The very first man a little girl loves is her Dad, and this special lifelong relationship should be nurtured and cherished. Like other small girls, I adored my 6’6” Dad who was always a ‘larger than life’ personality and a helpless practical joker. I recall being impressed by the ‘reindeer droppings’ left on our roof on Christmas morning, until I learned to recognise cow pats but I loved the fact that he'd gone to so much trouble!
I guess that like many other young girls, I started having crushes when I was about 12 years old. I think that Troy Donahue was, if not THE first, one of the first crushes I had. He was in a TV program called ‘Surfside Six’ and I, along with no doubt thousands of other girls thought he was ‘dreamy.’ I cut out pictures of him and pasted them inside my school books and wrote ‘I Love Troy’ on my ruler. Everyone at school (I was at a Catholic school, taught be Sisters of Mercy) had someone on their ruler too, declaring our ‘love’ for some distant and unattainable star in America!
As swimmer who trained morning and afternoon, after school, my first couple of boyfriends were also swimmers, who’d buy me a coke and a Bush biscuit after training to either share while we warmed up lying on adjacent towels or to eat/drink the bus stop. The same boys asked me to their school dances and I invited them to partner me to mine.
By the time I was 14, music and surfing had raced into my life and, best of all worlds was the surfing music of The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean. My ruler was covered with surfing words like ‘hangin’ five’, ‘wipe out’ and ‘surfari’. Australian surfing champions like Midget Farrelly became my heroes as I learned how to surf on a Malibu board on the south coast of South Australia in the chilly Southern Ocean (without wet suits, just boardies and a tshirt for warmth!). I went out with a crowd of other young teenagers with similar interests and very little ‘pairing off', just fun at the drive-in or local dances.
When Beatle mania came to Adelaide, all of my friends divided up into either John or Paul fans. We took transistor radios to school and listened to the Top 50 Hit Parade in our breaks. I remember wearing mascara on my blonde lashes and teasing my hair to achieve the Dusty Springfield look – great with a school tunic whose hem I kept taking up!
The folk scene also evolved and I discovered Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary and newer gentler music heroes to have crushes on. I shared a room in the nurses home with another girl who was an Elvis fan and her side of the room was covered with Elvis posters and mine with PP & M, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen – talk about being as different as chalk and cheese!
But the crushes were all innocent fun and some kind of preparation for real live boyfriends.
