Woollen skirts on outside, tie-dye soul sisters on inside
If not for a rebel fashion choice at the age of 12 I might have wandered the desolate veldt of school days alone.
A hot wind carried their teenage prattle up to the first-floor window, where I stood looking down in horror. Filing by in clusters on their way to school, my soon-to-be new classmates were dressed like modest nuns: cotton socks, buttoned white blouses and – grazing the tops of sensible shoes – knife-pleated woollen skirts in a cheerless cactus-green.
I was 12, about to start high school in a new town, in a different state. Under a very different regime: “Any student whose blouse is discovered even partially untucked will be sent immediately to detention with Sister Lucy.” The Catholic girls school was chosen because it was conveniently located directly opposite our new home in Rockhampton, Queensland. The uniform directive was distressing, though, deep-dyed in language that, to my young ears, suggested the everlasting torment of hellfire: “Shoes must be brown and polished, with no more than six eyelet pairs. Hair is to be tied back with hair ties in school colours. Skirts must fall to 50mm above the ankle.”
Problem was, in the rush and tumble of moving interstate and starting a new job and bedding in four children, my mum had left it too late to order my uniform. I had the white blouse and the polished brown shoes, but my ankle-grazing skirt wouldn’t arrive until the following week. Instead, I was to wear pants that first day. Tie-dyed green pants.
I was hopelessly underprepared for this new school, sartorially but also spiritually. At my old school in Newcastle, NSW, we’d had no formal religion. Boys and girls, jocks, nerds and burnouts, just one creed united us all: we worshipped the ocean.
Australia’s first and largest industrial city, Newcastle was a belching beast of a place. Everyone’s dad worked at the BHP steelworks and their big brothers routinely came home from Divinyls gigs at the Newcastle Workers Club with at least one black eye.
Newcastle was also a blue heaven of dripping ice blocks, two-for-10c potato scallops and endless, soul-cleansing days in the surf. Our local was Redhead Beach, a temple to surf wax and Sandmans. We’d tumble into school, scrappy, salty and straw-haired, leaving sandy footprints on the burning bitumen.
The school uniform, often worn over a bikini, was colloquially known as a “bum freezer”; if you could maintain decorum when lifting your arm to write on the blackboard, your dress was considered too long.
It was Puberty Blues relocated; surfside southern Sydney shifted north a few clicks. We worshipped that movie, too: a pair of decidedly unglamorous teenage girls, inseparable buddies, coming of age in the late 1970s, by the beach. Sharon O’Neill sang the title song, and we crooned it into our hairbrushes: “Puberty blues. It’s you and me, against the world.” How we longed for a Debbie to our Sue, a Sue to our Debbie. Curious, then, that I found my best friend in landlocked, heat-addled Rocky, where those Catholic schoolgirls surely paid the price for original sin wearing heavy woollen skirts in 40C heat. Ironic that I found her by not fitting in.
Gazing down on my schoolmates that morning, I had a choice to make. I could hide out at home until my uniform arrived. Or I could rebel against every conservative instinct my 12-year-old shyness imposed and stride into school wearing my tie-dye, that counterculture symbol of the free and reckless.
I did it. I wore it, and she befriended me at once. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d seen her on her way to school earlier, an electric presence despite her small size. A swirl of devotion eddied about her, much larger classmates in thrall to her jokes, her plucky insubordination. She had the long skirt, but she was wearing green tie-dye on the inside.
If not for the pants, I think it would have taken my new friend some time to work through the layers to the kindred spirit beneath. Maybe it would have taken too long and I would have wandered the desolate veldt of school days alone.
But she said she liked my pants. Then she scooped me up, and carried me with her, through those choppy early years of working ourselves out. Four decades on, we’re still carrying each other. We’re not so different to who we were then, despite the heartbreaks and losses, the joys and betrayals and all of the wonder. Time moves forward; our girlhood travels with us. It’s always you and me, against the world.