Pash rash, Passion Pop, Pseudo Echo: Susie O’Brien wants a return to old-time Schoolies
Once all you needed was a fake ID, a beach and beer money. Now corporates have taken over Schoolies, fuelling out-of-control entitlement and a $5000 price tag.
In 1987 when I did Schoolies, all you needed was a fake ID, beer money and a beach to pass out on.
We were rocking to Pseudo Echo’s Funky Town, wearing rugby tops with the collar turned up and getting “shitfaced” on West Coast (wine) Cooler – or (sparkling) Passion Pop when the money ran out.
Back then Schoolies was a lot simpler: there were no lanyards, no themed party nights, no fancy hotels and no porn stars jetting in to get their hands on all the “barely legal” young men.
There were no toolies, no moolies (mums holidaying together in a bid to share their child’s milestone event) and no one had a $5000 budget for seven days of sin.
A group of us stayed at the SA coastal town of Port Willunga and partied at the Victor Harbor foreshore, drinking in the streets and trying to avoid bouncers checking IDs.
Luckily, in the 1980s an SA driver’s licence had no photo, so all you needed was to borrow one from an older teen and memorise their star sign and postcode to fool the bouncers.
Photos from the time show a very tame group of girls with bad skin, shaggy bobs and baggy jeans desperately flirting with sexually repressed boys trying very hard to look like members of Duran Duran.
Throwing up in a stranger’s rubbish bin or getting chucked out of the Hotel Victor for being under age was about as crazy as it got.
It was a more innocent time, when emerging with a pash rash in the morning was considered fast and loose.
Friends have shared memories of their Schoolies, which included “local parties and Southern Comfort and coke”, “camping with a few mates near the beach”, “taking a Greyhound bus from Melbourne to stay in a youth hostel” and seeing bands such as Koo De Tah and I’m Talking.
Another remembers piling into his old HK station wagon with friends to drive from Port Macquarie to Young via Sydney: “lots of punk rock on the very crappy Ferris car cassette player”.
Schoolies as we know it today started in Queensland in the late 1970s, when a manager of a now-defunct Gold Coast hotel travelled to US coastal towns to get business ideas. He admired the teen parties there involving “wet T-shirt contests” and “egg-throwing competitions” and decided to replicate them here.
By the mid 1980s, Surfers Paradise high rise landlords were refusing to rent properties to school leavers due to mass damage and “sewerage blockages”.
There was even a 1996 Fairstar Schoolies Cruise, but the less said about that the better.
Within a few years, kids from the southern states started heading up to the Gold Coast and Byron for Schoolies and the partying soon spiralled out of control. By the early 2000s, police, charities, businesses and governments got involved to clean things up, requiring chill-out zones, registration, safe transport options and all-ages events.
Schoolies quickly became corporatised, with companies, not kids, calling the shots and monetising the whole enterprise.
In any case, the corporate coup hasn’t stopped tragic high-rise balcony falls, drug overdoses, sexual assaults or mass arrests.
If anything, there’s more pressure now to party harder than ever due to all the money and hype.
The expectations and sense of entitlement has never been higher: anything less than a week-long adult-free festival of babes, blokes, booze and bongs in an exotic location doesn’t cut it.
It’s now seen as a right, not a privilege, for young people to go on an out-of-control, expensive, unsupervised bender. There’s pressure to stay, spend up big on the right outfits, the right accommodation and the right events.
We didn’t know it at the time, but there was something liberating about what’s dismissed now as a “chaotic mass gathering”.
Maybe things will come full circle, and young people will get sick of all the commercialism, expectation and hype associated with Schoolies today.
As I wrote last week, this generation is less interested than ours in getting wasted.
Maybe in the next few years they’ll turn their back on Schoolies Inc and return to a simpler time.
Maybe they’ll even do what we did and celebrate the end of school by partying with mates at the coast with a campervan and an Esky, coming home safe with a sunburn, a hangover and yes, maybe even a pash rash.
What are your memories of Schoolies? Leave a comment below or email education@news.com.au
Originally published as Pash rash, Passion Pop, Pseudo Echo: Susie O’Brien wants a return to old-time Schoolies
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