Ripponlea

 

Uniform was compulsory for the speckled youths who congregated on Ripponlea platform that Saturday of all Saturdays. Shirts were tucked in that time alone promised would hang out. We piled into the red rattler with an effort at adventure, but somehow the prospect of boat races, and only boat races all day, lent internally a certain sinking feeling. Energy was kept up through loud voices with louder opinions, the vision of passing Melbourne streetscapes, in an atmosphere lacking deodorant. Seating in red rattlers was hard upholstery of a kind lost to mind for your average Jaded Bayside Commuter (JBC), designed for the age of the ramrod spine and steel buttocks. It was easy to hide behind a newspaper, which stretched across half the carriage. Werribee made way for Corio and soon enough hoved into view the underwhelming sight of South Geelong, ergo inevitable wave upon wave of an afternoon’s rowing. Some of us were already wishing for rewind, to that happy time previous to ‘the gateway to the South’, Ripponlea. But, like rowing boats, time moves forward even though the rowers face in the opposite direction. Hordes of uniforms, nowadays called cohorts, mooched downhill to the tiresome grey expanse that was the Barwon River. Caulfield, as always, were consistent in their performance throughout the day, consistently last. This did nothing to improve the general outlook. The sight of scintillating Scotch and overwhelming Wesley winning most contests, was abject. That the same number of rowers (8) in similar skinny shafts of boat ended in the same result, left one in a state of the St Kildas. (Ripponlea is a gateway to St Kilda.) The word for the wrist action that swivels an oar above the waterline, the name of the glue that keeps the cox attached to his seat, the long history of Geelong Grammar collisions with other craft – all the finer points of this pastime, were irrelevant to discussion in the face of such wholesale Titanic from Caulfield. Time to stroll through the picnickers on the other bank, parents and old boys quaffing bubbly, cheerfully chewing drumsticks outback of Range Rovers and Rovers and such, in mock heroic emulation of something English. Each raucous “Rah-rah Brahton!” and “Up School!” from bescarved onlookers only compounded the sense we were trudging through a lost weekend. Wearisome Wesley and soporific Scotch were enough to drive a teetotaller to whisky, as they crossed the line again in record time. One longed for return views of the You Yangs from the exhausted distance of the jolting red rattler, the last word in discomfort; thence to join other JBCs on the way back to where the whole wretched business of keeping up appearances began, geranium-bedecked Ripponlea Station, parents waiting for the evening pickup.