Greetings Joybell,

Well, well!! After doing the first two years of "post-primary" schooling at Westgarth Central I also started at Northcote High in 1956, just in time to be part of the turning out of the entire school to form an honour guard for John Cain's (senior) funeral procession; he, like Don Chipp, had attended NHS. I got the dance classes started there in 1958 and finished there in 1960, a master of the Pride of Erin, the Highland Scottische, the Barn Dance and (god help me) the Tangoette.

You may very well have met me there and you may also have met Marshall, my brother, who started there in 1958 in the same class as Normie Rowe. They were "first-formers" (or "fags", as we sixth-formers called such lower forms of life) so I can't really claim to have gone to school with such a famous singer. I don't think Normie Rowe ever sang Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees but Marshall did (as part of Smith's Gully) and now also lives in a home among them in a part of Victoria's goldfields full of folkies.

I'm now in the Australian version of New England, which has lots of Scottish names because (I gather) the original white settlers (mostly Scots) wanted in the 1840s to start a new state, governed separately from Sydney and called New Caledonia. They got part of their wish.

London's Colonial Office did set up a new state but put its border 100 miles north and called it Queensland. The Colonial Office also decreed that on any maps of what had wanted to be called New Caledonia, the largest printing would label it "New England".

But it's got lots of gum trees. And I do have a clothesline out the back. These days it's often called a solar powered clothes drier, however.

Cheers, Rowan