Word has it that Father Kierce did not believe in school camps; accordingly, they were kept to a minimum during our time at Whitefriars. Excursions aside, there were three exceptions to the rule: the famous Year 7 Camp to Harrietville in February 1978; the HSC Camp at Somerville in February 1983, and for those who were enrolled in Year 12 Physics, a week out in the bush to encompass the heavens.
Mentioned has been made of the Year 7 Camp elsewhere in the Secret History: namely, the stupendous dam we collectively built across an alpine stream on the last day of the camp as we waited for the buses to materialise - 'look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair'. Chunkles, an advocate of parsimony, also ensured that whatever pocket-money we brought with us remained largely unspent. Other details come to mind. The camp occured not long after our first day at school, so we were strangers to one another. Expectancy was in the air as our parents dropped us off at the car-park. All up, there were eighty of us or so. Buses took us to our destination. We stopped at Beechworth to examine the Chinese cemetery which lay in a state of dormition. The journey took us four hours or so. There was a score of us to a room (with bunks) and I remember sleeping in the same room as Tony Weeks and Bernie Rohan. We ate like horses - and even then we were still famished. The three days (from memory) were spent playing sport (mainly cricket) under the watchful eyes of Chunkles, Claire Healy, her cigarettes and Father Barry. For the unwary, an optional trip was on offer: an excursion to the Kiewa Hydro-Electric plant - not the most scintillating destination in the world, the alternative being another game of cricket with the spirit of WSC in the air (I chose the latter whereas Nanny - to his everlasting shame - headed out to inspect the dam). There was a milk-bar up the road where RC Cola (which was cool in 1978) Choc Wedges and Redskins were on offer. A visit was paid to the Mt Buffalo Chalet. Bright lay nearby and somewhere in the township there was a gym that had an enormous trampoline: it did much to sort out the pecking order - physically at least - for those who were game enough. As the weather was warm, not a few of us went for a swim at Bright where a tarzan-rope overhung the river. I also recall some sort of 'walk of death' plank where Father Barry challenged us to push him into the river (or vice versa); being all muscle and sinew, he prevailed against all. With energy to burn, we plotted to conduct a massive pillow-fight in the middle of the night. Sean Butler was the leader of the cabal but his own cupidity undermined the affair: he cornered the market by snatching up our pillows in a daytime raid and then offered to rent them out for the night at a princely sum. Sad to say, this event did not come to fruition. One night, we hiked up 'Mt Hotham'. Upon reaching an indeterminate point in the darkness, we mirrored the soldiers of the Grand Old Duke of York and marched back to base, singing 'My Sharona' all the way. Nanny adds: "I remember the night trek up and down that forsaken mountain. On the way up, Pat Bridge contracted asthma and could not breathe. Against every desire of my being I decided to stay with him until a teacher caught up - I think it was Fr Barry, on the way back down, and I happily nicked off and joined the other lads in a scramble down the hill."
The Year 12 Camp was a team-building exercise at the commencement of HSC. Prior to our departure, an enclave assembled in the Senior Common Room to elect a School Captain and his deputy. From memory, some six or seven guys stood for these offices. Somewhat iconoclastically, I voted for Matt Price. The ballot-papers allowed for preferences. What with some sixty guys or so voting in such a fashion, one would've thought that it'd take a day to determine the outcome - but no: Father Kierce and Joey Jordan collected the votes, stepped out of the room and returned some two minutes later to announce that Mark Healy and Geoff Guggenheimer were our leaders henceforth. One can only marvel at such dexterity !
Back to the camp. Joey Jordan, as the Year 12 co-ordinator, presided over the affair. Gloom was in the air: we had lost key people at the end of Year 11 such as Steff, Russ Lane, Santa and Andy Picken (and elsewhere, Steve Boysen had already departed Whitefriars, courtesy of an Economics test-paper that he had acquired and sought to commercialise). Father Shane was also in attendance and he authored the syrupy 'spiritual sessions' that dominated the daylight hours. Nights were another matter: I've never enjoyed poker but the exception was an all-night marathon, organised by Peter Bennett (sans cigar), where half of the pack were wild cards - what fun we had. For whatever reason, we watched The Elephant Man as a group. Returning to our huts, we donned pillow cases to screech out into the darkness: I am not an animal - I'm a human being! or variants to that effect. We were also yelling out to, and at, one another, the aim being to madden Joey who was attempting to enforce curfew. No sooner had Joey strode over to one of the huts to stifle the insurrection when another 'hotspot' would arise on the other side of the camp, summoning his attention. Those among us who were more adventurous (not me, sadly) slipped away into the darkness to partake of the nocturnal treats of nearby Point Leo. All in all, Sommerville was a less enjoyable affair than the Harrietville camp. HSC loomed ahead of us like the Second Step on Everest and the 'Kumbaya' sessions were dreary. A desultory attempt was made to swim at the beach but the weather was inclement. I remember walking listlessly along the Point Leo beach with Trenny. Both of us were bored shitless and waiting for the next instalment of life - namely girls and cars - to galvanise our existence; but they lay months into the future.
Which bring us to the third major outing. Eddie de Jong was (or should I say is) an archetypical physics teacher with a bushy beard, bullet-proof glasses and enough brown jumpers to invade Russia. Word has it that as of 2010, he's still teaching at Whitefriars, meaning that he has been there for the better part of forty years (I don't know if that makes him an institution or institutionalised). Eddie was a fine teacher with an acute sense of humour. He liked a flutter on the nags, and on not a few occasions could be seen at Tunstall Square's TAB. The Physics Room at Whitefriars had an attractive ambience to it (and out the back was an early computer that contained a few science-orientated games; Paul Dietze routinely blew up one of the nuclear power stations by blocking off their coolants). With a maniacal laugh, Eddie inducted us into the terror of electricity (making us all hold hands while he wickedly turned a dynamo). As I was abysmal at maths, I dumped physics at the end of Year 11 but those who were more intrepid pushed on. One of the main attractions of undertaking Physics in HSC was camping under the stars for a week. Here is a recollection of the event:
The Year 12 Astrophysics camp of 1983 took place in May at Cathedral Mountain state park, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range from Melbourne so as to get away from the light and air pollution of the city. The campsite was very basic. We slept in tents and cooked over open camp fires. There were toilets but no showers and most of us wore the same cloths for a week. With the accumulation of smoke and dirt and teenage boy gunk, I had never been as filthy in my life before as I was at the end of that week. It was cold and wet. On one night the temperature dropped to 1 degree. On at least one day, it rained all day long and we were confined to our tents. I didn’t bring a fly for my tent and it let in water. All my stuff became damp. Somehow, these “hardships” weren’t negatives. We revelled in them and had an absolute ball. Like true physicists, we experimented with the effects of temperature and pressure and projectile motion. What would happen, we hypothesised, if a can of baked beans was placed in a campfire? How long would it take for the pressure inside the can to exceed the resisting force of the steel can? What path would the beans take after being ejected from the can? The answers came from many repeat experiments. Maggot discovered that the time taken for a can to reach explosive temperatures is not very long at all when he wandered (unaware) near a campfire and was told in no uncertain terms by the lead scientist to move away with all haste. I discovered that the path taken by a body of beans can intersect with ones tent. The observational astrophysics was more problematic. It was cloudy for most of the week. We had some dinky little 3 inch refractor telescope through which I saw not a single heavenly body. There was a 6 inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope borrowed from another school, but I couldn’t bring the thing to focus. Tim Magill had brought his own Newtonian Reflector, but the worm gears were so slow that by the time you got it pointing at a star, the sun was coming up. There were so many of us and so few scopes that our shifts at the eyepiece were very short. In other words, we stayed up all night every night for a week but saw nothing though a telescope. We did learn about constellations and the brighter stars during the breaks in the cloud while standing around between shifts. Who attended the camp? The 'Baked Bean Team' consisted of Adrian Hill, Glenn Guest, Matt Thomas, Mal Pinkerton, Frank Horacek et al. Ernie Krakouer, Andy McClure, Copsey, Sokker etc were probably scouring the area for hidden crops of wacky tobaccy. Dietze, Vass and I were in a shift with Terry Dunn and, yes, probably Steve Wynd as well. On the final night, some port was smuggled into camp and passed around the campfire. Eddie de Jong and Mark Miller were either unaware or turned a blind eye. Well in to the wee hours of the morning there were boisterous choruses of The Old Bark Hut ("In the Old Bark Hut, in the Old Bark Hut, you might die of constipation in the Old Bark Hut"), punctuated at intervals by explosions of the last of the baked beans. I think I slept for 14 hours straight when I got home and Mum gave up trying to clean my clothes and threw them out instead. But that week is my fondest memory of Whitefriars."
Elsewhere, there were two day-excursions that warrant attention. The year 1979 was the 1900th anniversary of the eruption of Vesuvius. With Caecilius, Metella, Quintus and the famous Grumio fresh in our minds, Chunkles and Father Barry took us to the Victorian Art Centre where an exhibition was being held. Later that day, we toured the nearby State Theatre where a tour-guide informed us that such was the pressure of the water-table under the structure, the obelisk above our heads would take off like a rocket and land in Williamstown if it were not for engineering measures in play; we were impressed.
At the commencement of HSC, Shirley Fung accompanied the Biology Students to the Zoo. It was a mundane affair with one exception. In those days, the Indian elephants were confined to a narrow pen. They were noisy buggers, perhaps out of frustration. We had brought a long a tape-recorder and we recorded their trumpeting, spiced up with some commentary on our part (perhaps we used one Paul Dietze's Chrome TDK tapes as he had cornered the market in our year - even Metal tapes, astoundingly, were on offer). Anyway, for whatever reason we played the recording back to the elephants at full volume and much to our surprise, they went berko. They lined up as if another herd of elephants was about to charge their position. Their leader, a big tusker, was agitated in particular. Once we understood the causality, we replayed the recording a second and third time for a laugh. A crowd gathered around. At this point, Shirley materialised and promptly ended the show. Unceremoniously, we were marched back to the buses. Once we were on the road, Shirley gruffly told us that we were a disgrace to the uniform. We mused raucously on this thought as we journeyed homewards.
