figure.  I can read respect and affection – a knockabout affection – off our pinnings.

How did we sense, or what made us believe, that Reg was a misfit and rebel on the staff of Sydney Technical High School? He certainly gave little direct evidence of it in the classroom, where he was a quite straightforward, and not especially memorable instructor, neither a martinet nor a mumblebum, much less a proselytizer for whatever was haunting him, a man whose mind was elsewhere, unconnected with anything so mundane as Marvell and his Coy Mistress. Reg glanced at us, but he mostly stared out of the windows as he spoke. Perhaps Reg was simply shy – or wrestling with a mistress of his own at the time. Was she a Muse, perchance? If Mr Byrne was an aesthete, a poet or novelist, he said nothing about it that I recall. Was he was suffering the vicissitudes of being Cool and Groovy while living in the Askin Epoch, and teaching in a most conservative State school, under the supervision of a grim junto of ageing, irritable colleagues? Or was it only the outcome of a trifecta that haunted him? Those windows faced toward Randwick.

Reg was certainly an equalitarian, insofar as he spoke with us, not at us, and had sufficient slouch in his gait and bearing to signal that he was One of the Fellas. Fellas of the cool and groovy sub-division, that is.  I don't know what our straight-laced A-Class boys thought of Reg Byrne. Some of our sober - I will not say humourless - coevals today haul an Establishment rake of letters after their name: professorships, doctorates, chancellorhoods, gongs like the OAM. Perhaps the grim STHS junto kept Reg apart from our A-Class lads, fearful that desert-booted slouching might scuff the gilding on our Honour Boards. Reg could indeed be negligent about preparing lessons: slouching out of our classroom one day, he called over his shoulder, 'Remind me to tell you next time about Connotes and Denotes.' We didn't, and neither did Reg.

Brian Jones: banned at STHS

In 1966, I was among those pupils who, in the edgy, transitional world of our red-brick Dotheboys Hall, was branded a Disturbing Element. My disturbance amounted to wearing my hair as nearly as possible as did my idol, Mr Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Sydney Technical High School was ruled by a senate of terrible old men, all of whom resembled Arthur Calwell. They were wielders of sarcasm and the cane, toughened old warriors who'd seen action at Ingleburn and Victoria Barracks, livid now to discover that they had laid down their lives merely to preserve a rabble of druggies and hippies and hair. One of these veterans repeatedly bellowed – there was no speaking back then, only bellowing – bellowed at me to get my hair cut, because I looked like a girl, girls being clearly a bad thing to look like in 1966.

From this circumstance arose my only brief, personal exchange with Reg Byrne. I came into English straight from our school’s swimming pool, my hair still damp, clinging cloche-like.

Mr Byrne looked at me sharply; his brows lowered even further, if that was possible.
‘Have you had a haircut, Gard?’ he demanded.
‘No sir,’ I said, and added, ‘I’ve been swimming.’
Reg glowered, and then no doubt we got back to Marvel.

A trivial exchange, which puzzled me for a time, but I decided eventually that our Mr Byrne must have gone into bat against the junta on behalf of those of us who wanted to look cool and/or groovy. Reg may have seen me as his first test case, an oppressed mass to be liberated, but luckily, I wasn’t.

We had no advocate, for in 1966, cool and groovy young English teachers in tweed jackets, slouching in desert boots, and with hair and attitude in their eyes, these can storm out and resign, fed up with The System. But terrible old men, sarcastic, bellowing and wielding a frequent and furious cane with all the severity of outraged convention, these old men will still be there next day.

Stephen Gard

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