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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