Jack Johnson is the author of When The Clock Strikes, a fascinating account of growing up in Dandenong, his years tending to the city’s pipes and drains as a plumber and bringing up a family with wife Frances in their beloved home in Macpherson Street.
FOR years, school concerts at the first St Mary’s Primary School were held in the part of the school with the stage and classrooms with folding walls.
When the area became too small for the growing number of students they moved to the town hall.
Our early school concerts at the first town hall we will always remember.
The first one I recall celebrated the Jubilee Year in 1935.
Mother Domenic and Sisters Leo and Carmel marched us down Langhorne Street to the hall.
We entered through a gate in Walker Street between the hall buildings and the weatherboard Mechanics’ Institute hall, built in 1863, that still remained as the hall keeper’s residence.
We crossed the yard and entered through a doorway near the original stage.
Here we were drilled many times over for our approaching concert performances.
Sister Carmel, our music teacher, played the town hall piano while we did our physical jerks with wooden dumbbells that were painted silver.
We rehearsed for a couple weeks before the actual night.
On the day of the concert the youngest of the kids were sent home from school at lunchtime to have an afternoon nap so they could cope with the late night.
My brother Nipper got kicked out of the minuet by Sister Leo for not pointing his toe correctly.
He also got a few whacks around his legs when referred on to Mother Domenic who had a leather strap cut from a thick piece of horse harness.
The reason he would not point his toe was because he did not get to partner the girl of his choice.
She lived in New Street and was one of Jinnie’s best mates.
He told me that being her partner was the only reason he agreed to wear those pouncy buckled shoes, funny pants and that frilly, sissy shirt.
Later on, when I got to grades seven and eight, Mother Anthony, Mother Domenic’s successor, had an even bigger and better strap from which I copped a hell of a lot of painful wallopings, many of them caused by my mad mates.
My children were the fourth generation of our family to have an association with the Dandenong town hall.
But it would be decades later, and in the second hall when they would also take part in their school concerts.
The original 1890s hall that we experienced ran in line with Lonsdale Street but when altered in 1940 it ran parallel with Walker Street.
We saw our first movies in the old hall and many stage shows from which we gained our initial appreciation of the performing arts and of beautiful music.
As we became adults much of our social life revolved around the old hall.
We learned to dance in classes in the supper room.
My sister Jinnie made her debut there and later had her wedding reception in the 1940s hall.
We went to our first dances with friends from our childhood and met many new ones from the surrounding districts.
Some of us met life partners there.
