School

In June last year, our museum opened an exhibition called Namedropping. David says that what he’s trying to do in this show is figure out what status is and why it is useful, in a deep sense—as part of our evolved biology. Namedropping is a light-hearted look at all that, with a few pauses for self-scrutiny. What follows is from the exhibition. Read more about Namedropping here.

I went to school in a small town out past the airport called Sorell.

I got a pretty good education there, given my socioeconomic position and that of the school more broadly (which is to say, not great; not terrible, but skewed a little toward the latter). I’d already learnt to read, but school got me my maths and taught me titrations; foundations for a house I’d never build.

More importantly, though: everything else. The rules of basketball, handball, AFL; the fact that not everyone’s mum can cook; how many mls there are in a 10 oz beer; how to talk to girls (eventually); how to talk to boys (easier); what getting punched really fucking hard feels like; why you might want to punch someone really fucking hard; etc., etc.

I also learnt about authenticity, and ‘coolness’, and the thin, shifting lines that dictated them, things far more complex and interesting than anything I could manage on a Cartesian plane.

Examples:

Your genuine Rip Curl hoodie. Cool, real.

Your Melbourne market knockoff Independent hoodie. Still cool, but lesser due to not being real. You’d wear a borrowed real garment over this if given the option, because while the borrowing can diminish a thing’s aura a bit,¹ it’s still better than slightly squiffy embroidery and those obviously cheap, pilling cuffs.

A friend’s parents’ Tickford XR6 sedan. Objectively cool, but with some important caveats against:

• not an XR8 (obviously peak cool, if you’re talking AU Falcons);
• is a Ford, and my grade tended to skew Holden, who were busily dominating Bathurst through the efforts of Messrs Skaife, Murphy, etc.;
• purchased (probably) with money defrauded from the parents of other kids at school.

So, ultimately: not cool. But real.

A guy in the grade above’s dad’s SLR5000. Cool, real. Bonuses for sounding fucking sick, being a racecar, having a drop tank, and said dad being unafraid to light up a monster cook when taking people to the Leavers’ Dinner. Some nerd probably had questions about whether it was a genuine A9X or just a hatch with an aftermarket bonnet, but nobody was listening, and the work done on it overrules that sort of thing anyway.

The guy two blocks from school’s ‘SLR5000’. Unknown. A phantom. Janus. Subject of great debate. Four-door, no bonnet bulge. Something funny about the front end. Engine in such nasty shape it was sometimes tricky to tell if it was a six or an eight. Not looked after, whatever it was. Guy who had it over the pits at one point said there was about four inches of play in the steering, which is a shitty way to treat a thing, whether it’s real or not. Eventually he put a drop tank on it, but rumours abounded of it being cosmetic, not even hooked up. Plus he ran steelies (uncool) with balding cheesecutters (uncool) on the back so he could do cooks (cool) at pretty much any point he liked, which made the already-suss flares look even suss-er. Your cuffs are pilling, man.

To this day I still don’t know how I feel about that car—except, I guess, glad it’s probably not on the road anymore—but it probably says something that I can still remember all this nonsense now, and that whenever he’d rumble past the caged asphalt basketball court where we wasted most of our lunchtimes, play would generally halt.

Image: Holden Torana (LX) SLR 5000 A9X Sedan (a hotted-up Torana; wheel detail), 1977
Private collection, Hobart

This, though. This is real. This approaches degrees of real I feel out of my depth with. This is real to the level of matching engine and chassis numbers,² of odometer kilometres you could walk in a year. This is the original paint. This is the guy who walked into the dealership in 1977 and bought it with his own two hands driving it up to the door of the museum.³

This is really real.

Borrowed, though. Make of that what you will.

1. Jane says that on the other hand, the aura of borrowed artworks is actually ratcheted up for the borrower if the lender is sufficiently admirable. I wouldn’t know. Borrowing hoodies was fraught enough.

2. A foreign concept to me, who grew up in an Italian-car household, where you’ve got to work with what you’ve got; where you’re probably dropping the hotter twin-cam into whatever will fit it (or at least putting the better head on).

3. The hotwires are aftermarket, but it was presumably illegal to buy one of these and not put a set on immediately.

Header image: Holden Torana (LX) SLR 5000 A9X Sedan (a hotted-up Torana), 1977
Private collection, Hobart