1954

1954

The revolution began in 1954. Eisenhower and Menzies and the Queen ruled the world. People wore hats. And walked on the left side of the footpath, at least they did in Australia. We were still playing games in the streets of Sydney and the chant of ‘We won the war, in 1944’ rang out joyfully even though three of us were kids of German migrants.
Stalin had grabbed his ruthless hammer and sickle and cynically scythed through the hopes of post-war pacifists. Nasser and the Arabs were fomenting trouble for the empire and apartheid was bearing the legacy of Hitler’s eugenics.
Reds under the beds. A plethora of new nations and a forum of United Nations symbolised a newer world community that was being polarised and communalised simultaneously. The Cold War sat as an ugly bogey upon the world’s consciousness.
Free milk at school and every poor kid got there early to fill the empty gut. We’d take along a couple of Weet Bix and have our breakfast in the shade of the school building. Then we’d shove off down the yard to play cricket in the dust until the school bell.
They still talked of Bradman and all of us were him on the streets with our planks for bats and anything you could grab for the ball. The sheilas all wore dresses that spun out on miles of petticoats and Bobby socks and flat soles and pigtails and I think I fell in love with Eva Marie Saint that year.
That brings me back to the revolution of 1954. Lots of people declare with outrageous pomposity that the sixties was the decade that did all the things it was supposed to have done, like change the world, and I like that one with images of nappies and turds and John Harker and Nappi San, and introduce drugs and anti-social behaviour, and free love.
I don’t think so.
It wasn’t like that.
It was this way.

We sat nervously in the school hall. Our seats had been carried from the classrooms and arranged in rows facing the proud new screen hoisted in front of the stage. Row by row filled up and cigarette smoke cast a smelly and noxious cloud above our heads.
A few minutes before start time we heard them. They were still some distance away but the portent of Doppler told us they were coming our way. The bloke who had been ushering us into our seats got all panicky and tried to close the hall door at the back. There were people out there who’d paid their tickets and now were being blocked from entering. It was this way when the bikes arrived and stopped us all in our tracks.
There were about twenty bikes and about forty people. They all were hidden behind a dangerous black outfit. Leather and chains and caps and all the trappings of Bodgies. And Widgies. The Bodgies and Widgies were the badge of early Rock ‘n Roll in Australia. They carried the emblem in dark defiance of all that was good and decent in 1954 Australia.
Their bikes were aligned in military arrogance across the neatly mown lawn. A hooded sentinel in dark glasses stood alone and pitched his place there. We squinted through the leadlight. They were nearly here and we slipped away back to our seats and waited.
The first arrived and occupied the space at the back door. He was wearing his cap at a ridiculous angle. Others in leather joined him and stood there and watched us watching them. A scrape of metal against the floor and a young woman made for safer parts at the front of the hall.