Can't Stop The Music

Who remembers learning these songs at school in the 1970s?

• Blowin’ in the Wind   
• The Marvelous Toy
• La Cucaracha  
• The Ash Grove       
• Tzena Tzena                   
• Cileto Lindo                
• Moon of Silver White 
• Flash Jack from Gundagai
• I've been Working on the Railroad    
• The Happy Wanderer

In 1970s Australia, school music programmes included lessons via radio from the national broadcaster (ABC).   The lessons were piped through the PA system to each classroom.  The large wooden box speaker above the blackboard was as much a fixture as the framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth 2^nd and the useless ceiling-fan.   We’d lean forward, elbows on the desk, gazing into space or doodling on the songbook as presenters with quasi-English accents walked us through music basics.

We were taught songs from around the world, including quaint English ditties, European folks songs, the occasional mysterious "Oriental" number and slightly grandiose Italian songs.  "Negro spirituals" were especially common, the lyrics written in a vernacular now likely be considered racist.

Other songs questionable by today’s standards included those about:

• Sick and dying childen (luckily, they could be cured with Shortnin’ Bread)

• Miserable working conditions (Drill, Ye Tarriers)

• Mocking someone as "cock-eyed" (The Drummer and the Cook - “with her one eye on the pot and the other up the chimney”

• The lazy, useless wife of a Scotsman (The Wee Cooper of Fife)

• An old woman who died after swallowing a variety of animals  (There Was an Old Lady … )

• A monster being run over by a tram  (The Ombly Gombly)
  

There was a never-ending song (Chuffa-Luffa Steam Train) and a ridiculously short song which I will write here in its entirety:

“There was on old crow / Sat upon a clod / 

That’s the end of my song /  That’s odd”

Certainly it gave us a sense of mastery ("Mum, I learned a whole song in 15 seconds!").   Songs sung 'in rounds' were popular, such as Row Row Row the Boat and Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.**    

Nonsense songs were included to encourage those who weren't musically inclined.  The nonsense reached tremendous and very 1970-ish heights one year when the ABC ran with the theme of space travel, apparently inventing songs especially for the occasion.  

If anybody else remembers trippy tunes about the “astronautical ship” on which Zolt the Third took us to the “Gracious Star of Zap”  then by all means help me relive the horror.

Please do share memories you have about any primary/elementary school music programmes.

  

**  Australian pop group Men at Work worked a distinctive riff from  Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree  into their anthemic hit  The Land Down Under  and made it more enjoyable than I EVER remember it being at school.

Chalk Talk

Discussing school days and chalkboards with one of my blog readers (do chalkboards even exist anymore?) I recalled that it was once quite a privilege to be the ‘chalk eraser monitor.’  The more loaded with chalk dust it was, the more exciting the act of banging the life out of it, forming a massive cloud of colored dust.   

These days, that would have at least half the class reaching for their inhalers.  I think maybe 2% of the kids at my (large) school had asthma.  We wouldn’t have known an inhaler from a kazoo. Nebulisers?   Never heard of them; would have thought they were some kind of alien weapon from “Lost In Space.”

 Certainly one of the most common simple ‘punishments’ a teacher could mete, if he/she saw someone not paying attention in class, was to hurl the chalk duster across the room at them, hitting them either square on the head, or leaving an impressive branding on the back of their school jumper.  Again, if we transpose that to a modern-day school, I can’t even begin to speculate the cries of protest that would arise, the throng of parents complaining and possibly laying assault charges.

When I was 14, our temperamental English teacher (a very camp gent in ultra-high-waisted slacks) one day became increasingly annoyed as he listened to a group of rowdy girls in our class  mocking novels by Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.  “Stop it!” he finally yelped. “ You’re just a bunch of sluts!”

Well, that certainly shut them up.  It wasn’t appropriate from a teacher, but at the same time, some of the huffy reactions were hypocritical to say the least.   And guess that?  The two parents who lodged complaints about him, were the very ones whose daughters were being dropped off after school, a block shy of their homes, by guys who drove panel vans.

The Sizzling Seventies

Summer in Adelaide BAC (Before Air Conditioning) was oppressively hot.   At school, we'd struggle to focus on our studies as the temperature climbed into the 90s Farenheit.  Although most public primary schools had an austere red brick building on the streetfront, you could not enter its hallowed corridors until you'd done years of  'porridge' in the de-mountables  flanking the school oval.  Every school had rows of them: teetering on struts, yet somehow surviving years of marauding students

None of the buildings was air-conditioned; the de-mountables (aka "pre-fabs") were hottest of all.  Ceiling fans would shwp shwp uselessly above us.  We girls,  in our very short skirts, left embarrassing sweaty thigh-marks on our chairs whenever we stood up.

Lunchtime offered no respite.  "Play on the oval" teachers would say, pointing to the shadeless expanse.  A mere sprinkle of gum trees was eked along the perimeter.  Gums?   You might as well stand under an empty  clothes line.  Were Gums cheaper than exotics, or were schools - even then - being botanically correct?

To intensify the heat experience, schools provided acres of asphalt.

Hardly any students came or went by car: we walked or cycled home when the sun was at its most fierce.

No events were ever cancelled due to heat.  During sport, one or two heatstroke victims was pretty much obligatory.  Excursions went ahead even when the road was a sweltering mirage and the packed bus felt like a furnace.  You did as you were told.  Your parents didn't intervene.  These were the days when students and parents feared teachers, not the other way around.