Long before passwords, portals and device chargers, Australian children prepared for a new school year in a very different way.
It usually began with a book list.
Not an email. Not an app notification. A proper piece of paper that somehow managed to find its way home from school and onto the kitchen table, where parents would study it with a mixture of determination and financial concern.
Then the annual ritual would begin… School shoes were fitted. Uniforms were inspected. Hems were let down. Buttons were replaced. Hand-me-down jumpers emerged from cupboards for another year of service. Name labels were sewn in with military precision.
And somewhere, usually after dinner, a roll of Contact would appear.
For generations of Australians, this was the ritual of readiness. The signal that summer holidays were winding down and another school year was about to begin.
Few household activities tested family relationships quite like covering school books.
Some parents possessed a remarkable gift for it. Their books emerged perfectly wrapped, corners folded with surgical precision and not an air bubble in sight.
Others found themselves trapped in an increasingly tense battle involving sticky plastic, crooked cuts and language that probably wasn’t encouraged in the family handbook.
The goal was simple enough.
Cover every exercise book without wrinkles, bubbles or accidentally sealing two pages together forever.
Success varied, and many schoolchildren (especially me) spent the entire year staring at air bubbles that looked suspiciously like Tasmania.
Book collection day was almost magical.
You’d walk into a classroom or hall and see stacks of fresh textbooks waiting to be collected. There was something about the smell of new books, sharpened pencils and untouched exercise books that made a new school year feel full of possibility.
For a few brief hours, before homework, exams and report cards entered the picture, anything seemed possible.
You might even be organised this year.
That optimism usually lasted until about the second week of February.
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The contents of a pencil case carried a surprising amount of social currency.
Nobody talked about it openly, but every child knew who had the fancy geometry set, whose sharpener actually worked and who was still borrowing pencils by the second week of term.
If you owned a double-decker pencil case packed with coloured pencils, a protractor and one of those four-colour Bic pens that clicked between red, blue, green and black, you were operating at a level the rest of us could only admire from afar.
Then somebody turned up with a steel ruler.
Suddenly the humble wooden ruler looked prehistoric.
Every generation has its moment when something ordinary suddenly feels revolutionary.
For some readers in their 80s it might have been moving from slates and chalk to exercise books and fountain pens, while others will remember ink cartridges replacing inkwells or calculators appearing in maths classes for the first time.
For me, it was the fluorescent yellow highlighter.
The first time I saw one, I was completely gobsmacked. Up until then, pens came in sensible colours. Blue. Black. Red (if you were lucky).
Then along came this glowing yellow marvel that looked like it had been borrowed from a NASA laboratory.
I desperately wanted one.
Eventually I got my hands on a packet, only to discover my sister — three years ahead of me at school and apparently operating without any regard for property rights — wanted them too.
One disappeared. Then another.
By the time I mounted a formal investigation, the evidence had vanished, and I carried that injustice for years. In fact, when I started my cadetship as a journalist at 19, my beautiful mum bought me a fresh packet of fluorescent pens as a congratulations gift. Before I could even take them into the newsroom, I’d carefully written my name across the packet just in case my sister decided to visit.
To this day there are five fluorescent yellow highlighters sitting on my desk.
I’m not taking any chances.
Looking back, it wasn’t really about the stationery, or the shoes, or the Contact-covered books.
It was about anticipation, and the excitement of a fresh start. The promise of a new year and the feeling that anything might happen between the first school bell and the Christmas holidays.
These memories remain so vivid decades later…
The ruler. The pencil case. The exercise books. The carefully labelled uniform.
They were all part of something bigger.
A ritual of readiness that generations of Australians understood instinctively.
What was the most prized item in your school bag? A four-colour Bic pen? A geometry set? A fountain pen? A steel ruler? Or perhaps something even better? And did anybody else have a sibling who permanently “borrowed” your best stationery? Head on over to our Facebook page, we’d love to hear your memories.
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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