[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: New camera

[Shaun Hately]

On 23 Jun 2006 at 1:48, KathyK wrote:

> KathyK:
> 
> Shaun, they're very nice photographs.  That was great you happened 
> to have your camera when you finally found your pink heath flower.  
> Heh, I love when things like that happen.

Yes, I thought that was really cool. Although I have just found out that the white heath is the 
same plant as the pink heath - it's just white flowers are much more common than pink. Even 
more rarely you can get deep red flowers.

> Out of curiosity, is that how these places looked when you were 
> there?  In my case, the three schools I attended all had additions 
> added after I left.  Actually, this happened with my university as 
> well.  I still find it difficult to accept the way my old high 
> school now appears.  It just feels so wrong to me.  Taking photos of 
> it now would feel like I was lying to myself in some way.  I'll have 
> to comb through old pictures to see if I have any school photographs 
> already, but I suspect not. 

They are close, but not identical to the way they looked then.

The pre-school is virtually unchanged from the angle I took the photo, but going round the 
back of it - which I didn't photograph from I could see into the playground, and not 
surprisingly the play equipment was a bit different from 1979 - I suspect what we had back 
then would be considered too dangerous now.

The same applies to the primary school - different play equipment, but they have also very 
recently (at the start of this year) put new roofs on some of the buildings and I can see that in 
the first photo - in the school building closest to us, you can see a kind of high central roof 
section with windows in it - that's new. 

The second photo showing the front of the school is basically the same as I remember, 
though I assume the trees have changed a bit.

As for the two houses, there's been some changes. Most noticeably - perhaps surprisingly for 
most people - the most obvious change is the letter boxes. When we lived in these houses, 
they were part of a Royal Australian Navy housing estate and every house had an identical 
brown rectangular letter box. Us little kids (I was ten when we moved away from this) used to 
be told that we had to stay in the naval area and we were taught that those letterboxes 
marked the area we had to stay within. The estate was transferred to the Housing 
Commission some years ago, and is now a mixture of public housing and houses sold to 
private owners, and while quite a few houses in there still have the old letter boxes, most 
don't - and neither of my old houses does.

Besides that... the house we lived in the late 1970s has had a nice front verandah added (I 
suspect it's a privately owned house because nobody would bother doing that to a 
commission house), and the posion berry bush that I got my bottom smacked for eating to 
prove to my mother wasn't poisonous is gone. Not that I'd really expect it to be there after 
twenty six years, but I remember that bush.

The house we lived in the early 1980s has had a concrete ramp and hand rails installed to 
the front door - it looks like it's been made wheelchair accessible to me.

I know how you feel about places changing - I have the same issue and I'm lucky these 
places are still recognisable. My old Scout Hall - located right near the preschool - is now just 
a concrete slab in the ground, and I wish I had a photo of that before it went - the council 
decided scouts weren't coming back to the area, and they owned the hall so they demolished 
it - about three weeks later somebody moved to restart a troop. The council generously gave 
them an old pre-school to use as a Scout Hall and while I think it's probably a much nicer 
building inside, I get very amused as it still has its pre-school era paintjob - and I really 
wonder what the scouts feel about meeting in a building that has teddy bears painted on its 
walls!

My later schooling was in a (by Australian standards) very old school that is very intent on 
preserving its historical appearance, so I don't think to worry about that changing. But I did go 
past it's prep school recently (where I spent a year - the happiest year of my childhood) and 
was somewhat disappointed to see it had changed a lot - only somewhat, because I love that 
place so much that I'm very glad to see the kids getting better facilities - but still, nostalgia 
does apply. One thing I couldn't see if they'd changed that I hope they have - our change 
rooms where we used to have to change for sport at that school had a glass front wall - so 
anyone walking past could see us changing. Now that the school has a co-ed section, I hope 
they've fixed that - at 13, I found it rather embarassing when a female teacher walked past, I 
can tell you!

But in terms of changes... this morning I went and took some more local photos at another 
school I attended for one year back in 1987. This was, for me, a hellish and horrible place - it 
almost killed me - and it's only fairly recently I've been able to walk past it without feeling 
physically ill. I took some photos there today, and it hasn't changed much at all - and I wish it 
had because I was delighted to find out that the scene of my greatest misery - the toilets 
where I was beaten unconscious and left on the floor - had been completely demolished, and 
I was so glad to see that place gone.

Photos of that school - with some commentary on some of what happened there - should go 
up sometime today.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200 
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the 
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be 
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that 
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia