Mark O'Leary
1970-1973
Email: markoleary@hotmail.com
What?
We're going to Penang?
Where's that?
Malaysia?
Why?
All those questions and dozens more entered my fevered primary school brain
when my Dad came home from work one day, and apropos of nothing, announced
he was posted.
We had moved from London to Sydney in the mid-Sixties - but this was something else.
What about my friends? What about football? What about our house?
Oh, such innocence and naivete.
I forgot all about the fuss until the day I was taken out
of school to go to Dad's work (for the first time, I might add) at Beacon
Hill.
To get our jabs.
Arrgh. What's that for? In case I get cholera. Or typhoid. Or tetanus.
Thanks, why couldn't I have taken a tablet like these malaria pills, then?
This Malaysia place better be good.
It's May 1970: the Sydney Opera House is built, but not yet open... Australia
is in the midst of celebrating the bicentenary of Cook's landing, and from
that same Botany Bay a Qantas Boeing 707 is endeavouring to get off the tarmac.
No charter flight for us, we're on a scheduled jaunt to Singapore, where we
stay one night - before flying on to Penang on an MAS jet.
I'm not even ten yet, and here I am about to live in another continent. Again.
We get taken to a semi-detatched house in Tanjong Bungah, 8 Jalan Bunga Kaca
Piring.
Wow!
It's two storeys.
It's got fans.
It's got red floors.
It's got weird trees.
And there are all these crazy people here trying to talk to Mum and Dad, and
wait a minute... there's Uncle Jock and Auntie Lynn. Friendly faces.
And there's a graveyard at the end of the road.
How cool.
I wonder what school's going to be like?