My recollections of 1967 remind me of a few firsts:
In education Most of us who left school in 1967 were born in 1949. We were part of the post WWII baby boom and the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation. We experienced the first year of the Wyndham Scheme and Higher School Certificate (HSC), which replaced the Leaving Certificate. (The Leaving Certificate had been used to select university entrants from 1939 to 1962). The change to the HSC resulted in our secondary education being six years rather than five. We left school at the age eighteen at a time that many of our cohorts were being sent to fight in the war in Vietnam. At school Being eighteen years old, we were young men, full of testosterone in an all-male gated community. I recall that our assistant housemaster’s wife was only a year or two older than us. In our final year we sat for our HSC in October and school didn’t finish until early December. This was unchartered territory and, for those of us boarding, we were kept occupied in chain gangs building sandstone walls and paths around the School for several weeks until cadet camp at Singleton, in the first week of December. At our final cadet camp while on bivouac we were instructed by regular army soldiers who had served in Vietnam, the art of fighting the Vietcong in tunnel warfare in a mock Vietnamese compound … in the next year or two, four of our year were conscripted and posted to Vietnam. Post school The national service scheme was in place from 1964 to 1972, when the new Whitlam government suspended the scheme. As twenty year olds, we were compulsorily selected for national service through a ballot system. This was based in a lottery using birthdays for selection. I recall my relief when my birth date wasn’t selected (although those on the next day were). I then went on to work and part time tertiary education, while opposition to conscription and the Vietnam war grew.
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