There was a particular kind of excitement in going to school with a brown paper bag.

This wasn’t the bag carrying your sandwiches. This one had your name and class written across the front, your lunch order underneath and the money folded carefully inside.

It was tuckshop day, and from the moment Mum handed you that bag lunch became pretty much the most important appointment in your diary. At school the orders were collected, disappeared into the mysterious workings of the tuckshop or canteen, and then began the wait.

Maths couldn’t move quickly enough.

Somewhere out there, somebody was preparing my pie.

A little bag of anticipation

The brown paper lunch order became part of school life for generations of Australian kids, although what we called the place supplying it depended somewhat on where we grew up.

Tuckshop was particularly familiar in Queensland, while canteen was more common elsewhere, and plenty of older Australians remember school lunches before either became a regular part of the week.

By the ’50s and ’60s, school tuckshops and canteens were becoming well established, often run with enormous help from mums and parent volunteers. By the ’70s and ’80s, the brown paper bag ritual was familiar to kids across the country.

Mum wrote your name and class on the bag, added the order, worked out how much it cost and put the coins inside. At school the bags were collected, usually in a basket or box, and vanished.

Then you had to get through the rest of the morning.

I don’t remember giving much thought to the mums out the back who were actually making all this happen. They were preparing sandwiches, heating pies and sausage rolls, sorting bags, counting money and somehow getting the correct lunch back to the correct child.

Well, most of the time.

There was a procedure

Every school seemed to have its favourites, and every kid had a preferred way of eating them.

At mine, you didn’t just bite into a meat pie like some sort of amateur. The lid came off first. I can’t remember why. It simply did.

Then there were Twisties stuffed into a buttered bread roll, which somehow seemed like an entirely reasonable meal. Three dim sims for 50 cents was another favourite of mine, and a Big M could turn a very good lunch order into an outstanding one.

Other generations will remember sausage rolls, pasties, sandwiches, icy poles, flavoured milk and whatever particular treasure their own school canteen managed to produce.

The prices look ridiculous now, of course, but when you were a kid those coins represented serious purchasing power. If Mum had allowed something extra on the order, the day was looking very good indeed.

Podmore?

Then came lunchtime and the basket returned.

Someone began calling out names while the bags were handed around the room, and one by one my classmates collected the lunches they’d been thinking about all morning.

“Smith!”

Bag gone.

“Jones!”

Another one.

I waited confidently because mine was obviously in there somewhere, but the pile kept getting smaller and there was still no Podmore.

Then the last bag was handed out.

Nothing.

Surely there had been some mistake. The basket was checked again, presumably because an entire meat pie and Big M might somehow have been hiding underneath it.

Nope.

My brown paper bag hadn’t come.

I can still remember that particular sense of injustice. I’d done everything right and Mum had filled out the bag, the money had gone in and I’d handed it over before sitting through an entire morning of school on the understanding that there was a hot lunch waiting for me at the other end.

Now everyone around me was eating.

At that age, a missing lunch order was a catastrophe.

Someone eventually found me some leftover steamed dim sims from recess that had turned to rubber. Schools weren’t generally in the business of letting children starve because their pie had gone missing, but three rubbery leftover steamed dimmies certainly didn’t match the lunch I’d spent all morning imagining.

The bag comes back

Sometimes your change came back inside the same bag. Sometimes the bottom had developed that unmistakable translucent patch where the warmth and grease from a pie or sausage roll had soaked into the paper.

You could almost smell lunch before your name was called.

These days many school lunches are ordered online, with parents tapping a screen rather than hunting around for coins before school, although the old brown paper bag hasn’t completely disappeared.

I’m pleased about that.

While I’ve forgotten a lot of things about the old school days, I remember the bag, the coins inside it, waiting for my name to be called and the excitement of seeing that slightly greasy parcel finally heading in my direction.

And I certainly remember the day it didn’t.

You never forget a missing pie.

This article is part of ‘Lessons That Last’, a new Starts At 60 series exploring the memories, traditions and school experiences that shape Australians across generations, presented in partnership with Schoolblazer Limited, a specialist school uniform company that works with hundreds of schools internationally. Through Lessons That Last, Starts At 60 is exploring the memories and experiences of school life across generations of Australians.

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