The Plough - A Poetical, Penile Exegesis (Paul Feldman)

On 25 July 2007, were you present at a seminar hosted by the State Government authority Transgrid, to guide and facilitate public discussion of options for the economical distribution of electricity in south-western New South Wales?

You weren't?

Would you perhaps have been at the ACT Law Society's fortnightly get-together, where the topic for discussion was Commonwealth Liability for Actionable Torts Pertaining to Easements between Leasehold Properties in the Territory Jurisdiction?

No? That's a real shame.

Because the man sitting at the head of the table was the President of the ACT Law Society, Denis Farrar.

And Denis Farrar can do something that I bet you can't.

He can grab his nose and blow so hard that stuff comes out of the corners of his eyes!  Yes, that's what he used to do on the bus, the blue and red bus, that ran along Forest Road to Bexley in 1963. Then he and Rodney Ferrier, the forensic accountant, would try to put itching powder down the back of your pants.

But let us go now, back to Transgrid - to the afternoon seminar on the 14th floor, to the tasteful grey panelling and the waxing and waning sussuration of the air-conditioning, to the dismal views across to Redfern, poignantly relieved by a side glimpse of the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Ah... let us inhale the scent of overbrewed Transgrid coffee, waiting to be poured into those identical white cups...

The topic under discussion is not to be  dismissed lightly. There will be, one suspects, at least one voice struggling to maintain composure as the deficiencies of a shire transponder are carefully and politely explained. And the presiding voice, the forger of consensus, will call for expert comment to enforce the Transgrid line. And all eyes will turn to a white-shirted figure, who may smile and lean forward, as he calmly dissects the technological alternatives and points the way to the optimum .

I give you... Leon Arkinstall, Principal Electrical Engineer.

And as the white-shirted figure plays his part, the camera draws back, losing focus on his careful gestures. And the noise of talking becomes the drowsy hum of a distant substation, and the mind races back decades, as if over flattened grass.

In the words of Chris Ellis, ' He was a boy who could have been very good at English'.

How good? Consider please, his reading of The Plough.

Of course, to read The Plough as construed by Arkinstall, you have to recall the craft and prowess of a 15 year old, and then place yourself in a whole class full of such, with the wit to appreciate the ingenuity of Arkinstall's exegesis.

This talent for innuendo was evident elsewhere, nay everywhere, in the Third Form of 1965. Did not a whole busload, returning from the Long Reef geology excursion, groan in unison as the bus rutted in first gear at a set of uphill traffic lights? And were the hole-exploring feats of Hill End confined to miners of the previous century?

The agrarian romantic AG Street set his sights on inspiring those city-bound middle classes wealthy enough to indulge a hankering for the great outdoors. His essay The Plough is an accomplished piece, rather too quaintly written to survive its generation, but the sentiment of recapturing a lost simplicity is as old as urban civilisation.

To we Third Formers, of course, it was just shit boring, like every other supposedly entertaining essay in that dreary little book.

[Here it is, read it yourself. The Plough]

It was Chris Ellis who sowed the seed of Arkinstall's stimulating reinterpretation, with a discussion of medieval allegory. Things had got bogged down, you see, with Richard the Second. There he is, locked up in that bloody tower, talking to himself for a whole Act before Bolingbroke's boys break in and put him out of his misery. Ellis has to do something to get us interested, so he gets us to decode some of R2's ramblings, by telling us about how Shakespeare uses parallel metaphors from the animal kingdom. You have to understand that everything stands for something else...

Eventually, in the mind of Arkinstall, this comes to fruition:

' The plough, which looks so clumsy and uncouth, changes its character... It is no longer an ugly, awkward inanimate thing, but a delicately flexible instrument, which responds to your lightest touch'

'You and the plough have become one, a common intelligence with but one idea only, to plough - on and on and on.'

'..you are drunk with the urge of the plough and do not stop. Stop? Why, to stop would be absurd, and on you sail, unheeding, on and on and on'

'Why cannot one plough one long straight furrow for ever, without these petty hindrances? But one is forced to turn.. then to turn again into the work, and swing away on a new tack, happy and interested once more'

And finally:

'...I would suggest in all sincerity that three months steady ploughing would cure any man of a nervous breakdown.'

' ... and if ploughing generally be conceded a pleasing thing to do, then to plough virgin land is pure joy.'

The word spread rapidly around STHS. Within days, a hapless student teacher was convinced to allow Arkinstall's whole essay to be read aloud to the class and Room 14 rocked and convulsed with laughter.

'Good at English'? Arkinstall was a genius. I think I can hear AG Steet down there, bumping the lid of his coffin...

Tom Thumb the Great - Drama at STHS (Paul Feldman)

Oh Huncamunca, Huncamunca oh!
Thy pouting breasts, like kettle drums of brass,
beat everlasting loud alarms of joy!
As bright as brass they are, and oh, as hard!
Oh Huncamunca, Huncamunca oh!'

In 1965, Chris Ellis produced the play for the School concert. The previous year's offering had been The School for Scandal. Ellis moved back a further 50 years to Henry Fielding's sex comedy 'The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great'.

The play parodies a Shakespearean royal tragedy.

    To quote/paraphrase Thomas R. Cleary
    'Its action centres round a farcical, ever-complicating plot line in which Tom Thumb, a six-inch hero who has conquered a race of giants, and a captive giantess called Glumdalca, become involved in the political and sexual rivalries of a normal-sized kingdom ruled by King Arthur, himself smitten by Glumdalca. King Arthur's wife, Queen Dollalolla and daughter Huncamunca are both enamoured of member-sized Thumb, who loves the daughter in return, in rivalry with the normal-sized Lord Grizzle. It resolves itself through a sustained third Act blood letting. Glumdalca is killed by Grizzle who is killed by Thumb, who is reported to have been swallowed up by a cow 'of larger than usual size'. The Queen kills the bearer of bad news, which triggers an ever more absurd series of murders. The last character left alive is the King, who kills himself.'


The players were Third Form boys. By far the most impressive were those in the female roles. Ierace played Glumdalca bare-armed in a sheepskin vest and a metal helmet with curlicues protruding on both sides. But Paul Meller stole the show as an overweight randy Queen Dollalolla (think Noeleen from Sylvania Waters). Shrieks of laughter when Dollalolla rushes on for a midnight tryst with Tom Thumb, semi-nude and distrait, bearing a candle...

The play featured a number of boys who were not in the least bit intellectual or arty. Tom Thumb was played by Doug Embleton, a tough little character who went back to being a rev-head. John Keller, who played the Ghost, resumed his low profile somewhere in the E classes, but later became an educational theorist.

There was lots of laughter throughout, and thunderous applause at the end. Years later, Ellis told me that the crowning moment of the evening, for him, was when Constance Brown (Lady Bong) encountered him as they were leaving. With a tight look of formal politeness, she said 'I never thought that  you  would put on a play like that, Mr Ellis'.

Ellis was assisted in the production by Ann Jennings and Virginia Sumpter, who rubbed make-up onto my face...

An STHS Film That Never Happened

THE FILM THAT NEVER HAPPENED. Paul Feldman - Class of 1968 In those days, anything seemed possible. For one thing, Reg Byrne was the coach of our debating team. On the Away days, all four of us clambered into his gunmetal grey VW (‘the people’s car’) and farted our way far and wide. We did compulsory examinations at Kogarah, the failure of our media at Sir Joseph Banks and capital punishment at Kingsgrove North. About half the time the adjudicator was one Father Matthews, a priest in a black cassock. I thought he was quite fair in his adjudications, but I noticed that Reg would sit up at the back and fix him with a cynical stare. When Matthews awarded our final debate to Birrong High, Reg walked off without shaking hands. I can remember him drawling ‘I’m sorry to be rude, but that man brings out all my anticlericalism’. Part of the reason we weren’t very successful was our distinctive and somewhat unharmonious speaking styles. On paper it would have been hard to fault our first speaker. Gary Simes went on to write a dictionary, but in those days he affected a County Cutie accent of the ‘mater has a grahnd piahno’ variety. As second speaker, I could never think on my feet, and used to fill in the gaps by insulting the other team and sometimes the audience. Imants Tillers was there to help us with ideas. In the middle of a debate on Australian secondary industry he would hand you a note that said ‘the Soul is indivisible, and cannot be defined in emptiness’ Geoff Fleming was all right as whip, but by that time the damage had often been done. Anyway, late one day in 1967 Reg drew half a dozen of us into a room and said he knew a film director who wanted to make an experimental movie at the school. It was going to be a fictional fantasy about a sex-appeal drug, and did we want to be in it? He needed some boys from Tech, and about the same number of girls from St George Girls High. The next week we got a copy of the plotline. It looked like we were going to have a lot of fun making it. Geoff Sykes from sixth form said it was clichéd and silly and then started going on about the film he wanted to make, about a Sixth former’s  reminiscences of his days at the school. But he was Vice Captain and always had this patronising take on things, so what did he know.  The plotline featured a character completely lacking in sex appeal. There was an ill-favoured, unkempt kid in our year called Alan (‘Gabby’) Williams who was quite willing to lay his ugliness on the line. He assured us that he had been all the way with several girls and was in no way sensitive about his appearance. At the other end of the spectrum, someone good looking was needed, and so the expert drinker Peter Rose was enlisted. The next weekend about five of us went over to meet Reg Byrne in Balmain. Chris Ellis drove us there in his green two-tone Hillman Minx, with classical music playing loudly on the radio. He was off to play tennis with some of Reg’s friends. He let us out on Darling Road where we saw Reg coming out of the pub with Bruce Searle and Jim Rannard.. Searle was the Jean Cocteau of Sixth form and Rannard was a chuckling Communist. They had been playing pool. Reg took us down to Louisa Road in Birchgrove and we met the director, whose name was John Abbott. I remember feeling uneasy about Abbott.  He was about 35. Despite his cord coat, he was too old to be cool and I think he knew it. He was friendly in a stagey sort of way but kept making these knowing asides to anyone adult. Still, he lived in a ramshackle two storey house with at least one woman, and his film gear on the top floor. And he took us round to an anarchist house, to eat lunch with people in long hair and caftans who sat on the floor and ate with their fingers from a big spread of Asian food. He introduced us loudly and theatrically, along the lines of:  ’I have with me five young men who have survived the ravages of the education system. They are eager to see what life has to offer them. They are our future as well as their own, and if they look like the Beatles, then that’s not their fault’. That last bit is word for word. After lunch we went back to his place again, and were joined by a small apelike man, wearing a flat cap and carrying sound recording equipment. He kept snapping his fingers as though he was on something. John Abbott passed around a page or two, and we all assumed character roles and read a line of script each. It turned out that Abbott and this man had made a documentary about the army in Vietnam. They had been over there making it, and Abbott flourished some footage of dead bodies. ‘See’, he said, ‘this is the sort of thing our boys get up to’. But when we lurched across the room to look, he said ‘Oh look, they all want to see the dead bodies. Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn when your number gets pulled out.’ What else happened? Abbott annoyed Tillers by saying something to him in Latvian, and then asserted that he hadn’t said anything offensive and that Tillers really had to learn to cope with that sort of thing. My notes say we had to go away and come up with a list of questions that the sexual attraction researchers would ask students, to analyse sexual attraction. We all went home by public transport. A week later and nothing had happened. Then Reg gave us the bad news. The Education Department had stopped the project because they didn’t like the theme. Reg showed us a letter John Abbott had written to the Minister of Education protesting about the decision. Within a day or two, the official version emerged. Mr Haddrill, the silken-voiced conservative who ran the English Department, summoned us for a meeting with the Headmaster.. Bong affected disappointment, but proceeded to rationalise the Department’s rejection of the project. “Boys, I think you have to bear in mind that the Department has to take into particular account the community’s view of this use of school property. I’ve read this [plot outline] and I think it all sounds like good fun, but I think you need to put yourself in their shoes. There are members of the community, I think it’s fair to say, who would not be happy to have this film made on school property. I think in particular the word ‘Pill’ conjures up a lot of things in the present day context. I think the Department were worried that the public view of the school would suffer if this film were to be made on our property. I’m not saying I agree with the Department, but I think you need to know why they reached that decision. So I’m sorry about this, boys.” Later Haddrill assured us that the Headmaster had done his very best to change the Department’s view. “I think those people were leading you up the garden path” he said.. “I think they knew that this would never be allowed to go ahead”. But it was also Haddrill who once said “I always find that those who have no respect for authority have no respect for themselves”. I never heard anything about John Abbott ever again. It bothers me that I can’t find any references to his later work. He gave us this gesture of rebellion, then left us to fight for ourselves with the ogres of compliance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Plot Outline THE “IT” PILL PROJECT: from John Abbott, 77 Louisa Road, Balmain Nature:  A half hour B&W full sound film, shot as an experiment at Sydney Technical Boys High School, Bexley Plotline: The failure of an unattractive, skinny boy to get any girl to go with him to a forthcoming dance excites the interest of a group of boys. What, they wonder, is it that attracts one sex to another. They enquire, and quickly learn that neither brains, beauty nor any other single factor seems to be the sole cause. The enquiry, in the form of a market study, is carried out at both the boys’ school and the associated girls’ school. The information in, the team analyses all factors and comes up with a mysterious “It factor’, which they believe they can synthesise. The team goes to work; in the lab, various experiments are tried. Necessary equipment is manufactured in the machine shop – and at last, a magnificent machine is assembled. It clicks, grunts, gurgles, grinds, coughs and clatters – and at last, produces a large, round pill. What next? Who will try it? None of the team are willing, so the skinny boy who started the whole idea is brought in. Would he like to be irresistible to girls? He is soon convinced, takes the pill and sets off to test its effects. He is followed by the team, eager to see the result. Near the girls’ school, the skinny boy discovers the startling power of the pill. A beautiful girl starts to walk past him – then snaps about, purrs and approaches affectionately. And another. And another. Until the poor lad discovers the price of total attraction and is submerged in a mound of howling girls, all after him. He crawls off, finds his feet and flees. The girls pursue, howling and jumping, on roller skates, skate boards and bicycles. The It Pill research team, observing, is horrified – they must not let this happen again and hurry off to set guard on their machine. Eventually, after a long chase, the skinny boy finds refuge. The girls, thwarted, come to their senses and discuss the strange thing that’s happened to them. They return to the school, still wondering – and there, a girl who had not been in the chase tells the others of an experiment her brother was involved in – to make a pill that renders its taker irresistible to the other sex. Aha. A short, fat girl hears this – and determines, once in her life to know what having all the boys after her feels like. She sets out to win herself a pill. The fat girl infiltrates the boys’ school. She avoids sentries posted around the lab area, enters the building, tippy toe. Inside, by superb rugger tactics, she avoids the last ditch guard, makes it to the machine, seizes the pill from the production chute, and swallows it. She spins around, faces her audience with a happy smile. Her smile fades as the boys’ expressions switch from anxiety to slavering greed. Her rugger is enough to get her out and, collecting an ever growing crowd of pursuers, she flees. The boys mount their motor bikes, bikes and whatever to continue the hunt. The chase continues until at length the girl finds refuge too – and she and the skinny boy scare the tripe out of each other in the hiding place, until each realises neither is attracted to the other. The “it” effect has worn off. They relax. Shyly, the boy asks if the girl has a partner for the dance yet, and, as shyly, she admits not. At the dance, a number begins. The skinny boy walks along the line of chairs towards the fat girl, who sits demurely. He passes a very attractive girl, who says hello to him, smiles encouragingly. He is about to ask her to dance, when he sees her again as she was during the pursuit - arms flapping, jumping up and down, face a mask. He jumps and moves on. As he approaches the fat girl, a good looking boy comes up and asks her to dance. She is about to accept – when she too recalls how he had looked during the chase – face a devil’s leer, crooked fingers clawing after her.  “ I’m sorry, I have this one”. The skinny boy  and the fat girl move out onto the floor and dance, as….. ….end titles super over. _____________________ The Australian.  October 1967 STUDENTS’ FILM ON SEX APPEAL BANNED The New South Wales Education Department has stopped senior pupils at a Sydney high school producing their own 30 minute film for speech day. Mr J. Abbott, a TV producer, wrote the script for the film – called The It Pill Factor – which tells the story of schoolboys who produce a pill which makes them irresistible to the opposite sex. Mr Abbott wrote the script and offered the use of his production unit, technicians, and film at no cost to the school. But the film’s theme was ruled unsuitable by Mr J. Buggy, assistant to the State Director-General of Education. Mr Abbott protested to Mr Buggy, who allegedly replied: “I don’t have to give you a reason.” Now, Mr Abbott, who produces documentaries for the Commonwealth Film Unit, has appealed to the State Minister for Education, Mr Cutler. NO KISSES Mr Abbott claimed that the film was virtually a contemporary Midsummer Night’s Dream and added: “ There’s not even a kiss in it.” Neither Mr Buggy nor Mr Cutler was in Sydney yesterday, and they could not be reached for comment. The central character of the film is a boy named Bones, an adolescent greatly lacking in sex appeal. His female counterpart is a short, fat girl, Tessie. The story shows what happens when Bones takes the It Pill and is pursued by dozens of schoolgirls who cannot understand why he is so appealing to them. After a chase, Tessie takes an It Pill, and she in turn is chased by boys. ___________________________ The Australian     April 24, 1969. ANOTHER FILM MAN JOINS THE BRAIN DRAIN John Abbott, one of Australia’s best-known documentary film makers, became part of the brain drain yesterday. Before he left Sydney with a British work permit in his briefcase he told me: “I don’t want to leave but I have been forced to join a long line of others in voluntary exile. “I can make a very good living making commercials but just one more commercial and I would have gone around the bend. You just can’t make a living out of documentaries in Australia. “Where are Stefan Sargent, Sue Baker and Richard Croll? They are all making films in England. “The funny thing about it all is that there is every chance that NBC, in America, or the BBC will send me back here to make sort of documentaries I wanted to turn out anyhow” John is 37, a cousin of Australia’s Minister of the Interior Peter Nixon, and the man who made Action in Vietnam, a wide-screen colour film, in South Vietnam for the Australian army. He also has a world scoop to his credit with The Other Germany. His camera crew was the first to film in East Germany without the restrictions of censorship. “It was astounding but true” John said. “I doubt very much if it could be done today. “The trouble about making documentaries in Australia is that the budget is nearly always too small to make anything out of them, while the budgets for commercials are enough to stack money away in the bank. “Another strange thing is that you get treated with greater respect when you are making commercials than when you make documentaries. “Nor do you get any marks for new ideas. About 18 months ago I was approached by a teacher to make a film with his class to replace the hoary annual concert. “We began work on a film which all the kids loved. It was called the It Pill Project. A boy taking one of the pills became irresistible to all the girls, and if a girl took one she was popular with boys. “Of course, in the end it all cancelled out, but this was too much for the NSW Education Department which cancelled the project in the middle of rehearsals. “Originality does not count for very much in Australia. For an idea to go you need to show that it has already been a success in some other country. Second-hand ideas such as Man Alive, in England, turn up in Australia as the new TV programme Checkerboard. ‘It is not only the brain drain that Australia has to worry about. Even more important is the imagination drain. “The sort of films I would like to see made here are self participating films. I want to make a prison film inside a prison with the script written and acted by the prisoners themselves, with some of them also working with the film crew. “The film I intend to make one day in Australia, no matter what happens, is about the No 1 question for every Australian – How we have for years occupied the Aboriginals’ lands.”   29/8/2007 - John Abbott

Posted by Derek Lewis

ITS terrific...JA was a genius...

Vale Garry Manning

From Ian Pickard:

Stephen,

I have just been informed that Garry Manning passed away.  I have spoken with his mother who advised that Garry passed away on 18 July at St George Hospital.  The funeral has already taken place.

Ian

If any of his schoolmates has a tribute to Garry Manning he'd like to make, click on 'Post a Comment' below to add it to this notice.

___________________________________________________

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume;
when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book,
but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...

No man is an island, entire of itself... any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne
Meditation XVII

Bosler - Boss Hog

Recent photo of our esteemed colleague, about to celebrate Christmas in July at Jamberoo.

This is one of the trikes he operates as part of his tour business.

In the Matter of Roger Jones

This received from Roger Jones:

Came across the site more or less by accident a couple of days ago.

It's been many years since I had contact with anyone from the 1969 class, I think Graham Pope was probably the last one, at an industry conference some years ago, back when I was still living in Parkes. I moved to Brisbane early in 1999 and have been here since.

My contact details are:

Roger Jones

PO Box 1443

Stafford City  Qld  4053

Regards

Roger Jones - goonum49@we.net.au

The Red Rattler

Recently found this pic in a book about Australian Railways. It was taken about 1964:

It's a veritable Sydney suburban 'Red Rattler' - but there are two even more significant factors.

1. This set shows the first double-decker (trailer) cars in service. Those of us who, like myself, came to Tech every day on the train used to scramble for an upstairs window seat when the double-deckers appeared, and marvel at the view, looking down ladies' blouses. Later, we'd scramble for a downstairs window seat, and marvel at the view, looking up girls' skirts.

2. This photo was taken at a spot where I spent most of the carefree hours of my boyhood. To the left and below, Neverfail Bay, good for messing about in the mud, with decaying row-boats and tar-pungent oyster barges, and on home-made rafts. In the distance, Caravan Head and Como, places to explore by sneaking over the Como Bridge between trains. To the right and above lies Yarran Road, Oatley, where I failed to grow up. The stretch of gully and bush on the right, between the spot where the photographer is standing and the Como Rail Bridge which lies about a hundred yards ahead of the train, was My Place.

My place, for cubby houses under lantata bushes, and caves in the sandstone cliffs, and secret, parent-forbidden fires, and rock fights, and loading and letting off bunger-guns, and building dams in the tiny creek, and fist-fights with other gangs of marauding boys and endless, dreamy days when the world seemed to consist only of summer and uncounted holidays.

Just to the left is where Brendyn Wilson is shown on the '69ers website laying his head on a rail. Rob Hodge's house is to the left and above. The photographer is standing on a shelf of rock where once was written, in tar picked off the road and moulded by two pairs of warm young female hands, the names of two boys they fancied. Neither of the names was mine.

The construction of the new Como Rail Bridge, starting in 1966, meant that much of this vista disappeared. The sandstone cliff where our choicest caves lay was sheared off to create a wider cutting. The old rail bed is now a cycleway where hundreds of suburban bores in Nikes and bumbags pedal backwards and forwards over the old Como Bridge. My Place, the gully below, has gone, choked with rubble from the excavations and the realignment of the lines.

Perhaps it's just as well. I wouldn't want any other boy to have it, and I'm too old to fight.
------


Historical comments:

• These Sydney suburban passenger trains are more correctly designated EMU (Electric Multiple Unit) sets
• More information about them is to be found here.
• Trainworks at Thirlmere has some cars in its collection.
• At the time, they were not known colloquially as 'Red Rattlers'; this term applies to Melbourne's suburban railcars. The 'rattler' epithet was introduced in the 1980s by a Sydney politician attacking the NSW government's transport policies; at that time, many of these trains were still in operation, or at any rate, some of the older cars were still to be seen.

Big Brother is Watching Us

Just got an e-mail from a current member of STHS's teaching staff, asking me ever-so-politely to correct a couple of 'minor' errors on our pages. Not to do with the past STHS, but rather the current one.

The Good Name of the School is ever-so-slightly being menaced, it seems.

Or misrepresented, perhaps.

Just a tad.

Big Brother is watching us. The minatory spirit of Bing lives on. The school's 'marketing managers' are zealously cultivating its reputation, mindful of attracting future clients. They are naturally anxious about the sites that their school web-pages may be linked to. The content of such sites might be 'inappropriate' (horrid word) and the school staff, or worse, the Minister of Education, be held responsible.

Do we not live in interesting times? I keep forgetting that we no longer have 'free speech', merely 'responsible speech'.

My interest in the present school and its doings has been minimal. It is now non-existent.

I have therefore deleted from the STHS 1969 site any image of or reference to the present school. The link from the current STHS web-page and ours has been deleted. All images of the current school which were stored in Photobucket have been deleted. I have placed a disclaimer on our front page.

So regard it as your motto.
Some forget it, too, in toto,
'Til they're cautioned,  voce sotto
'Don't disgrace your school.'

It Was Forty Years Ago Today...

... or thereabouts, when Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most 'iconic' (that is the buzz-word, and I shall expect to hear all you boys using it)  album of the rock era, exploded into our teenaged world.

Some of you may recall, in 1967, English teacher Chris Ellis taking my copy of the album out to the front of our Fourth Form class, to read aloud the lyrics on the back:

"I used to be mad at my school,
The teachers who taught me weren't cool...'

Some desultory discussion followed, of the Beatles as lyricists, I suppose.

During the first few months of 2007, Pepper's 13 iconic tracks were remade by contemporary bands, as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the recording of this album.

('What kind of album, boys?'

'An iconic album, sir.')

BBC Radio 2 (or 'Radio Toe' as the BBC announcer keeps calling it; why did the BBC ever allow regional accents on the airwaves?) has made a brilliant documentary about the remake.

This project and the documentary are probably of more interest to musos like me, since the tracks were recorded in the same Abbey Road studio, using the same recording equipment, - the valve-driven mixer, one-inch four-track tape machine, mics., Neumann U 87s, as if you cared, Fairchild limiters, compressors - as the Beatles used, operated by the same two engineers! There is lots of fascinating material about the original sessions: techniques, innovations, and comments on the Beatles' studio discipline - i.e. how to behave if you're a rock Godlet.

This project meant that the 2007 rock stars recreating the Pepper tracks had to play LIVE! This is just not done in today's digital recording studios. Modern pop songs are pieced together like Airfix kits. The executive weaknesses of these artists, as digitally unassisted performers, are glaringly evident. The program is no longer available on line, but bootleg recordings exist. Ask, and it shall be given you.

Some of the re-creations - 'Lovely Rita', 'Getting Better' and 'Fixing a Hole' - are especially good - the artists really got inside those songs. There are video clips as well.






 

Bill Nielson - LIVE and in Concert

Derek Lewis wishes to share a photo...

This just in... caption required. Neatest correct entry wins a bar of Sunlight.

Greg Fretten - an Update

After a number of years of non contact I finally realised the reason may be that we changed our provider and email address!

The reason for my forgetfulness is either too much Bundaberg OP Rum or old age. Probably old age.

As time has passed nothing too much has changed. We still live on the Gold Coast at the same address and continue to be reminded of what a wonderful place it is.

My daughter has approx. 4 weeks till she graduates with a Master of Pharmacy to go with her Bachelor of Pharmaceutical Science and my son is hopefully on the same track although he has recently discovered the 3 main pleasures in life, women (sex), alcohol and Jupiter's Casino.

Last year we sold our wholesale bakery to continue other interests, but unfortunately we hadn't worked out what they were! As a result we haven't done too much since then. The house is almost painted!

We have been doing some casual teaching to make ends meet, which has reaffirmed that resigning from teaching in 1986 was the right decision. The money is good, but at what cost. Needless to say we are now looking to buy another business.

Last year we did travel to Truk Lagoon (Chuuk) in Micronesia to do some WW11 wreck diving. This was a dream that I had and the experience was more fulfilling than the dream. Also last December the family went to Espiritu Santo (Vanuatu) to dive on the "President Coolidge"wreck and complete our Advanced Open Water Divers qualification.

Could you please amend our email address as: gregnsue[AT]onthenet.com.au

Hoping all continue in good health.

Regards
Greg Fretten & Family

Stephen Edgar, poet

Found and bought this book recently. (Heinemann, 1995)

The bio inside says:

'Stephen Edgar was born in in Sydney in 1951. After working in London for three years, he moved in 1974 to Hobart where he has lived since. For most of the past twenty years he has worked in libraries, though other jobs included psychiatric nursing and insurance; he is now a freelance editor and proofreader. Between 1989 and 1994 he was poetry editor of the literary quarterly Island.

From 'The Secret Life of Books'

They have their stratagems too, though they can't move.
They know their parts.
Like invalids long reconciled
To stillness, they do their work through others.
They have turned the world
To their own account by the twisting of hearts.

---

From 'Reflexions in the Face of Newton's Clock'

Each visit the shed's tilt is more pronounced,
The rust that binds the wires is more encrusted,
Each time the lapsing fence more thickly flounced
With blackberries, the sag
Of the cottage ceiling less to be trusted.
the clichés start to nag,
Setting up their din
Like starlings' tuneless infestation in
The bush, its widening range.
The years, these are the years, so you begin:
Time passes and things change.

---

Extracts from Edgar's work are used without permission, because I admire them.
Come and get me.

David Gaunt may be able to tell us more about what Stephen Edgar is up to these days.

SDG