Nude School's Where I'll Be

“I see you are a sportsman Mr Callinan,’ the headmaster nodded his approval across the acreage of his vast desk. “A footballer?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent! We could use an extra rugby coach.”

“I play Aussie Rules.”

Mr Dent’s eyes tilted over his reading glasses as if trying to identify the source of an aggravating sound. I nervously rubbed my neck where a tie should have been, my full job interview accoutrements having not yet followed me to my new home in Toowoomba on Queensland’s Darling Downs.

“And a church man!” he said, the zeal returning to his voice. “Ah, Catholic,’ his tone lowering. ‘No matter, we’re nondenominational here.”

That I played the wrong codes of football and religion proved little barrier in the end as I found myself employed (on the spot) as a physical education teacher at Toowoomba Grammar School.

TGS is a traditional Queensland private school in the GPS system. So passionate were they about the Queensland policy of ‘no daylight savings’ they’d stopped the clocks altogether in the mid-1950s. My very first lesson I think best sums up the temporal paradox of the college. From memory I was getting the boys to assemble a quintain for the next interschool jousting tourney when a senior boy came trotting up to the Trustees Oval to deliver a message.

“Sir, Pigeon and Prendergast to the barber!”

Without even a nod from me, Pigeon and Prendergast trotted after the boy to return fifteen minutes later with all but shaved heads. I was to become used to the polite interruptions of boarding school life with boys plucked from lessons to visit Nurse for a leeching or Chaplain for an exorcism.

For Monday assemblies the entire staff dressed up in full gown-and-mortarboard regalia and went up onto the stage before an utterly silent hall of 800 standing boys. The PE department was absolved from wearing gowns, but paid the price by being sat in the wings of the stage.

Toowoomba is a Queensland town in name only. It has Melbourne’s climate, Adelaide’s conservatism and Perth’s sense of isolation. It’s only 120 kilometres west of Brisbane but the winding dividing range that one must climb to travel the last few kilometres gives it a Shangri La aspect where the new are welcomed begrudgingly and the departed never mentioned again.

It’s known as the Garden City, a badge it wears almost obsessively with an annual festival (quaintly called The Carnival of Flowers) and a parade that is so long that it appears the entire town participates. I remember thinking it was over and then turning back to see a Windscreens O’Brien ute turn onto Margaret Street festooned with garlands of camelias.

It’s rare to see an overgrown garden in Toowoomba. Even neglecting your lawn for a fortnight leads to the sight of a burning rake on your front lawn ringed by men in white robes and hoods doing your edging and spraying your roses for aphids.

The easiest way to integrate into any community, other than planting a tiered hydrangea garden, is to join the local footy team. Having just played in the Northern Territory Football League over the wet season for the North Darwin Magpies (now Palmerston), I was keen to maintain the momentum, but this being rural Queensland, I wasn’t even sure if there were any AFL footy teams to play with. I was in luck, I spied an article in the Toowoomba Chronicle by a local journo who played for the Toowoomba Tigers AFL team.

The Friday night after I arrived I had some mates up from Melbourne so we headed down to the Tigers pub, the Settlers Inn, to get the vibe. As we played pool, we were approached by a bloke in a Tigers shirt with a wad of raffle tickets. In the glow of recent employment I bought a swag. As I stepped towards the bar to collect the first meat tray there was a tepid cheer for the out-of-towners. There was quiet bemusement when I won the second and thinly disguised hostility when I won the third. The atmosphere was such that we didn’t wait for the fourth draw.

As we cooked up our various cuts in Queens Park we all agreed that if there is one AFL team there must at least be one other for them to play against. A small advertisement in the Toowoomba Chronicle confirmed the theory. My ear was still warm from my inquiring phone call when I had the coaching committee of the Darling Downs Institute Eagles on my doorstep.

They settled uncomfortably close to each other on the two-seater couch and started the pitch. Assistant coach Jimmy Urquhart, a former Essendon twos player, didn’t say a lot, allowing the coach, Paul Feltham to do all of the talking. A North Melbourne premiership player, he was studying sports psychology at the Institute and already had the 1986 premiership with the Eagles under his belt. With the transitory nature of university teams, he was determined to get access to any new blood. Without having seen me even look at a Sherrin, they handed me the No.11 guernsey and organised a roster to get me to training on the far side of town.

Feltham was a charismatic, but mysterious character. He was well-liked by the team but he was the subject of more rumours than Boo Radley. I tended to ignore the chatter and take on his words of advice. He was one of the first men in my life who challenged me directly and inspired me to reach beyond what was easy, both on the footy field and in life.

Some of his exhortations rang in my heart years later when I made the leap from teaching to comedy. He also actively encouraged and promoted women as equals at the footy club: a wildly preposterous notion for most footy clubs in the 1980’s.

The first training was billed as a ‘light’ getting to know you session followed by a barbecue at Sandy ‘Whale’ Martin’s house, which was conveniently located over the back fence from the oval. The first bloke I got to know was fellow new recruit Jeff Head. As we knelt side by side regurgitating our breakfast we discovered that we had a bit in common. We were both phys-ed teachers and had a similarly different slant on the phrase ‘light session.’ Jeff was a solid defender with a safe pair of hands who had previously played for Dalby, an hour north-west of Toowoomba.

To get to training on the windy plains of Drayton, I either had to walk down the hill to the bottle shop where Jimmy worked, or team manager Bill Graham would collect me in his Holden Kingswood. En route he would regale me with tales of life in footy clubs from Bendigo to Brisbane.

Bill nodded approvingly when I finally turned up to training with my own HQ Holden. It was shit brown with a white roof, bench seats and three on the tree. It wasn’t long before I became the taxi driver. My first job was to transport five blokes down ‘The Range’ to Brisbane to catch the Moreton Island ferry for a training camp. Being the non-Queenslander and newbie to the club, I assumed at least one of them would have known the way. They didn’t.

We not only missed the boat but never even came close to finding the ferry terminal. Thus we found ourselves in Brisbane for the weekend, training in a way not entirely in keeping with what Feltham had in mind. Here I bonded with two of the less geographically cognisant of the four Graham boys.

Bill and Dot Graham, originally from Bendigo, were more than the heart and soul of the club. They had donated every son and most organs to ensure that two sides ran out on the field each week.

Danger (David), Noos (Mark), Pee Wee (Peter) and Nick (Nick) were the four legal sons but everyone who pulled on the blue and gold was treated like he might have been a bastard Graham. In my time in Toowoomba, there was perennially a Graham in close proximity. Whether they be shooing magpies away while I took a swing on the golf course, or cooking home-made pizzas while the darts thumped into the asbestos walls of the garage, they were a constant presence.

The club at the time was presided over by the delightfully eccentric Dave Hacker, a forty-year-old primary school teacher who lived with his mum. Hack wore the same home-knitted jumper around the club every day. It was threadbare and smelt like a wet koala. We all chipped in and bought him another jumper for his birthday, which he thanked us for, then diligently refused to wear.

The Darling Downs Australian Football League at the time was made up of seven teams. There were the four town teams: Coolaroo, who to a man looked like extras in a prison movie; Souths, predominantly made up of diggers from the Cabarlah Army Barracks nineteen kilometres out of town; the Toowoomba Tigers, predominantly made up of fuckwits from all walks of life; and us, the boys of the Institute.

The bush teams were Dalby, who were such nice blokes that thumping them felt wrong; Lockyer Valley, who fulfilled the charter that there must be a team in all levels of competition who wear Collingwood jumpers; and the recently merged Goondiwindi-Moonie.

The first game I can remember was against Souths out at Cabarlah. Without exaggeration, the field looked like it had been used as an artillery range. As the twos ran around tripping over spent cartridges and disappearing down fox holes, Feltham made all the firsts line up along the hill that overlooked the ground and every available hand set about the task of strapping forty ankles.

The ground was rock hard and wore its few tufts of grass like an alopecia sufferer who is past caring. Falling over resulted in abrasions usually associated with motorcycle accidents, so we took a while to adjust. The fearless Souths boys wore skin that had been transformed into callouses over the pre-season – a considerable advantage. But we ran over the top of them, convincingly, in the second half as we got a handle on the topography, using the trenches to sneak a loose man forward on occasions.

Perversely, I rolled my ankle the following week on the comparatively lush expanse of the Baker Street Oval, our home ground. The next week, I was given until the last minute to prove my fitness for the match against Goondiwindi-Moonie. As we unravelled from the bus after the three-hour trip to Moonie, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see a few cows grazing at the western end. Any plans of me playing through the pain were abandoned after inspecting the field that made Souths home ground look like the lawns of Versailles. Feltham caught my eye and shook his head, the boys got changed, and I went to the bar with the rest of the rehab group.

We scored a comfortable win against an under-manned Goondiwindi-Moonie, whose ranks had been decimated by the winter, wheat harvest.

Having had a head start on the others, I required the first bush wee on the drive back. Inevitably, as I went to climb back on board, the bus took off. Anaesthetised by my day’s takings, I ignored my dodgy ankle and took off after the bus. It kept just out of my reach for just long enough for it to be funny again.

‘The Tutes’ were the most heavily nicknamed team I ever played for. Most players had at least one moniker – and in exceptional cases up to three monikers.

My nickname was conceived, tested and locked in within a 24-hour period. While I was rushing to head out one night, I hung my only pair of jeans in front of the heater to dry while I showered. When I returned, the entire arse of the jeans had burnt through. Wearing the seared, arseless jeans with a long grandpa shirt untucked for modesty, I rushed down to the shops, which shut at 5.30pm on the button in the country. In Toowoomba the doors come down like Billy the Kidd has just ridden into town.

At 5.29pm, I staggered into Robert’s Menswear on Ruthven Street, who were fortuitously having a sale. Out the front was a table stacked high with Levi’s for $50. I dropped my pineapple on the counter without even trying the jeans on, stooped under the closing shutters and walked into the fading light.

As I ambled into the Uni Club to meet up with a large swathe of my teammates, the initial greetings turned to silence as their eyes dropped to below waist level.

Noddy Lethlean broke the silence. “Acciiddddd!”

The other boys chorused: “Acciddddd!”

I was called nothing else for the rest of the night and indeed, the remainder of the season. I didn’t know what acid wash jeans were and therefore, in my vulnerable state, had been unable to resist their economic allure. Tim ‘Jack’ Clarke, one of the loveliest blokes I’ve ever met, took me aside and explained my fashion faux pas. He suggested I wear the burnt jeans the next day to the match until I worked something else out, but that did little to arrest the momentum of the nickname.

Jack was another Victorian exile, who, like many of my teammates, was studying agricultural engineering. He had feet the size of a suburban block and a smile that could talk a nun into an orgy. As popular as he was with the ladies, he was my bitch on the dance floor. At the first bars of Nude School by the Painters and Dockers, he’d abandon his muse for the night and come streaming onto the dance floor. We’d meet for two minutes and forty-nine seconds of kinaesthetic bliss. Then we’d request a series of songs the DJ had never heard of and Jack would somehow convince him to play Nude School again.

Undefeated at the halfway point, our team dominated selection for the rep side for the Queensland Country Football Championships. More than half the side played in the city-country selection trial. The day of the match was so foggy that Jack the Ripper would have stayed indoors. Morning fog is not a rarity at the top of the range, but by midday it hadn’t lifted and I got a call to say the game was off. One of my teammates, Col Vernon, lived down the hill but didn’t have a phone so I had to run down and let him know. I had just returned when the phone rang again. The game was back on. By the time I got back from my second errand, I began to hyperventilate and began telling anyone who’d listen that the Greeks had defeated the Persians in battle.

The under-eighteens were playing when I arrived. At least I think they were. You could hear that a game was being played but unless the action stayed on the clubrooms side you could not see a thing.

Despite not being able to categorically distinguish individuals, a squad was selected and eleven Eagles made the cut. I was picked but collected an injury in the dying minutes that impacted on the rest of the season. I tackled a bloke, fairly I might add. He was the quicker of the two of us at getting to his feet, and as I lay on the ground, he deliberately stomped on my knee. ‘That’s for the meat trays dickhead!’ I heard him call out as he disappeared into the vapour.

I played the next week in a warm-up friendly against QAFL side Coorparoo, but by half-time my knee was a balloon. The carnival was the following week. With the tight turnaround of games, I couldn’t recover in time after the early games and had to sit out the second half of the tournament.

I had a floating bone that had been cleaved from my kneecap and the initial diagnosis was surgery. I sought a second opinion from a sports doctor who suggested that a weight program to build the muscles around my knee may help. This combined with some nifty strapping techniques that Feltham came up with to disperse the fluid meant I could keep playing. I’d lost a yard and took days to recover but within a few weeks the knee pain was dissipating. Then: Pinnnnggg! Torn hammy.

I’d been doing my own made-up weights program at the school gym. The result of my experiment was that I’d built myself a pair of quads that could deflect bullets but I’d left my hammies the size of snow peas.

For those who like kitchen based analogies, tearing your hammy sounds like someone has dropped a stack of pancakes on a slate kitchen floor and feels like someone is rummaging for cutlery in the back of your leg. At the time I was sprinting next to Col Vernon, who was marginally faster than I, but I was surging to keep up, as I had yet another phone message to pass on to him.

I missed two games but with one game left before the finals, I rushed my recovery and did it again in identical circumstances, chasing Col down the outer wing.

“We can’t keep doing this, Col,” I said, clutching yet another bag of frozen peas to my thigh. “You’ve got to get your own phone.”

That night a physio who had just moved to town had arrived down at training unannounced. He’d worked with national under age rugby teams and told the coaches that he had machines that made noises. Getting me fit to play in the Grannie (if we made it) became his project. For seventeen days I was up all through the night icing, stretching, stair-walking and attempting to re-dye my jeans. I did everything possible to get myself right. Well, almost. Most of the team drove down The Range to Gatton to watch the preliminary final between Toowoomba Tigers and Gundi-Moonie Saints. Feltham wandered up to a group of us and asked if he could have a sip of my beer. I passed it to him. He dropped it in the bin and said: “Slows down your recovery. You should know that.”

We had made it through to the Grand Final by comfortably knocking off the Tigers in the semi. On the last Thursday night before the grand final, I was put through a fitness test. Despite doing everything asked of me, it wasn’t made clear to me if I’d passed.

Later that night the whole team went out to Qi’Lin Oriental Restaurant for dinner. After the meal, the coaching inner sanctum went behind the Chinese paper screens to finalise the team. Just after the lychees and ice cream were served, I was summoned.

“Are you right to play?’” Feltham asked.

“I think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

‘Then you’re in.”

There was only one change from the winning semi-final side. Sandy ‘Whale’ Martin graciously patted me on the back after he’d returned from behind the paper screens and genuinely made me feel like it was important that I play. Blokes like him are why they created best-clubman awards.

Goondiwindi-Moonie, free of the agronomical constraints of the seasons, had stormed up the ladder late in the year and had made it through. They’d knocked us off late in the season, and we had injuries, so despite being minor premiers we were looking pretty precarious.

We got off to a good start and seemed to have their measure. I was playing better than I’d hoped and had forgotten about my hammy thanks to the magic physio and noise making machines. Just before three-quarter time they got a sniff and started getting into the game. I got thrown down back as an extra man in defence to stem the momentum. With the ball in dispute during another surge forward, I grabbed the ball in their goal square and was tackled by three players at once. Unfortunately, one tackler managed to pick up my left leg and bend it up past my ear. The siren went and I limped to the clubrooms, shook my head as I walked past the coaches box, and sat alone in the rooms on ice.

As the last quarter began, I listened to the soundscape of the match like a jilted lover listening through the wall to his ex in action with someone else. I was conflicted. If we won I would feel bad that I’d denied Whale a premiership. If we lost I would feel guilty that my injury had contributed to the loss.

The escalating emotion in the sound of the crowd broke me from my reverie and I hobbled out onto the bench. Gundi-Moonie were coming home strongly and were on the brink of a fairytale comeback win. Somehow we rallied and stemmed the flow and the siren sounded with us six points up.

The night is a blur, as all premiership nights should be. All I remember is that it involved having the run of the Drayton Hotel; Bill Graham declaring us the “best bloody team he’d ever seen”; Jeff Head and I proudly not throwing up together after another light session; Hack allowing us to unravel his favourite jumper row by row until he was just wearing a collar with a string connected to pile of yarn at his feet; and the entire team singing and dancing to Nude School. On the now traditional second airing of the song, Jack led the vanguard in a nude rendition.

Grand Final wins change relationships fleetingly: guys you haven’t spoken to all year become blood brothers. I can still see myself wrestling under the pool table with a bloke called Bunny, drinking XXXX from the premiership cup with a blonde Viking-type nicknamed Heidi, and separately informing each of the Graham boys that they were my favourite.

The ’87 season was my only one with the Tutes Eagles. I moved back to Melbourne but kept in contact with the boys, some to this day, and mourned with them the tragic loss of Jack in ’88 after his yacht disappeared in the Melbourne to Devonport. His passing made me reflect, younger than is customary, on the fact that I’d shared a magic year with an exceptional group of people.

So, one more time fellas wherever you are …

Oh, we’re all going to nude school, a nude school, that’s for me-ee.

We’re all happy at nude school, a nude school is where I’ll be …

Postscript 1 - The Darling Downs Institute Eagles are now the (South East Queensland) University Cougars, but they continue to play at the same fog prone Baker Street Oval in Drayton. At the time of writing in 2024, there are still 7 teams in the league. The men’s senior team are currently 5th and the senior women’s team are 2nd. Go the Cougars, formerly known as the Eagles!!

Postscript 2 - My good mate Dave Pace plays in the Painters & Dockers & having music royalty mates significantly enhanced my cache at the footy club. You can check out the Nude School film clip here. Sadly Dave, also a teacher, wasn’t allowed time off to get his kit off at the piggery.

Postscript 3 - This is an edited version of a story I wrote for a book called Footy Town: Stories of Australia’s Game (2013) An anthology of grassroots footy writing compiled and edited by Paul Daffey and John Harms. You can still order copies of the book from the Footy Almanac website.

(The 1987 Darling Downs Australian Football League Premiers - The Institute Eagles. The author is sitting arms folded with the footy. This photo was taken before the match, while both hamstrings were intact. I have no recollection of the bloke on the end with no shoes, but we probably did the Nutbush together on Grand Final night)