The Goldmine.
  • Spy vs Spy
    • At Fox River
    • Patty and the Tet Offensive
    • Pale and Interesting >
      • More pale and interesting
      • Older, still pale, possibly only interesting to a couple of people
    • The Heckler and Koch Affair
    • Spy vs Spy
  • Peeling the Onion
  • Old unhappy far-off things
    • Wipers and the Ypres League
    • Fanny and Cobber.
    • In Memoriam
  • Slightly Saltirical
    • A Dexter Hand
    • The Boar-Worshippers
  • Taken by the Hand
    • Geranium Days
    • The Lockhart Papers
    • A Martial Aspect
    • O Perfect Love >
      • Sonnets Unplugged
      • Stout Cortez
    • Tea and an Ascot
  • Childe Harold
    • Monikers >
      • The Sandman and Sleipnir
    • Bos Indicus
    • Three things in a field >
      • Dance With A Bull
  • Eureka (Stockade)
    • Two for Joy
    • At the Bottom of the Garden >
      • Coins of the Realm
  • Superstitious Nonsense
    • Leaves of Tea
  • The Best of Times
    • The Space Race >
      • C.P.Snow
  • Sorry luv, I missed that.
  • Valley Girls
    • Britten, B et al >
      • Gammon and Spinach
      • The Blue Flowers >
        • The Beautiful People
        • The girls from 9DY Rangi Ruru >
          • The Fires of Hell and other Works of Art
        • The Cat's Paw and other Feline Fables
        • Flowers in Bloom
      • The Moon and Daisies
      • Snowmaiden Revelry
  • Sitting on Custard
  • The Long White Grass
    • Somewhere...
  • I have pictures
  • The Queen's Cake
  • A Portrait by Hoppner
  • The Iron Fist.
    • Slow twitching gams.
  • Whips and Whatnot
  • Showering with Friends

Patty and the Tet Offensive

(Or, the '70s revisited.)
I was there. And, despite the funny hair, I loved them. Of course I had no idea what was really going on. Did anyone know? I don't even know the chronological order of events now. But at the back of my mind there's a non-stop parade of headlines from those years. (Most of them are from the 'Melbourne Sun', a now defunct paper).
Patty Hearst wasn't at the Tet Offensive but those two names, to me, dominate the era. I have had dreams where those two names are the only things that I can remember at all. I know that I didn't understand what was going on in Vietnam or the arguments about conscription (introduced? not introduced? -- I can't even remember now). We had men in uniforms come to see us with slide shows of soldiers in jungle green leaping out of helicopters hovering just above ground level. There were maps on front of the newspaper and pictures of LBJ. At home, in the depths of the bush the F one-elevens would scream overhead on a training run from Kapooka or Forest Hill, loop the loop and fly away again. One day Saigon fell and it was sort of over.
But all of this heart-breaking earth-shattering confusing reality was only the background to the more ordinary but all-consuming life of an Australian teenager. You know, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll and early morning Geography classes. I had no idea when I was studying the sequential occupation of the Canterbury-Otago plains that I'd end up living in Canterbury for decades. In fact I would have scoffed heartily as I thought the only places then to live were Sydney or London. There was Hardy and Pol magazine and Harper's and Queen to read and the filthy letters I got from some of the boys from Yanco Ag.  
I found my smallpox vaccination certificate just the other day. I had the vaccination before I went to Noumea on a school trip. Those were the days.
(To be continued. Or amended. Or maybe even deleted.)