BY PHILIP FITZPATRICK

WE TEND to view the past with rose tinted glasses.  The bad experiences fade away and the good ones remain.  It’s part of the natural human inclination to be happy.

Sometimes something comes along to remind us of those less than pleasant experiences.  In the case of PNG a re-reading of John Bailey’s 1972 book The Wire Classroom will do the trick.  In many ways it’s a revelation, albeit not a pleasant one.

The story follows the progression of a young teacher straight out of ASOPA through a year at the mythical outstation of Wendi in the Gulf District.

Remember the interminable boredom of outstation life? Remember the booze ridden days and nights, the heat, the constant damp and the unfathomable ways of the locals? It’s all in Bailey’s book.

Remember the faint suspicion that you and your friends were there because you couldn’t make a go of it in Oz; that you were somehow second rate?

Remember the universally held belief that the locals, especially your hausboi, were useless and could break almost anything? Remember the story about the highlander who came back to his boss with the broken anvil?

Remember the counter balance? The intelligent and educated local who was not lauded for those qualities but feared for what he or she could do with them.

What about the illicit sex where people away from their customary environment behaved in all sorts of scandalous ways?  Where PNG women became objects of white male longing and the constant ogling of bare breasts was a regular pastime.

Remember the longing to be home in Oz among the familiar?  When being able to buy something as simple as a strawberry milkshake at the local deli became an obsession.

Remember the urge to be out of the debilitating heat and humidity and to be back to cold winters and warm fires?

Not your experience you say; I enjoyed my time up there, but for sure I knew people like that.

Bailey’s chalkie anti-hero who finally realises he was not cut out for teaching and outstation life and eventually skulks off home was certainly that way inclined.

Remember Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright?  This is the PNG version.  Have a drink mate?  Have a fight mate?  Have a taste of dust and sweat mate?  There’s nothing else out here mate reads the poster for the successful 1971 film version now being deified as an Australian classic.

There is no doubt where Bailey got his inspiration.  The descent of outback teacher John Grant into his own personal hell is beautifully paralleled in Bailey’s book by the chalkie Charlie Cummins.

This was John Bailey’s first novel.  He went on to write a snappy and funny sci-fi novel in 1978 called The Moon Baby and then disappeared off the scene until The White Divers of Broome in 2001, The Lost German Slave Girl in 2003 and then the much acclaimed Mr Stuart’s Track in 2006.

Read The Wire Classroom if you dare.  It will make you laugh and it will depress you but it will also make you think, was it really as good as I remember?

Search Abe Books on the net for a copy.