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
