BILL MACKIE (P’39

Bill Mackie (P’39) –OGG Centenarian

When 11-year-old Bill Mackie came to Corio in 1933, many of the buildings we now think of as old did not yet exist. The Junior School (now The Hermitage House), the Art and Music schools, and Francis Brown House would all be built while Bill was at school, and the Dining Hall extended. The Chapel had only recently been completed, and the Cloisters and War Memorial were but a few years old. A fresh-faced James Darling was only three years into his 32-year headmastership. Bill’s schooldays were the years described by Michael Thwaites AO (Cu’33) as “that heady spring… a pulse and pain of growth set the blood coursing, and the earth was young”.

Corio was a much bigger world than the small rural primary school Bill came from, to which he rode a pony three miles there and back. His mother’s brother, Bill Bates (GGS’10), had attended Geelong Grammar in 190910, and so it was to Geelong Grammar School that Bill and his younger brother Jamie (P’42) were sent after their primary schooling. Both boys were born in Ceylon, where their father William Copland Mackie was the manager of a tea plantation. The family returned to Australia in late 1927.

Bill was a diligent Junior House student who had a solid work record, and an art prize, by the time he entered Perry House in 1937. The Art School was built in that year, and Bill was one of the boys who spent Saturdays in the school forge learning metalwork in order to fit out the new building. “Darling had the walls put up and the plastering done, but the rest he left to us!” Bill helped to make the wrought iron bannisters, along with his dorm mate Jimmy Catanach (P’38) – “a very nice fellow” – who a few years later was one of the escapees from Stalag Luft III.

These were days of Saturday Parties – excursions by bicycle anywhere they liked within a 25-mile radius, so long as there were three of them – and teachers with nicknames like Cupie Dart, Beaky Ryder and Dangles Derrick. In the Dining Hall, they had competitions to see who could eat the most servings of chocolate blancmange. “Haslow had the record – six refills after quickly gulping each serving down and putting his plate up again for more!” Infectious diseases were rife. Bill had a different illness in each of his school years – influenza, measles, mumps and chicken pox. “But I never had a day’s sickness after that.” He was one of several boys in the Sanatorium with mumps when it came time for their Confirmation. “We were hauled out of bed, and we knelt in front of the Archbishop in our pyjamas and dressing gown!”