Exams aren't what they used to be

This kind of stuff -- students buying pre-written essays to memorise and then regurgitate (and I use the verb advisedly) in their HSC exams -- has made me reflect on the olden days of last century, when I wor a lass, and my cohort had to sit a total of five, count 'em, five lots of public exams within three years.

In Intermediate (the year we all turned fifteen, the equivalent of Year Ten) we sat the exams for Commonwealth Scholarships for the last two years of school -- these were essentially IQ and general-knowledge tests, not things you could prepare for in any way apart from staying healthy and getting enough sleep -- and only a few months later we sat three-hour exams in each of eight subjects. The following year, Leaving (Year 11), we sat another set of three-hour exams in six subjects. And the year after that, we sat for another round of Commonwealth Scholarships, this time to university, plus more three-hour exams in five Matric (Year 12 / HSC) subjects, except for the exceptionally clever kids who did six because they could.

That's 60 hours of competitive public examinations over three years, in an era when there was no continuous assessment: your result for the year depended entirely on how you scored in the exams. And if you didn't pass a sufficient number of them, then that was it: you repeated the year or you left school.

Nobody cheated, perhaps partly because they were not the sorts of exams for which cheating of this kind would have been possible.

Then, of course, there were the university exams, by which time you could score at least part of your result through essays handed in during the year. Not much, though.  And if in later years as an academic I ever got sick of my Honours students complaining about how hard they had to work, all I had to do to make them stop was tell them about the assessment for my own Honours year: two 12,000 word theses, plus four three-hour exams in a total of six different subjects, two of them (Practical Criticism and Shakespeare) compulsory. Like many of my mates in that year, I was by then living away from home and worked all the way through the exams, in my case washing dishes in a Greek restaurant. I was, however, alone in the charming experience of going to court about my no-contest divorce about halfway through the exams.

What's more, I walked five miles to school and university barefoot in the snow. And I think you should all get off my lawn.

On crying

I hate crying. Not only am I one of those people unable to cry prettily (red-eyed, blotchy etc) but it doesn't even help, as it is popularly supposed to do; on the contrary, it makes me feel exhausted, headachy and stupid. One of my favourite 19th century characters (he was a real person), one Reverend J. Haweis, is quoted somewhere as saying -- to me quite unforgettably, so I don't need to look it up -- 'A good play on the piano has not infrequently taken the place of a good cry upstairs.' Give me a good play on the piano any day.

Here in the second half of my fifties I'm horrified to find that if anything I cry more instead of less. I remind myself more and more of Waker, the emotional twin in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters -- 'Tell Waker it looks like rain and his eyes all fill up.'

It never takes much, and the minute it starts I feel split in two as neatly as an apple, with one half blubbing away and the other, cool and scornful, observing this intemperate creature and thinking Oh for God's sake, what is it this time? It's usually not about 'being upset', more something that seems both glancing and visceral, like being accidentally knifed by someone who wasn't even aiming for you. It reminds me, in fact, of that great line of Dorothy Dunnett's: 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

It is indeed most often something to do with either music or animals, which brings me to my real point, which is that one of the reasons I'll feel very pleased to have finished this book about Adelaide is that I might stop crying so much; not only is the writing of it an unexpectedly emotional exercise, I think probably closely akin to a form of auto-psychoanalysis, but in the reading for it (yes, I'm almost finished, but one keeps finding new things while checking the old things), I keep coming across stuff that gets me going, like the item about the War Horse Memorial in Simon Cameron's lovely little book about Adelaide's statues, Silent Witnesses.

It's a granite horse trough inscribed WAR HORSE MEMORIAL 1914-1918. Not an actual horse to be seen. On the contrary, what it evokes is the poignant absence of horses. It hasn't always; it was originally situated in Victoria Square and connected to the water mains for the use of the working horses of the Central Market. The memorial was moved to its present site on the south-east corner of North and East Terraces, next to the Light Horse Memorial obelisk, in 1964 when Victoria Square was redesigned. It's got an inscription on it from the Book of Job.

He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength. He goeth on to meet the armed men, he mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted, neither turneth his back from the sword.

Liberal schmiberal

Malcolm Fraser has left the Liberal Party, and poor Margaret Simons, who as the co-author of Fraser's political memoirs has known for four months but promised not to say anything -- which as a journalist must have really, really hurt -- is finally liberated.

Like many old enough to remember, I've got one of those sharp 'where were you when' memories of Fraser's spectacular catapult to the top of the Australian power tree on the day of the Dismissal. I'd just come out of the Adelaide U English 3 exam, during which I had concentrated excessively on Persuasion at the expense of Anna Karenina, and was being picked up outside Centennial Hall (now pulled down and replaced) in the Wayville Showgrounds, where university exams were held, by my dear friend J in her little blue Anglia, the dead spit of the one owned by the Weasley family except that it couldn't fly, though on occasion it certainly felt as though oh never mind. We drove away to the tune of the ABC fanfare for the midday news and then the sound of a shellshocked newsreader.

Twas a day of blues: my memory of Gough Whitlam's outraged and infinitely imitable voice saying 'Because nothing will save the Governor-General' is all tangled up with lines of powdery lavender-blue flowering jacaranda against the lacquered blue enamel of an Adelaide November sky.

We were all so outraged that none of us had a good word to say about Fraser, but I remember noticing even at the time, and certainly later, that he was consistently good on race and racism. His harshest criticism of John Howard was on the subject of boat people. And his resignation from the party now seems to have been triggered by Tony Abbott's bluster about closing the borders and so on. (Hello, Budge, Australia's an island. We don't have borders.)

How Fraser is feeling can only be imagined; apart from anything else, I bet he wouldn't talk about it. Imagine being 80 and deciding that an institution that has had your loyalty all your adult life is something to which you can no longer bear to belong.