1987

- It was an election year, I remember this because I was elected prefect. This meant wearing a badge, feeling self important and popular, and being able to stand up on the school bus while telling those younger than me to siddown.
- Elroy went on school trip to Queensland for 3 weeks. He came back with exotic plastic objects for all, plus an expanded vocabulary of racist nouns and adjectives.
- Meanwhile I went with parents and grandmother on an endless car adventure into the red outback. Kept accurate statistics of roadkill by type (kangaroo, emu, wallaby, wombat, Unidentifiable Flattened Objects) drank and showered in sulfuric boar water, played pool with my dad for the first time, stayed in pubs, went to an opal mine, and didn’t swim once for three suffocating weeks of summer.
- Summer 87 was the tape, but the tracklisting is lost to dust and history
- There was a Hot Pink suit incident, with stirrup pants and a hot pink check button down shirt, sliced wide by a fat black elastic belt, and a partly exposed Dire Straits t-shirt
- Elroy was crowned ducks of his grade, and was immortalised on a plaque. Fierce academic competition was born into his world.
- Mastered the art of swearing in every second sentence, as practiced every lunchtime behind the junior block with my best-friends-at-the-time.
- Caught myself looking queerly at my classmate one too many times
- This was the year I thought golf was cool. Living so close to a golf course assisted with this delusion, and I went pro. Me and my neighbour of the same name used to don our golfwear and hit the links after school and on weekends. We would have been a funny sight, with our chocolatey soft drink faces and no interest whatsoever in keeping score.
- First business venture: selling golf balls to golfers near my back fence. Lost balls was a great industry to be in, until the Pro Shop guy got wind of the scheme, and made me sell him the balls at a very low price so then he could upsell them.
- Started guitar lessons after years of begging. didn't realise that practicing wasn't very fun. But still, Country Road and Mrs Robinson ALWAYS take me back to the weird musty smell in the guitar teacher's house.
- I had a mullet this year. I remember my teacher once having a quiet word with me about brushing my hair, as it was kinda shaggy. I'm sure he meant no harm, but I was mortified.
- My teacher used to play this mathy game with the class: everyone would stand, and he would throw a tennis ball at speed randomly aorund the classroom. As he threw he would yell out a maths problem and you had to catch the ball and do the maths problem at the same time as throwing the ball back. Those with poor motor skills did not pass maths that year.