The Little House of Concrete Version 4.0

A Very Fashionable Hovel

• Home
• Who?
• How?
• What?
• Why?
• Where?
• Site Map
• Hughesy's iStuff
• The Writing
  • The Blogs
  • Bowen, 25 Years On
  • The Fiction
    • Dirty Work
    • The Denison Saga
    • The Alien Story
    • Desperate Days
    • The Real Australia
    • Real Estate Manners
  • Interesting Times
  • Little House of Concrete 1.0
  • The LHoC Hits the Road
  • The LHoC Music
  • The LHoC Reading Pages
  • The LHoc Sports Desk
  • The LHoc Wine Rack
  • When The Movie Came to Town
• The Original LHoc Content
• The Wine Pages
• The Music Pages
• The Reading Pages
• Bowenwood
• Bowen, Twenty-Five Years On
• The Travelogues
• The Index

Despite assurances the undertaking was impossible, in 1971, along with studies at Townsville Teachers’ College, I was working my way towards the B.A. that was supposedly going to provide an avenue to escape the classroom. Didn’t happen, but there you go.

Experiences the previous year suggested anything that could reduce the academic workload was a smart move, so when I cast my eye around for a University subject that year, History IIH (Problems In Australian History) seemed likely to fit the bill, particularly since I was down to do Australian History at College.

I was living at a residential college on the University campus and, by coincidence, on the same corridor as another History IIH student. Predictably, there were late night discussions of seminar topics through the year, and along the line we came up with a scenario for a movie about the Real Australia.

The original two- or three-page manuscript is long gone and was very much a product of a time when there was an irreverent focus on the Australian identity, a time when, for instance, a bunch of NIDA students were working up The Legend of King O’Malley and the Bazza McKenzie books and movie were looming just over the horizon.

The original version of the movie was populated by figures drawn from acquaintances at James Cook, who were supposedly going to play grossly distorted versions of themselves and was supposedly going to be filmed in what was left of Ravenswood.

Over the space of forty years, those characterisations are long forgotten and this version, prompted by a recent chance meeting and a lengthy reminiscence over a glass or three takes what I can recall of the original plot line with a completely new cast of characters.

Any resemblance between the people and/or events described herein and anything approximating reality is completely coincidental, and while I’ve attempted to give some of the details a degree of historical verisimilitude, the whole remains, more or less, the result of someone’s fevered imagination rather than any recollections of any genuine or alleged reality.

© 2012 Ian Hughes Contact Me