Roller Derby
It was as though the playshed had been made for this ...
When it was donated in 1892, the old school ground was dry and bony, with few places for children to play on level ground. The situation was remedied over the years with a series of Arbor Days and an almost immediate order for a playshed to be chiselled into the bank near the school, and it hasn’t gone anywhere since.
Just about everyone at Mount Crosby in the post-war period can claim to have played or met friends under the playshed – I’m talking here about the Boer War, you know.
Because it was a standard Queensland design, that old shed is solid enough to stand straight on the black soils of the Lockyer Valley, strong enough to withstand the cyclonic winds of Mosman, and won't corrode at Calliope, Cairns or Coolangatta. There’s another one at Redbank Plains, and you’ll find them all over the place, now that you’re looking.
It was a good place to sit for lunch or chat before school. I was there when Egg Day happened in 1970, for example, but really I love it for the games it played. Many were sanctioned forms of gentle entertainment for juniors – about which I am not a complete expert, but I’ll do my best to describe what was happening.
Tennis balls, in their afterlife, were bounced onto the shed’s beams as though trying to knock down a key, while increasingly difficult combinations of clapping and turning were employed to keep it interesting. There was no winner (as far as I know), only the satisfaction of mastering ten levels of difficulty, like an analogue premonition of a computer game.
Nearby, several girls tied themselves in elastic while calling incantations like apprentice sorcerers and, on the part of the floor that had worn through to dirt, marbles made an occasional appearance. I think I can say, without fear of successful contradiction, that nobody ever knew the rules of marbles. In case you are wondering, handball had not been invented.
All nice, but children are influenced by their sporting idols and have a great capacity to invent games in their image.
On television, at someone else’s place, you could see wrestling and an amazing new thing called the Roller Game. Because none of us was Greek or Roman, we reserved the wrestling for solving disputes between siblings, and fell into a sort of love with the Thunderbirds (no, not the lame marionettes) – I mean the girls of the roller derby, who encouraged us to invent the Mount Crosby equivalent of their bruising spectacle by running barefoot around the outside of the playshed while trying to push each other over the bank.
It was as though the playshed had been made for this.
The rules were never codified but went something like this: about ten children of various sizes, would run around the perimeter, at first pretending to be in teams, but you need to know that was just pretence. At a moment determined by some unknown force (maybe the wizards wrangling the elastic), the runners’ attention would fall onto another who had become isolated, and they would be pushed and bundled over the edge (unless they could get through the posse). In this way, which I feel prepared me for corporate life, the game gave the appearance of fairness because it could happen to anyone, big, small, skinny, solid, fast or slow. You had to be able to read the room and find a soft place to fall. Much like life.
I remember having my share, but no more than my share, of tumbles down the bank, followed by the uncomfortable prickliness of the unkept brush on the bank, then looking up at the blue sky peppered with orange pips of silky oak and thinking to myself, “Oh Geez, I can’t wait until big lunch”.