Oh dear. How the past can catch up, eh? Back in the mid 1970s I was ‘studying’ at the University of New England in Armidale. As Mr Smith used to say, study is an old Aboriginal word for drinking heaps of piss, chasing girls and falling over a lot.
First year was spent ‘in residence’, living in a college on campus. I scored a room in Robb College because I was good at footy. Robb was all blokes back then and had a reputation for being as wild as it gets. We had the best parties and still won the football. Think Animal House but with a lot of cold nights running around the oval.
So, a few months ago I ran into an old mate from Robb. This is one of life’s anomalies; after a biblical three score and ten years on this planet, some of the tightest mates I’ve got come from a couple of years of shared youth.
The UNE motorcycle club that kicked off back then is still going strong, with a bunch of us putting in more rides now than ever. Makes you think people are like bottles: the older they get, the tighter the lid’s screwed down.
Anyway, first thing Nowra Bill’s done is send me a bunch of photos.
It’s hard for digital generations to realise but once upon a time capturing an image meant owning a device specifically for exposing chemically laden plastic to light. Not many people had cameras and not many photos got taken. It was easier to do stupid things back then before social media put its digital clamp on fun.
One of Bill’s photos featured a couple of blokes, naked except for boots and helmets, riding a Suzuki 350 past the lower level of Robb College. I’d totally forgotten about it but there’s the evidence: the half back and the breakaway from the College Union Firsts celebrating a big game by doing a lap of the college in the nude.
From memory we’d just played Guyra, a bunch of grown men who trained by pulling tractors around their potato fields. We won the game, they won the fight. At least a black-and-white photo doesn’t show the purple bruises.
Smart move, eh? Not so for the elderly lady standing at the bus stop who fainted when the halfback thrust his backside in her face. She was ambulanced to the uni health centre where my mum knew the nurse. Next time I went home I got to hear all about these total idiots who’d caused mayhem and risked skinning themselves too.
Yes, but at least they were smart enough to borrow someone else’s bike and somebody else’s full face helmets. Someone and somebody else both had alibis, so nobody knew for sure. That was the story, and that’s what we stuck too – even though as the only bike rider in Robb, fingers were pointed.
Young and foolish, sure. But before they made university free, I’d been working as a bridge carpenter at a place called Willawarrin up the back of Kempsey. At 17 I was the youngest on the team and they called me the ‘Milky Bar Kid’ because while they tucked into schooners of Tooheys at the end of the day, I’d have a Coke and a block of chocolate. On my 18th birthday, Grey Dog – the leader of our crew – reckoned that if I could drink 10 schooners of beer he’d run naked across the old bridge in front of the school bus.
I got those beers down, after a couple of trips outside thrusting fingers down throat, and next Monday arvo the rest of us sat at the smoko table waiting for the double decker to come down the hill. As it slowed at the Give Way sign, a naked man jumped up and ran the whole length of the bridge to the shouts and cheers of the schoolies almost falling out the bus windows.
Yep, the Grey Dog was as good as his word. Unfortunately, he was wearing my full face helmet. And I didn’t have an alibi.
For the rest of that year I got cold-shouldered by all the locals with a daughter at high school in Kempsey. As if being the only bike rider in town wasn’t bad enough! But it was a lesson learned early: stupid is one thing, getting caught is another.
Right, now I’d better get this column in the mail before the wife catches me.
