‘I should never have begged to go on school camp’

It was 1963, I was in my last year of school, aged 15, and I begged my parents to let me go on school camp. I did my schooling in Sydney and had to catch a train into Central Station and then take the bus to Narrabeen, which is where our camp was being held.

We were on a red rattler – a single-deck steel carriage train that operated in Sydney and the surrounds from the 1920s until around the ’90s. They were given that name because they were bright red in colour and their windows rattled in their frames as we travelled along the tracks. I remember that the doors stayed open as we travelled too. If you were really cool, you would stand at the door and watch the scenery fly by. Teenagers being invincible never really gave too much thought to the possibility of falling from the train. I remember someone produced a packet of Peter Styvents cigarettes. Wanting to be accepted, I lit one and inhaled a deep breath. A man on the train saw that I was distracted and was about to fall from the train, so he grabbed me by the shirt to stop me.

We arrived at the camp and I was shocked. There was no running water, no toilets, and only a small fireplace. There was a roster to clean the toilets, two girls at a time, but I couldn’t understand why – it was a hole in the ground with a wooden plank across it. We had to collect water from a pond and boil it after removing the tadpoles. On our first bush walk the group came back to find animals had gone through our bags, eating and destroying our food. The teacher said we shouldn’t worry and that there should be a cage in a tree left by the the last lot of kids. They would have put some food in it and strung it high. We found it, but when we opened the door it was crawling with maggots. I was horrified when the teacher told us we could just dust them off.

She instructed us to find a stick each and said we would make a damper. It was a soggy, gluggy mess. Hardly worth eating, but definitely better than anything involving maggots. We could see a lighthouse and when night came and we were in our bunks every time the beam shone in our room one girl would scream, though to this day I have no idea why.

My friend had hidden a tube of condensed milk and ate the lot when no one was looking. She started howling that she had a toothache, and all this drama brought on an asthma attack for me. There were no inhalers in those days, so my teacher put Friar’s Balsam into a jug and added boiling water, which I inhaled to help me breathe.

The camp lasted two horrible days and when the bus pulled up with the boys we were so glad. We were trying to get on the bus before they even had a chance to get off. I never went on another camp as I left school, though I still had the occasional ciggie… I just didn’t smoke near the open door of a train.

Did you go on a school camp as a youngster? What was your experience?

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