Dianavan's question "Since you seem to agree that parents impart values, would you then say that two children (being instilled with the same value system) have exactly the same opportunities in life?" reminded me of an educational event we used to run from our inner suburban school in Melbourne. It was called "The Basalt Excursion" and was used to demonstrate the social consequences, in the 1980s, of volcanic eruptions some 10,000 years ago. Many of you won't know much about Melbourne so here's a summary of the event.

15-10,000 years ago, volcanic eruptions in Victoria's Western District produced a basalt plain (3rd largest in the world, according to some texts) that pushed the surface drainage and rivers at its eastern end, eastward to the where the older shales and mudstones had blocked the basalt flows. The river there is now called the Yarra; Sydneysiders regard it as the only river in the world that flows upside down, because of its sediment load.

When whitefellas arrived in 1836 and started to build the place we call Melbourne, the first industries (fellmongering and brewing) required lots of flat land and water; both were in plentiful supply along the Yarra in the area that is now regarded as the inner suburbs. Trouble was, both industries were extremely (and offensively) smelly, so the only people who built houses in those areas were the ones who couldn't afford to build anywhere else.

They were working folk that would, at the time, have been regarded as "working class" and their houses were frequently timber and occasionally brick, but almost always "terraced", with the building across the whole frontage of the block of land. The larger blocks had a frontage of 16' and there were (and still are) many that had only a 10' frontage. We would tour the students through Abbottsford, Collingwood and Richmond to show them the built landscape of this and then contrast it with the contrasting landscpae of where the bosses and the moneyed population lived at the same time.

The "upper class" lived away from the foul smells, which was usually across the river in the leafy suburbs of South Yarra, Toorak and Kew; the usual method of crossing the river was to pay (there's the rub) the operator of the punt from Richmond to South Yarra and the road to the punt (there's now a bridge) is still called Punt Road. This led to the social "class" division of Melbourne into "south of the Yarra" (where all the toffs lived) and "the northern suburbs" where us (I declare my 'bias') hoi polloi lived and where the school I taught at was located.

So much for "history"?

Well, in 1980 (from memory), one of the writers on education for Melbourne's "classy" broadsheet newspaper did a little experiment, straight after the HSC results had been published; the "Higher School Certificate" in Oz is the Year 12 final exam that gets you into uni and US and UK readers will have their equivalents. His experimental methodology was to write a series of job application letters to banks, insurance companies and similar institutions that routinely employed such school leavers. Apart from mythical names of such applicants, the only differences between the letters was the putative home address of the mythical applicant; all the HSC results nominated in the applications were exactly the same. There were equal numbers of applications from both sides of the class divide.

And guess the results!

3/4 of the applications which showed an address "south of the Yarra" were invited to an interview, while only 1/4 of the applications from an address "north of the Yarra" received an invitation to interview. We put it down to volcanic eruptions in the Holocene.

I'd say the experiment had a certain style. Yes?
But there's no such thing as "class" in Oz.

Cheers, Rowan