What This Blog Is All About
The Boomalacka Blog supplements the Sydney Technical High School Class of 1969 Reunion website by providing a repository for the reporting of contemporary events concerning our peers, along with the occasional memoir.
What This Blog Is Not About
The Boomalacka Blog has no connection with the current Sydney Technical High School. It contains no information of use to current or prospective students, or their families.
About the Name
The school's war-cry, chanted at sporting events when we played against teams from other schools, went as follows:
Boomalacka, boomalacka, bow-wow-wow.
Chingalacka, chingalacka, chow-chow-chow.
Boomalacka, chingalacka, who-are-we?
S-T-H-S! Can't you see?
The war-cry was no doubt borrowed from elsewhere, probably an American college (Pencey Prep?), and its provenance seems to have been during the era of ra-ra-ra and sis-boom-bah and 23-skiddoo and boola-boola and raccoon coats and roadsters and similar U.S. cultural dross which lacked all relevance on the Australian scene, but which we aped with a lamentable lack of discrimination that still dogs us.
'Boomalacka' had even less relevance in the cynical 1960s. Many STHS boys of that period, especially those of us lacking in the team spirit, thought this chant both dated and imbecilic, but we were required to bellow it to encourage our muddied oafs at the goal. And bellow we did. STHS was a selective school, and among those muddied gladiators were some of the brightest of our peers, often the brightest young men that our State and our nation could produce. We cheered them because they really were the best we had, on or off the field.
'Boomalacka' has a resonance for us, an echo of our gawky schoolboy days, and so we gladly use it to tag this archive of sometimes uncomfortable recollections. We feel the same ambivalence towards 'Boomalacka' as we do towards our School Song. It was dated, and its sentiments were slightly absurd, but it was our own. Memories Makyth Man.
Postmodern Appropriation
In this age of almost untrammelled greed, it is sad to note that the melody of 'Men of Harlech' has been abducted and copyrighted by Sony. Our School Song was a contrafactum of that old battle cry. When we posted a version of it on YouTube as the soundtrack to an STHS 1969 reunion video, we received a copyright violation notice.
The Curator
The Boomalacka Blog and the STHS 1969 Reunion website were created and are 'curated', as is the expression today, by Stephen Gard. Opinion where it is not elsewhere attributed is the opinion of Stephen Gard, and for this opinion Gard offers no defence, still less any apology.
Comments on postings are invited, but these are subject to moderation by Gard. His is a unicameral tribunal with no appeal mechanism.
Boomalacka,
Stephen Gard
October 2024
The STHS school chant was resurrected in 1981 or 1982 by principal Flannery. It felt very dated even then and was not received well by the students. Students were effectively forced to be cheerleaders crying out the chant in the presence of students from other schools.
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