PENCIL CASE

Stephen O'Brien got this pencil case in 1973 when he went shopping with his mother for school supplies. He used the pencil case from Year 6 and 7 at Roleystone Primary School and then at Kelmscott High School from 1975-1979. He chose this pencil case because he didn't like the other cases which were of a 'hippy' motif which Stephen did not like. In 1978 it was replaced with a black leather pencil case.
The following are excerpts from a account written by Stephen in 2014 about his time at school.
"I got the pencil case first. My mum took me shopping for school supplies at the start of 1973 and I didnt much like the choice of pencil cases. The hippy era had become commercialised and the cases on offer had slogans like Love, Peace, or various similar symbols printed on them. This was way too girly for my liking so I chose the one with Thinkprinted on it. Id actually made a very bad choice as it seemed that whenever I made a mistake in class the teacher would jab a finger at the inscription and say Thats what you should be doing!or Its a pity you never read this word. Mr Morris in Roleystone Primary was particularly good at this.
That pencil case saw me through years 6 & 7 and into High School at Kelmscott, where in Year 10 it was sidelined for a decent black leather pencil case. Being black the replacement case was very difficult for other people to write on.
A peculiar quality of the vinyl of my 1973 pencil case was that it tended to absorb graffiti. Biro inscriptions by myself and others would gradually become blurred to the point of fading into total illegibility, only to be replaced by yet more graffiti. I recall in late 1973, in my year 6 class at Roley Primary, executing drawings of the famous Cassius Clay boxing match on this case. The match, by the way, was viewed by us live due to a television set being wheeled to the front of the class so that our large group of 11 year old children could watch the fight. That was when I drew the pictures.
Boys & Girls tended to write and draw different things on their pencil cases. Girls would write Lovesurrounded by daisy flowers, cats and pictures of Snoopy the dog from the Peanuts comic strip. Boys would write down the names of footy teams or draw pictures of dragstar racing cars (essentially an elongated triangle with wheels). When we got into High School the subject matter changed.
In 1976 Alice Coopers Welcome to my Nightmare album was all the rage and boys kept asking me to draw black widow spiders on their pencil cases, at other times it was skeletons. By this time band names were the thing to have on your pencil case; with girls writing down the name of their favourite band member, often suffixed by the word &for me. A lot of us found it was offputting in making any overtures towards girls, as no spotty 13 year old could ever hope to compete with a member of the Bay City Rollers.
Some bands such as ABBA, Sweet, Status Quo and TMG (Ted Mulry Gang) were on the schoolbags and pencil cases of both boys and girls, others such as AC/DC were confined to boys. Girls tended to select male performers like David Essex or David Dundas as well as bands. It was unusual for a song title to find its way onto a schoolbag, but one song that did was Queens Bohemian Rhapsody. Even the hard case flanelletted Rock guys in their black desert boots liked that one."
"Footy team names were often written on schoolbags as well as pencil cases. This was before the advent of the current form of interstate football that developed later, and local Perth-based team names were almost the norm. Swans, Old Easts, Souths, Demons. All the main teams were known more by their diminutive than by their proper names of Swan Districts, East Fremantle, South Fremantle and Perth. Equally if not more common were English soccer teams such as Arsenal and Spurs, for it seemed that most of my classmates were born in the United Kingdom, and had arrived with their parents and siblings on assisted passage as Ten Pound Poms. I recall that a couple of years later, in 1978, a show-of-hands survey in our form class indicated that over two thirds of us were from the UK."
"The contents of the pencil case include a biro with a cap but no inside. This was my secret pea shooter and was used to project little bits of curled up paper at my classmates, when occasion demanded it. Some people used to chew the paper into spitballs before shooting them and I developed a conceit of moral superiority over not doing this."