Royal Show Memories.

My earliest memories of the Royal Show were a mixture of merry-go-round rides, Chairaplane rides, dodgem cars, the Octopus, log chops, Professor Wilkinson doing tricks on a motorcycle, displays by mounted police on charging white horses, exhibitions of food and farm produce in the Centenary Pavilion, bustling crowds, strong animal smells, sample bags, hot dogs and fairy floss.

In those days  there were only three terms in the school year and the October Royal show fell outside the school holidays. The two big days of the Show were People’s Day on Wednesday and Children’s Day on Thursday. Wednesday was a public holiday and city schools were closed for both days. My parents used to take the family on People’s Day. I fondly remember the 1948 Show. It was about 10 months  after my family had moved from 164, Seventh Avenue Inglewood, to  number 8, Aberdeen Street. I was ten years old. My sisters, Valerie and Kathleen were aged 7 and 5 respectively.

My parents loaded the family into our blue Essex Tourer. Dad had folded back the canvas hood and the family set off from Aberdeen Street and into Beaufort Street towards the city, just like royalty riding down The Mall in an open carriage.

At that time, my older cousins, Maurie and Raymond Carr, who lived with us at Aberdeen Street, had two dogs, G.K. and Danny. G.K. was Maurie’s dog, a Scottish terrier he had named after G.K. Chesterton. Raymond’s dog, Danny, was a beautiful collie dog just like Lassie. Unfortunately, when Dad drove out of the side lane he did not close the gate. The family’s high-spirited departure had excited both dogs and G.K. and Danny soon set off after the Bourke family making their royal progress along Beaufort Street. 

Despite the dogs’ barking and yapping, my dad decided to keep on driving towards the Barrack Street Bridge. As he drove passed the Swan Barracks he waved his right hand and yelled at the barking dogs to go back. They took Dad's gestures as a sign of encouragement and continued bounding noisily alongside the open vehicle.

What had started out as a royal procession quickly degenerated into a scene out of Dad and Dave Come to Town.Dad drove his family in the open car and over the Barrack Street Bridge, escorted by the two barking dogs. Startled onlookers in the street looked at the passing parade, convinced that some rich squatter had arrived in town for the Royal Show with his family and farm dogs in tow. By the time the car reached Murray Street, the dogs had found other city distractions to occupy their attention and the Bourke family continued on to the Show without their canine escorts.

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Every year, as soon as the family had entered the gates, Dad would pick out a landmark, such as the Ferris wheel or the main door of the Centenary Pavilion and say, “If you get lost go straight to the Ferris wheel and wait for your mother or me to come and get you. Do not go anywhere with anyone else.”

My mother was well aware of “Stranger Danger” long before the term became fashionable. She warned my two sisters and me to be particularly wary of ladies offering them lollies or any other inducements. She told us that quite often, evil men dressed up as women, just to trap little boys and girls. Filled with such foreboding we never wandered far from Mum and Dad. The other reason being of course that Mum and Dad had all the money that is so necessary to obtain the full enjoyment of Sideshow Alley.

When I was about twelve years old I started going to the Show on my own or with friends. I would save for several weeks, keeping my Show money under the carpet in my bedroom. Naturally, Dad would give me some extra spending money and my Aunty May was very good and always gave me a bonus in Show Week. Aunty May ran The Lucky Bunny lottery kiosk at 119 Barrack Street. She used to pay me five shillings a week to run the lottery ticket butts and the cash to the Lotteries Commission office in St Georges Terrace each day, after school.

My Uncle Ray would also give me a few shillings to spend at the show. I would take great delight in counting out my money, working out how many rides, sideshows, cool drinks, hot dogs and serves of fairy floss I could afford. 

On Show Day I used to arrive with what always seemed like plenty of money However, by late afternoon I would have only enough for my bus fare home, while still strongly desiring more rides, sideshows and food. In those days all cool drink bottles carried a deposit of tuppence. I would collect up as many empty bottles as I needed and cash them in to finance my next big showtime splurge. At least in those days the showbags, or sample bags as they were then called, were free.

Naturally, the main attraction for me at the Show was Sideshow Alley with its rides, dodgem cars, House of Horrors, Ghost Train, the Wheel of Death, Blum’s Boxing Troupe and various other sideshow tents. Two sideshows remained etched in my memory forever; one featuring Big Chief Little Wolf and another featuring the alluring fan dancer, Paulette.

Big Chief, Little Wolf was a Red Indian who became very popular in Australia after the war. He was a sensation at the big wrestling matches in Sydney and each year would tour the various Shows putting on exhibitions, demonstrating wrestling holds and talking about his colourful life. He always wore a huge Indian feather headdress and attracted big crowds wherever he went. On one earlier occasion, Dad took me to Reilly’s Hall in Inglewood to see Big Chief Little Wolf stage a boxing and wrestling exhibition against Paddy Boxall a well-known state champion boxer of the 1940s. Big Chief Little Wolf was a great entertainer and attracted huge crowds all over Australia.

Paulette was an exotic French lady who was, quite possibly, just an ordinary Australian girl from Bayswater named Beryl, making pin money at the Show. However, as Paulette, with her sexy French accent and exotic dancing, she had a lot of fans. Of course, her two biggest fans were the huge feathery blue ones she used so cleverly to keep her naked body covered as she danced around on the small stage inside the tent. She certainly aroused my interest in the female form and I spent a great deal of my hard earned pocket money visiting the creamy skinned Paulette, always in the hope that once – just once – she would drop one of those blasted fans. 

She never did.

Millions of Federal dollars for formal testing in Year One. Did anyone ask the teachers what they REALLY need?

Federal Education Minister, Simon Birmingham will spend millions of dollars inflicting a universal literacy and numeracy testing regime on all Year One students. By doing this he is demonstrating the penchant for politicians to look as if they are interested in education and busily doing something about it.

There is not a Year One teacher in Australia who could not have told Minister Birmingham at the end of February this year which children in their class would thrive in language and numeracy, which children would achieve satisfactory outcomes and which children would struggle. They would struggle because of a variety of intellectual, physical, psychological, social, emotional and cultural factors.

What these Year One teachers want is not another testing regime imposed from above. What they want is more well trained Teacher Assistants, more school nurses, more speech therapists, more school psychologists. They especially want more social workers to visit families that are not coping, that are dysfunctional, that are affected by drugs, physical and sexual abuse. Many of the problems children experience at school originate well outside the classroom.

By inflicting this new universal testing scheme on Year One Teachers, Minister Birmingham is indulging in Teacher Bashing, because he is in effect saying that up till now Year One teachers have been derelict in their duty in detecting children at risk.

He also putting increased downward pressures on schools and teachers to introduce formal literacy and numeracy skills to the early years of childhood. Since NAPLAN was introduced in 2009, the pressure on teachers to introduce the formal teaching of language and numeracy skills into Kindergarten and Pre Primary classes has resulted in Kindergarten becoming the new Year One and Pre Primary the new Year Two.

The dangers of inflicting formal education on very young children was highlighted by highly respected Professor David Elkind, of Rochester University, in 1989, when he published his bestselling book, “The Hurried Child, The Power of Play and Miseducation.”

Elkind spent many years studying “The Hurried Child” and the many problems that arise from getting young children involved in formal education too soon. He stressed that “Education is not a race.” He believed that children’s education activities should be “developmentally appropriate.” Unlike our politicians, Elkind spent a lifetime researching the subject.

In 2001, Elkind published a paper entitled, “Much Too Early”. He again warned of the dangers of forcing formal education on minds not yet ready.  He warned of the “Growing call for early-childhood educators to engage in the academic training of young children.”  Elkind went on to point out that “Those calling for academic instruction of the young don't seem to appreciate that maths and reading are complex skills acquired in stages related to age. Children will acquire these skills more easily and more soundly if their lessons accord with the developmental sequence that parallels their cognitive development.”

“The short answer” said Elkind, “is that the movement toward academic training of the young is not about education. It is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in what they regard as an increasingly competitive and global economy. It is about the simplistic notion that giving disadvantaged young children academic training will provide them with the skills and motivation to continue their education and break the cycle of poverty. It is about politicians who push accountability, standards, and testing in order to win votes,  more than to improve the schools.”

Elkind wrote these words in 2001. They are even truer today than they were then. Elkind clearly identified the problem sixteen years ago yet politicians have continued to push for policies that win votes but do not necessarily improve schooling.

Unfortunately, some parents and most politicians, do see education as a race. Despite the research evidence of educators like Professor  Elkind, who have spent years studying the effects of “Too much Too Soon”, they believe that they can give children a head start in “The Race” by starting them earlier and earlier.

Elkind concludes by saying, “If we want all of our children to be the best that they can be, we must recognize that education is about them, not us. If we do what is best for children, we will give them and their parents the developmentally appropriate, high-quality, affordable, and accessible early-childhood education they both need and deserve.’’

He warned, "It is during the early years, ages four to seven, when children's basic attitudes toward themselves as students and toward learning and school are established. Children who come through this period feeling good about themselves, who enjoy learning and who like school, will have a lasting appetite for the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Children whose academic self-esteem is all but destroyed during these formative years, who develop an antipathy toward learning, and a dislike of school, will never fully realize their latent abilities and talents.”

These chilling words, warning of large numbers of youth disaffected by schooling, should be written in bronze on the walls of every politicians’ office. The problem would be getting them to read them and understand them.