Showering with Friends

A tree in Narrandera Park. I may have had a cigarette or two under here.

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It is hard, over one's life, to determine which of the many experiences one seems (somewhat surprisingly) to have had that are truly formative. I think, however, that it is well recorded that leaving home at an early age and then living in a boarding establishment for several years is an experience that may leave a mark. And so it was for me. At the tender age of eleven and a half I left the manifold discomforts of an old farmhouse in the bush and the tedium of going to school on a rural school bus for the strange new world of high school and the Country Women's Association hostel in Twynam St in Narrandera.

I arrived late in the January of 1970, as unworldy a child as one is likely to find, but not without a certain confidence engendered by having been dux of my (small) primary school, and the blood of many Alexanders in my veins. All of my belongings had carefully sewn-in labels, I owned a school hat and a small brown schoolcase, and as such I was ready.