• Meeting up after 50 years—no time at all, really. Back row L-R: John Huts, Peter Fox, David Swift, David Sutcliffe. Front Row L-R: Nolene Rowell, Nola Lewis (née Rothwell), Es Pashley. Photo by Jeremy Dixon

After 50 years out in the world, the kids from Mt Pleasant primary school are meeting up.

The school’s having its 60th anniversary this year and David Swift is trying to track down classmates who graduated in 1963.

He says with the anniversary coming up, “I contacted a couple of friends and said ‘what’s happening?’

“And they said ‘what are you going to do?’ So I accidently volunteered myself to organise it.”

He says many who went to the school still live in the area and he occasionally bumps into familiar, if more weathered, faces.

Mr Swift is hoping former students will come forward to share memories about playing marbles in the schoolyard, fancy dress balls and other rites of passage.

“They used to have this rather corny Guy Fawkes night on November 5 every year,” he recalls.

“There’d be a bit of a bonfire, which sounds tremendously dangerous. Maybe somewhere along the way it was considered too dangerous.”

Built in the middle of what was then-bush, Mt Pleasant was an unusual experimental primary school in the early days but Mr Swift was happy to be one of its guinea pigs.

“Any new teaching aids, reading programs and maths programs were trialed on us right the way through school, which sounds horrible but it was actually great because it meant that quite regularly some amazing new scheme would turn up… which made school interesting. I never did find school boring.”

A farmer-turned-anaesthetist (who enjoys a bit of hypnotherapy as a hobby), he says it’s been interesting to see friends from so long ago grow up to become big wigs in government (one’s the architect of the new hospital). More than a few have done the mid-life crisis thing and bought Harleys, he chuckles.

The 60th anniversary school fair is on Saturday October 26 from 10am to 3pm, and the year seven class of 1963 will be at the memorabilia stand at 11am.

by DAVID BELL