The Wagga High class of '67

The Wagga High class of 1967 – 72 recently held its 50-year reunion. The four key organisers worked over quite a few years to get as many of us together as possible. And then they organised enough functions to come out of our ears, opportunities to mix and mingle and chat and laugh. Do we feel warmer to each other as we age, I wonder? Does the fact that sex is no longer a burning issue mean that the women and men can relax in companionable friendships? Does the fact that most of us women no longer give a hoot about what other people think of us make us freer to be who we are?

Some of us were only the class of 1971 – 1972, ring-ins, at the school for 5th and 6th form (Year 11 and 12 to you young’uns). Our Coolamon cohort was eight-strong, with a small crew of us bussing in each day and a few of us boarding in Wagga during the week. I felt some ambivalence about, and detachment from, the school itself – I never did learn the school song, for example – but I fell in with a fabulous group of friends and was embraced as an equal, as a person in my own right. My Coolamon baggage was irrelevant. I was no longer Ross’s daughter, Audry’s daughter, Paul’s sister, Mama’s granddaughter etc. It was an opportunity to find out who I was, and I treasure the friendships I formed, as well as the ones that came with me from Coolamon.

The slide show at the Saturday night Wagga RSL club do, seemed to have a distinct preponderance of photos of me and my friends. That may have been because they were the ones I noticed. It may be because we responded to the call for photos. And it could have been because some of us were enthusiastic participants in whatever was going - like the girls versus boys’ rugby league game raising money for the cheer squad (of which I was a member) to accompany the mostly-hunky boys’ team to Gosford for the University Shield final. I wasn’t allowed to play because it wasn’t ladylike – thank you sincerely, my father: you saved your ball-dropping, scaredy-cat, and splay-footed daughter’s dignity.

We also possibly took a lot of photos. There’s a whole portrait series of us hanging out in our usual spot one lunchtime – on the brick fence boundary at the bottom of the hill. Another series from when our Wagga friends came out to Coolamon for a weekend and we all stayed at Rhonda’s pub. There were some photos from our post-school days too, when our friendships continued - sharing flats, attending 21sts, weddings, being bridesmaids or just drunken guests. Not that we all stayed close – some of us hadn’t seen each other since the last reunion twenty years ago, others of us see each other or have contact on a weekly basis at least.

Marg, who was one of the wonderful organisers, brought along a couple of her photo albums from those young days, and as I flipped thorough them, I was struck by the number of photos identical to the ones in my albums. I’m very familiar with my collection, having scanned the original albums and created digital albums, tidying up the photos along the way. I just regarded them as my photos and it was really affirming of our friendships to see them in Marg’s album too. I’ve lost memory of who took which photos, except for the hazy, grainy, small square black and white ones that could have only come from my Snappy camera purchased for eight shillings from Coles Variety store on the hill in Wagga when I was about eight or nine. Photography was one of my passions for many decades until I had to choose between it and writing, for time reasons. I even had a joint exhibition once, with a friend who was so technically proficient she could talk in f-stops while I glazed over and heard it as a foreign language. I was never going to be more than a rank amateur in that field, so retreated to the world of family snaps. In that professional/semiprofessional photography space, it was important who the photographer was. As I looked at Marg’s photo albums, I realised that the photos belonged to all of us, and that it didn’t matter who took which ones. It was also warmly comforting to know that we all cherished the same memories. We might remember them differently, but they belong to each one of us. They connect us. What a joy it is, and how solid it feels, to share them. Thank you, my Wagga High friends.