It was almost fifty years ago but I remember it clearly.
It was a Monday afternoon and there we were, the second-grade students at Reservoir Primary School, sitting crossed-legged on the floor, the concertina door separating the two classrooms pushed open so we could stare at an 18” black and white television screen in a distant corner of the enlarged room.
Classroom sizes being what they were in 1969, there were probably 80 children and two teachers watching on.
We waited for what seemed to be an interminable period, but it was probably less than an hour. It could have been a lot worse. While Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin stayed in the Lunar module two hours after landing, they decided not to take their sleep break which would have had me and the rest of the world waiting another six or eight hours.
Our posteriors throbbing from the cold linoleum floor and with temporary obstructions from seven- and eight-year old bonces, squinting at the distant screen produced mixed results, hazy images of light and shade. It was like watching an ultrasound at 20 paces. But we understood something big was happening.
We hadn’t been rudely swept from our usual timetable and plonked on the floor without notice or warning. We knew this was coming. Our show-and-tell sessions were littered with stories of Apollo II read from newspapers from its lift off in the gigantic Saturn V rocket three days earlier to the point where Columbia began its first of thirty orbits around the moon.
I remember peering into the night sky in the backyard for a sign of Apollo II on its 384,500-kilometre journey to the moon as if it might appear like a blazing comet.
We waited on that hard floor until Armstrong ascended. He uttered the words, “This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” as his left foot touched the lunar surface at 1:56pm. History records it as four minutes to midnight, Sunday July 20 American Eastern time but in Australia, man first set foot on the moon on Monday 21 July just after lunchtime.
No doubt news editors pondered which image would run on the front page. My memory is that The Age ran with the photograph taken by Armstrong’s partner, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin’s footprint on the lunar surface, a set of horizontal stripes etched into the dust. No Nike swooshes or Adidas stripes.
The then Melbourne Sun ran with the shot taken by Armstrong of Planet Earth in a state of waxing gibbous, shrouded in darkness with the lunar surface in the foreground. I doubt there has ever been a more powerful image and I wager it changed the collective consciousness forever. For the first time we could see that, with the exception of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins who was orbiting the moon in Columbia, there we were, all of us, hanging delicately in space.
That image rattled our brains. It has given rise to environmentalism and a deeply ingrained aggregated sense that we are all in this together and we had better not stuff it up.
That image and over 10,000 others released to the public and the grainy video beamed live into my classroom have given rise to a mess of complex conspiracy theories that what we had seen was an intricate fake, an event contrived in a studio in Arizona or possibly in a California basement, depending which loon is doing the babbling.
The addled conspiracy theorists contend Armstrong and Aldrin did not walk on the moon, nor did the astronauts of Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17.
This nonsense is proof if it were needed that the idiots have risen to prominence in our times, as if the Khmer Rouge had secretly conquered the planet, putting the dumb, the twisted, the loudmouthed and the crass at the helm while the rest of us have to pretend we’re gormless taxi drivers, lest it be thought we were capable of reason and rational thought.
The leader of the lunatic lunar conspiracy theorists is Bart Sibrel, an occasional guest on talk shows of low or no repute, maker of four terrible films and inveterate serial pest who runs around accosting astronauts, demanding they swear on a Bible to having walked on the moon.
This has given rise to another grainy video almost as impressive as the lunar landing itself, where a then 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin lands a solid right hand to the jaw of Sibrel after the conspiracy theorist had bailed Aldrin up and called him “a coward and a liar.”
Happily, Aldrin was not charged as police wisely concluded that Sibrel had engaged in a sort of entrapment exercise where he duped Aldrin to attend an event for no other reason than to harangue the astronaut with the nonsense that Apollo II lunar landing was a fantasy.
But it did happen. Along with around 500 million inhabitants of the planet, I saw it with my own two eyes and I’ll never forget it.
It was a sign that humanity is capable of almost anything. In the latter part of the 20th Century, a century that produced two catastrophic world wars, more political oppression to count and a superpower nuclear stand-off that threatened the existence of every single one of us, we needed a reminder that human beings were transcendent and could shift to the sublime and perform unimaginable feats of courage and skill.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, we want to hear from those who witnessed the incredible event from Earth. Where were you when the landing took place? What was the atmosphere like? Do you have photographs of the moment? Perhaps this one small step for a man sparked a long-lasting interest in space and adventure?
You can submit your stories and photographs from the time by filling out the form here. App users please visit theaustralian.com.au to submit your memories.