The learning process dovetailed neatly with other things happening around me, and while it involved some of the elements that had made me one, I found myself in an increasingly Music Freak Free environment, though over the next nine years there was the odd light on the horizon.
There was one bloke on the staff at Aitkenvale with tastes that ran to the new west coast country-rock exemplified by the Eagles, which was interesting at the start, and he'd picked up on a couple of other odds and ends - Jerry Jeff Walker and Jesse Winchester, for example. Named his son Jesse, not necessarily after Mr Winchester, as far as I recall, but familiarity with Biloxi and Brand New Tennessee Waltz had something to do with it.
After Bruce left town, headed back towards home on the Sunshine Coast, I got to know the District Relieving Teacher based at the school, a bloke who wasn't always there, since the DRT was likely to end up in odd locations like Petford, Mount Surprise or Lockhart River for extended spells, but Terry had similar musical interests to mine, tended to convert the cheques that reimbursed his travel expenses into vinyl and had been known to take a drink.
Over a drink there was the chance to talk over some of the not-exactly-new faces that were coming to prominence in the wake of the Punk Rock wave, and it was through Terry that I ran across a copy of Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True. There was also a mutual interest in some of the more interesting figures on the Stateside music scene like Little Feat, Warren Zevon and Mink De Ville. After a spell of 'dice drinking' at the pub up the road over the Christmas holidays at the end of 1977, we wandered back to my flat, where he met the lady he relocated to Melbourne with three months later.
Around the same time a new record shop opened in downtown Townsville, and I spent more than my fair share of time around Wavelength Records, which was handy when it came to purchases, but didn't generate a new social circle outside working and trading hours.
When I found myself surplus to requirements at my old school holding a bundle of transfer papers in my hot little hand, that avenue wasn't exactly closed off, but relocating to Bowen wasn't going to make the collecting caper any easier.