User:Reboogstoob

Royal Park High School

This is the high school I attended from 1973 until the year I graduated which was most definitely not 1973. It was a later year, after 1977 but before 1979. I remember my final year very vividly because it was the year Van Halen released their debut album and it was the year I fell down the stairs in the main building, breaking both my legs and, in the process, the legs of the headmaster who wouldn't get out of the way as I was tumbling down. There may have been one or two other students caught up in all this tumbling down plus a teacher or two. The memory is a bit cloudy but it sure was a busy set of stairs, kids and teachers up and down all day.

Royal Park High School was situated in the city of Adelaide. Well, not really the city, a suburb actually. The suburb, like the school, was called Royal Park and it never ceases to amaze me what an extraordinary coincidence it was that these two separate entities should share the same name. I remember a kid in my Geography class telling me some ridiculous story about the school being named after the suburb, but I just told him to stop telling lies and to stop drawing pictures of motorbikes on his map of Venice, the city we were studying at the time.

Despite its name there was nothing particularly royal about Royal Park High School and I can't remember there being a park either. In fact the closest park was about three suburbs away. It had about two swings, one slippery dip, a seesaw and a gigantic football stadium which nobody bothered to attend because they were too busy fighting over who gets to use the slippery dip. Consequently, nobody was in the stadium to see Liverpool defeat Manchester United 48-0 when they stopped over in Adelaide on their world tour of exhibition matches. Well at least Liverpool put on an exhibition. Manchester United were so rubbish they couldn't even put on their guernseys. Without help. That's how the newspaper reported it. I wasn't at the game, I was in the park fighting the younger kids so my little brother could claim that elusive slippery dip. Slippery indeed!

Shortly after I left Royal Park High School it was renamed West Lakes High. But they couldn't remove the graffiti from the sign out front and so they were stuck with this new, unsolicited name. Which is strange because there aren't any lakes in Royal Park, certainly not to the west. All I can remember are huge puddles on the road, riding to school in winter. For a while the powers that be weren't sure about the new name foisted upon them by a lunatic vandal graffiti nut and so they decided to just close the school down forever, which they did. Right in the middle of class. "Sorry kids but off you go to another school. Good luck finding one at such short notice", were the last words the headmaster ever said to the students. The buildings are still there today. And they were there yesterday. And they'll be there tomorrow too. But it's not a school anymore. And they've added a great big park with a great big lake which Queen Elizabeth likes to sail on whenever she's in Adelaide. A truly Royal Park!