Article - News.com.au - Thursday January 25th, 2007

Humpybong School days
By William McInnes
January 25, 2007 12:00am

WHAT it means to me to be an Australian: it's a hard question to answer, for Australia is a work in progress.

Always changing - sometimes gradually, sometimes swiftly.

The Australia I knew as a boy is superficially very different to the Australia I know now as an adult.

And the Australia of the far distant past is a land I may feel some familiarity with, but really it is an uncharted land.

Having completed a telemovie on the first year of the Curtin government in 1941, I was struck by how homogenous that Australia was.

But whether it is fundamentally different is a question to answer.

As Australia changes, so too its citizens, of which I am one.

And so when I look at what it means to be Australian, I find an answer, an understanding, in perhaps an unlikely place.

I find it in primary school.

This is a story of two schools, of two Australias, and yet I believe the same Australia.

But first let me tell you about a school by the sea. A school that was celebrating its 125th birthday.

Humpybong Primary School was 125 years old.

It celebrated with a fete, and old students had been invited to wander around the old stomping ground, wander through the stalls and sausage sizzles and the fun rides and the memories.

I have a friend who thinks the only place where you would find a school called Humpybong is Queensland.

She's probably right. The school is just north of Brisbane and marks the area of the first European settlement in Queensland.

The name came from the local Aborigines, who must have been relieved to find that the first influx of Europeans in 1824 had given up battling a dodgy water supply and hordes of aggressive mosquitoes in an attempt to settle the area.

The first white settlers decamped to the shores of what became known as Brisbane, leaving the buildings of the settlement deserted and empty.

The Aborigines called the buildings "humpy bong".

The European translation would be "dead houses".

Dead Houses: not a great metaphor for a place of learning. But Humpybong kept its connection to the past.

As students we were told the origins of the school, and an Aboriginal figure, complete with a spear, still adorns the school crest.

Although the school took its name from the language of this nation's first inhabitants, I learnt hardly anything about these people and their culture - save for one wet afternoon, when one of my teachers showed us a photo of an old and sad-eyed man in a shabby cloth cap with a brass plate around his neck.

The inscription on the photo was: "1913. Sammy Bell, the last of his tribe, the last of his people."

I walked around the grounds of Humpybong at the back-to-school celebrations and I looked at the murals of Aboriginal-themed paintings on the walls, hanging in classrooms where the portrait of the Queen used to smile at us.

Retracing the steps you took as a child can throw up the most unnerving and disorienting emotions and feelings.

The grounds looked so much smaller than I remembered. Yet the trees down by the beach looked immense, as they had when I was a boy.

I looked in through a classroom window and instantly remembered my grade 3 room. The walls were empty and the room was now a lounge for teachers.

In my day it was the room where every treasure, real or imagined, found on the beach was displayed.

Humpybong School opens onto the shores of Moreton Bay, so all the odds and sods that were stuffed into jars on the shelves were of a pretty high beachcombing standard.

I remembered being told to stand by my teacher and to try to work through a series of square roots.

I had absolutely no idea of square, spherical, triangular or any form of roots.

I stood dumbly mouthing nothing much and being stared at by dead fish through formaldehyde eyes, a stonefish, open-mouthed, mocking me.

My grade 4 classroom was where I got caught mid-way through a frenzy of underarm farting by the headmaster and a school inspector.

I received six of the best, six strikes of the cane.

It still bewilders me why that expression for corporal punishment was used in Queensland.
Six of the best sounds like some advertising slogan for a six-pack of beer, or some form of cleaning aid.

Faces of other adults on that day changed to faces of the children they once were.
It's a strange experience when the past and the present come together.

Humpybong had a band. A school band.

They always played God Save The Queen after the Lord's Prayer at assembly.
Even after Advance Australia Fair was deemed our national song, the band played God Save The Queen.

Ah, 1970s Queensland.

I must have looked shell-shocked. A current student at Humpybong asked me if I needed help.
Clyde was his name. I told him I was just finding my way around the old school.
Clyde nodded. Obviously he'd seen former students in the same vague state.

I looked at him and asked him if he liked the school.

Yeah, he said. I asked him how old he was. He said he was 12. That meant it was his last year at Humpybong.

In my last year people always asked kids what they wanted to do when they finished school.
So I asked Clyde. He thought a while and smiled at me: "Be happy, I guess."

"Well," I told Clyde, "it's important to believe."

He looked at me and laughed. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked.

At the sausage sizzle area I was served by a man who'd been a few grades above me at Humpybong.

He was enjoying himself. It was a great day, he told me, as he forked the spitting snags.

The smell of fried onions on the barbecue mixed with the salt from the bay breeze.

Ibis and seagulls wheeled and squawked overhead and their cries melded with those of the children in the school ground.

In the 1970s, workmen unearthed convict manacles as they renovated a drain in the school grounds.

It was big news back then, and announced at school assembly. It was as if the school's connection to the past had been authenticated once again.

Humpybong, the school by the sea. Much had happened here. I learnt quite a lot, but there's always space for a bit more knowledge.

The sausage sizzle man must have seen me watching Clyde and his friends.

Two were Anglo-Australians and the other two, including Clyde, were indigenous Australians.
"They're a great bunch of kids, matey. Give them a chance and they'll go places," he said. "It's a great day. You want onions on your sausage?"

The sausage sizzle man was right. It was a great day.

I remember when my son finished his primary school.

I remember the first day he went to this school. He seemed so little.

I was away working on a television show.

I stood on a beach with my hair dyed and my fake tan on and I spoke to my little boy as he was about to leave home to go to school for the first day. I heard my son's little voice shriek from my mobile.

"Daddy, what if they laugh at me?"

I told him not to worry, that nobody was going to laugh at him.

He yelled that he loved me. I remember that as if it was yesterday.

The faces of the people and the voices of the school.

I have seen how children sing our national song, hand in hand together. Some are Anglos, some are Muslim, and some are indigenous, some of Asian heritage.

"Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free . . ." Australians All.

It may just be that I'm overly sentimental. It may just be that I want it to be something more important than it is.

But I think my son and his classmates and their old school have given something to me and to the other parents and to our country: the crystallisation of what it means to be Australian.

That's the trick - to find something worthwhile to believe in, to feel hope in the promise of our young nation.

Hope is an inextinguishable flame of humanity.

Long may it burn in our nation and in all our hearts.

This is an edited version of the John Batman Oration at yesterday's Australia Day luncheon by actor William McInnes