Photo reminiscences

Aaarh..choo! I sneezed and sent clouds of dust scattering in all directions. I sneezed again and the force of it threw me backwards against my car. I was in the garage cleaning things out for the Council Clean-up. The dust and cobwebs in my brain were unsettled too.

I sneezed and shivered and headed back indoors to grab a jumper and hot coffee. From my porch I could see the sunshine starting to loosen up the rigid cold air and two neighbourhood children scooting by. It was school holidays and my daughter had just called to pick up her son and daughter after a sleep-over at Gran’s. We’d been awake for hours and I felt motivated to tackle a task I’d postponed many times. Even now, I procrastinated, and went indoors again to find a radio to keep me company.

I’d lifted the lid off a large cardboard box, and it disintegrated in my hands. I collected all the larger pieces and looked past them to see that the box was full of photos.

Today we don’t keep photo prints but these were from ‘before’- before mobile phones, before Divorce, before my son and daughter became adults, and long before that. Some photos were from my own past. I sorted out three piles- for my kids, for the rubbish, and for me to keep.

There were dozens of photos of my children, and various cats we had had. I stared fondly at three pictures of ‘my tree’, in Wolyunga National Park. The first one was me standing in the fork of a dead gum tree with my baby girl, the second was her again, and me very pregnant with my son, and the third was next spring with my daughter a toddler and my son a little baby.

Poking up between the photos I say a small green album, with aged stiff plastic pages tearing apart. I made myself comfortable with a new coffee, and found myself staring back at a photo taken sixty years ago, a photo of myself in my Secondary school uniform, on the first day of school. I stood there smiling, relaxed and unselfconscious, another ‘before’ photo- before the awakening, before the experiences and the scars. I wore a brown boxed pleated uniform down to my knees, white blouse, brown tie, socks and shoes and panama hat.

It was a long ride on two buses to school, about ten miles. The school was a Selective school, and I was one of the first five girls from our small primary school in the eastern suburbs. Most of the other students in that first year were from an Opportunity school, which took elite students from mainly the wealthier seaside suburbs. Many were Jewish and many came from families where parents were university professors or wealthy businessmen.

As I stared at my young self, a torrent of memories flooded over me. My photo sorting came to a halt. The connection between her and me was fraught with teenage angst and loneliness. I forced myself to turn the photo over. The older fell apart completely and photos went in all directions.

One caught my eye- the hockey team, and I deliberately put it in the pile to show my children. It showed rows of teenage girls wearing yellow duck box-pleated sports uniforms with large billowy yellow bloomers and white Dunlop sports shoes. I made an effort to smile at the ungainly group of girls and marveled at the huge change in school uniforms since then.

I shrugged off the maudlin mood and forced myself to smile. Most of the photos in this small album were definitely not going to be kept. There were several school year photographs, and these went in the bin. But wait! There was Year 6, the final year of High School, before those one hundred and fifty girls went out into the world of university, and Teachers’ college or found their way into the business world.

I recognized several and I poured over this one photo for ages. There was Christine Marchant, a formidable swimmer and athlete, Jackie Collins, a tall redhead who bore no resemblance to her famous namesake. I shuddered with revulsion at what had happened when her father drove me home from her place one evening. And again, I firmly directed my attention to the rest of the girls in the last row. There was Barbara Sinclair, tall and beautiful, and she left school early to become a cancan dancer in Le Moulin Rouge. The teacher beside her had a story too. In sixth year the teachers were only about five years older than the girls. Narelle Smart was short and thin, and sha had been a provocative and insightful English Teacher. She found God, and became an Anglican Deaconess.

In the rows of faces, I remembered many names. I had flown to Sydney to go to the Twenty-fifth Reunion in 1993. Most of us chatted about our jobs and our families, our children and our divorces. Two girls were pregnant, at forty-two. We realized that the passing years had taken their toll. Marie-Lyn had died of breast cancer, and Gloria had committed suicide. Robyn was a dedicated feminist and a lesbian, Christine was depressed and expressed the morbid desire that she would not live long enough to come to another reunion.

I looked up, and put a stop to the reminisces, took myself to the toilet and made another coffee, and took a Zyrtec to try and cope with my streaming eyes and runny nose from decades of dust.

Motivated to clear out most of these photos and start then on a stamp collection, I sat down again and picked up the remains of the old school photos. And there she was- Rhonda!

Rhonda had been my only friend. A rather lop-sided relationship, with me very needy and her very confident and charming. We both had young siblings and at High school it was not common to have siblings who were ten years younger. We shared stories about them, both of us in the role of mother’ helpers, looking after the younger ones. So, Rhonda and I would bump into each other whenever I could engineer a meeting, between subjects or in the playground. We were in several classes together and the Evangelical Union at lunchtime.

I had found myself in a very awkward and unwanted position, where I was much cleverer than all these students who had come to this Selective school with the anticipation of continuing to exceed and be top of the class like they had been in Primary school. To find me, an ‘upstart from the eastern suburbs’ at the top of the class was something neither the girls nor their mothers had imagined. It made it very difficult for me to make friends.- Except for Rhonda.

The years at High School made a indelible imprint on my development. I really didn't want to see that photo again.