It matters not a whit to anyone else, though it interests me, that while I was spending my time in short-panted boredom in classes 2A and 3A at Rose Bay Public, my cohort in China were being released from their bondage and exhorted to make revolution. Freed from attending classes indefinitely, elementary school age students were at their liberty to goof off, shout slogans, engage in vicious gang warfare, join Red Guard units and even denounce their teachers should the latter to be found in any way counter-revolutionary. It must for many have been one long mad holiday. For others, of course, a disaster.
No denouncing of staff for us though. By the time Lin Biao was crashing into the Mongolian steppes, following the alleged abortive coup against Mao, I was enduring the authoritarian strictures of the kind of regime that would have been a prime target in China. Surely if Comrades Deng and Liu could be denounced and struggled against, then the Black Gang of Meyers, Welch and Pierce, whose crimes were everyday apparent to students at Killarney Heights High, were worthy of at least one dàzìbào. Not for us The Thoughts of Chairman Mao - rather - The 1000 Concerns of A.M Meyers.
At some point though, there was a real time intersection between my Australian childhood and events in China. In 1976, whilst immersed in my final year HSC, I bought a short-wave radio. Nightly, I tuned in to the Voice of America and Radio Peking. 1976 was a biggie in Chinese History - the death of Zhou Enlai,, the second purging of Deng Xiaouping, the death of Mao Tse-Tung, the arrest and imprisonment of the Gang of Four, the post-Mao power struggle. I would spend some time going over my study notes, then take a break listening to the martial female voice on Radio Peking that barked the latest production figures and loudly denounced the Gang. That was a time!
As Exhibit A, consider this elementary school textbook cover from Guangxi province.
compared with, say, this one from NSW.
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