EARLY MEMORIES.
I can still remember when I was quite young, going with my parents and my sister to the Sydney Royal Easter Show at Moore Park. We must have spent many hours there, but my memory of those visits will only bring back a few particular experiences.
I can just recall,when I must have been about four or five years old and I had the frightening and bewildering ordeal of being a lost child at the show. It happened suddenly in the crowd that I became separated from my parents. I vaguely remember being taken by the hand by some unknown adult and being delivered into the custody of this huge and looming policeman. I could never imagine that, thirty years later, I would be the scary man in the blue uniform collecting lost children at the show.
Visiting the Easter Show with my father was not as enjoyable as I had hoped. My father was a country born fitter and turner so he lingered over the farm machinery, stock and produce displays and managed to stride quickly past the really interesting things like the octopus ride, the merry-go-round and the sideshow alley. But happily, he did take us to the treasure trove of the show-bag hall. There was no point in going to the show without acquiring armloads of show bags. My favorite was the Aspro bag. It didn't contain pharmaceuticals but the bag and its trinket contents were coloured lolly pink. The palette of the early baby-boomers was mostly white, black, grey, brown, cream and navy blue.
To see bright pale magenta was like catching a glimpse of the Heavenly City.
My most striking memory comes from the cattle pavilion.
I was hanging around, wishing that my father would stop looking at cows and buy me a fairy floss, when I noticed a man doing a drawing of a cow. I managed to sneak a look at his work and was fascinated to see that he was drawing with a pencil that made a red line. The drawing was a very good academic realistic study of cattle anatomy , but the thing that interested me enormously was this drawing done with a red pencil, after all I assumed that a black graphite pencil was the normal thing to use for drawings. That's what we always used at school.
For years I had the ambition to acquire the red drawing pencil. The red pencil from my packet of Columbia coloured pencils just never gave the wonderful subtle effect that I had seen at the show. perhaps I imagined that this pencil would be like a magic wand that would impart to my hand the superior artistic ability that I deamt of.
Many years later I found the artistic red pencil in an art shop. A terra cotta drawing pencil made by the French firm of Conté of Paris. This pencil is a cross between chalk and crayon and gives a wonderful fine art effect, especially to portrait drawing; real Leonerdo da Vinci stuff.
I have used the Conté pencil quite often but sadly the magical properties I might have imagined are not found in it.
The Sydney Royal Easter Show moved from Moore Park to the site of the old Flemington Sale Yards.
I've never been to the new look Easter Show and I have no desire to go there.
