Recorded 12 June 2018
GM: Today is the 12th of June 2018, it’s a Tuesday. Trenna Mahney is here talking about her memories of her life.
Tren, we were talking yesterday about when you first moved into Girls’ Friendly Society. You described the accommodation there, and a little bit about what you did. Tell us a bit more about that era of your life.
THM: I really enjoyed my time at Key Personnel. It made me grow up quite quickly. I did buy makeup. I bought some makeup at David Jones and I learnt to put that on.
I don’t know how well I was at putting it on, but I did wear it and I did for a while, at some point I started smoking, and I’ll get to that.
Janet Nelson, and The Times They Are A-Changin’
It was good to have Julie and Sue still from my previous school life – some friends to keep in contact with. I did keep in contact with Janet [Nelson, from school], and Janet, through her church on Friday nights, had Youth Group.
She would always ring me up, and over the weeks, and I think it only took a matter of a few weeks, it seemed to me that she began to sound very immature. It was the Janet I’d always known, but clearly I was growing up quite quickly.
I got to say what I wanted to watch on TV, or not me alone, but with my peers. And there were new television shows starting. It was 1973 [GM: The time of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam] there had been changes with Vietnam, and women’s rights, and things to do with literature.
There were magazines that were brought out for modern women that were called Cleo, and Cosmopolitan. The one that I particularly liked and that I started buying was Cosmopolitan.
Before that there were only sex and sexual innuendo sort of magazines I had sneak read when at the Andersons. Sue [Anderson] used to buy True Confessions. They were magazines with stories of love with someone having an affair, or you know, what they would do to allure their husband. They were very corny and unsophisticated.
Along the road, Adelaide Terrace, towards the city, and at this stage the Taxation Department was still at number 1 St Georges Terrace. It was on the corner [of Victoria Avenue] there.
There was big talk about a new concert hall being built, and it was the talk of the town. I don’t remember the timing completely, but it was going to take over the site from the Taxation Department initially, however it ended up being next door to the Taxation Department.
So, the Taxation Department remained, but there was an area in between the Taxation Department and where the Governor’s residence was, and it was between those buildings that it was being built.
Across the road, as you walked up Victoria Avenue towards Hay Street, it would go all the way up to the Catholic Cathedral. I know that you had worked around that area so you would know it [GM: Trenna is talking to me – I had worked at 2 St Georges Terrace in 1975-77].
Moving on From Agatha Christie
Anyway, there was a newsagent there, well it was a bookseller and newsagent downstairs, it was below 2 St Georges Terrace. That’s where I would go each week to get my TV Week which was about an A5 size magazine that would tell you the shows on television for that week.
But also that would give you all the goss on everything happening in the media. I loved it because there were always scandals.
There were all the new magazines coming out, and they weren’t the daggy ones like the old New Idea and Woman’s Day or whatever. They were definitely aimed at young people.
There was Cleo and there was Cosmopolitan, and Cosmopolitan for my money was by far the best. It had advertisements in there, but not a lot, but they had a lot of information about sexual conditions and things that I had never heard of before.
It seemed like you could read anything you liked, and just for that very reason I loved it…I just loved that whole idea of it being so explicit. Everything was just out there. There seemed to be no censorship
It was still a time when you were allowed to advertise cigarettes. And all the hunks who were in there!
It was the opposite to what the usual, you know, the guys’ magazines with all the half naked girls. They had a centrefold, and there would be a male centrefold. The first centerfold had no appeal to me whatsoever, but I think he had a lot of appeal to himself, and he was the actor Jack Thompson.
Jack Thompson who was renowned for living with two women at the same time. I think therefore, you know, a magnet to chicks. He was too old for me, I didn’t like him.
I also bought magazines that had stuff about rock and roll and the like. I would buy my books there too. Novels were really cheap. That’s when the paperback book really came into its best.
They were very short paperbacks, some with less than 100 pages, and the writing wasn’t particularly small. You could read them almost in a night or two, and they were always really fabulous – about bikies or about skinheads. Characters I didn’t particularly go for, but all the things they got up to with all the chicks, and all the sorts of things they did with sex, which was pretty explicit.
I just loved that whole idea of it being so explicit. Everything was just out there. There seemed to be no censorship – like it had all been lifted. I don’t know if it had been, I don’t know if the law had changed, because we were censored a lot in the West of Australia.
It seemed like you could read anything you liked, and just for that very reason I loved it.
So that was close to GFS and I would go there, and a lot of the time, being in a bedroom by myself I would do a lot of reading. I don’t know if there was much homework. If there was, I wouldn’t have minded doing that homework.
I can sort of see myself practising my shorthand at home and doing ledgers. Again, nothing was as it is now, pre-lined. We would rule lines on paper to make credit and debit columns and stuff like that, as opposed to later on they would already be put into the right [pre printed] foolscap size books.
So a lot of my time was spent with college during the day. And in the evening until Sue Lee arrived, was just sort of wandering around the city with, I think there was Judy, Leanne, a couple of other daggy girls.
Later during the year a group of girls came in and they were some of the girls who became my better friends. There were some girls, whose names I will recall, I have written them down.
There was an older girl who was quite responsible. She was training to be a dental nurse. There were a few girls training to be nurses. And then there were the “Twinnies”.
They were Sharon and Joyce, and they were Aboriginal girls who were younger than me. Very sweet, and we got on like a house on fire. I was still wearing glasses, bifocal glasses at that stage, and they just called me “Professor”. It wasn’t done in a malicious way.
They used to think I was really funny. At that time the popular youth radio station, which wasn’t all that groovy, was 6PM. It had characters like John K Watts and Barry Martin as DJs.
Clearly, it was a male orientated world. They played modern music. The modern music before then had been played by 6KY. 6KY had been the radio station of the hits when my older sisters were younger.
6PR was the radio station of country music, and all the horse racing. It was also a bit sports orientated.
6PM you listened to, every day, in the morning it was John K Watts and Barry Martin, and there were lots of double entendre sort of jokes and in those days we still found them amusing. Very sexist, very racist jokes, where women were pretty stupid.
On the show there was a character, who was supposed to be Aboriginal and his name was Billy Cokebottle. He was funny, but he was always, or very often, drunk. It was very derogatory but in those days it was considered as good fun humour. And, of course, they were doing it in jest and many Aboriginal people who were around at that time also found it funny.
I don’t think they were ever asked if it was funny.
Aboriginal people had finally been given the right to actually be people and counted in the census in 1968. In 1973 they still did not have very many rights at all. It was still preferred by many that Aboriginal people live on the outskirts of town.
I don’t know if they were still barred after a certain hour and were required to go home. I do know that if you were a good footballer you were treated with a bit more respect, but other than that, if there was an Aboriginal woman working, generally she was working as a cleaner and probably for not very much money.
When Rose came along, my better friend came along. Initially we were sort of friends but she was very studious. She was Aboriginal. I didn’t know what sort of Aboriginal person she was.
I knew little about Aboriginal people [like most non-Aboriginal people then]. I knew they were Noongah, but I thought it was their word for Aboriginal. I didn’t know that Noongah people were the people of the area of Perth, and that there were other Aboriginal groups who had other country areas.
So to me Noongah just meant they were Aboriginal. I felt I was pretty clever to know they were Noongah. Rose was very, very keen to become a hard worker, and her aim in life was to marry a white fella, and someone who wore a tie.
Now I know that she was a bit like my Aunty Hilda whose ambition for her daughter’s was that their husbands wore ties. It just simply meant, no labourers. They had to have some sort of education.
Youth Club
So life went on at Girls’ Friendly Society. I still caught up with Janet on a Friday night. I don’t remember it being every Friday night that we had Youth Club.
I would stay over at her place on the weekend. Sometimes it would just be for a night so I’d go over on Friday night, we would do Youth Club. Youth Club was starting to become so that there was always part of it when we went to play Putt Putt.
We loved that because there were a couple of boys who worked there we were pretty keen on. Both of us were keen. I was more daring than Janet.
Janet was quite studious and she did believe in her religion. I never said I didn’t believe in it, but I didn’t mind the religion that went in it because I let that just wash over me, and the rest of the time it was pretty good fun. Just hanging out with kids your own age and doing various things, all very innocently.
Her mum and dad had a big van so they would always drive the kids to and fro. They liked me, and they had an above ground swimming pool which we loved to play in.
They also had a billiards table on which I learnt to play billiards, and we really liked doing that sort of thing, so it was still quite good.
But it was starting to become more and more childish [to my way of thinking] or Janet would say she had to go and do some study. So she would walk me to the bus stop and I used to think “this is getting more and more daggy”.
Sue Lee, and the Rolling Stones
Finally Sue Lee arrived at GFS. Sue was the girl who shared my room, and she was beautiful. Well, in my eyes she was, and it might be that she was Eurasian. Although at that time I wouldn’t have been able to say that as I don’t think I would have understood what that meant.
But she was [beautiful] and she was an exquisitely good drawer. I could describe an outfit that I’d seen in the shop that day. She would ask me questions about it, and I would also be able to describe what was on it.
From my description she would sketch it really beautifully for me. Then I would say, “well it was in the window of … such and such a place”, because I knew a lot of boutiques in those days that are no longer around.
I’d say it was in the window. Boutiques were really proper boutiques in that they would only make one size of each outfit that they would move and they would be sold, and the product would be moved throughout the shop.
So she would go and take a squiz at it. I remember describing a jacket that I loved. It was green and yellow and she really liked it, but it was a bit expensive and she ended up making a jacket very like that for herself, because I ended up going and buying that jacket.
I wore that jacket for quite a long time. It had a sort of a velvety feel to it, but not a really plush velvet.
I really admired her because she was so beautiful, and although the same age as me, she just seemed so sophisticated. She was there because her parents were going to America and she had been to America too many times before and didn’t want to go, and she really wanted to do this course at Perth Tech, which was Fashion Design or something like that.
She really wanted to do that course and was staying at GFS over a three month period. So it wasn’t a long time but it felt like I knew her for a long, long time.
She had a boyfriend called Paul. He was English and the spitting image of Mick Jagger, so boy, was I sold! I think it was her who actually really got me onto the Rolling Stones.
I had a Rolling Stones record, but only a single, probably it was Satisfaction. I don’t remember now because I don’t believe I’ve got that one anymore. I may still have it but I don’t think I have. Anyway, that was just one of the songs I liked. I wasn’t yet into buying albums.
I hated Lionel Richie songs later on so I’m glad I lost that one!
She really liked the Rolling Stones and had talked about some songs. I really only knew the oldies like Goodbye Ruby Tuesday and their hits from the early 60s.
But she started bringing me into their newer stuff which was a lot more psychedelic, sort of, and a lot more bluesy, and a lot more to my taste.
I know that Nancy and Jim for Christmas bought me The Best of The Rolling Stones which was a good album to buy me. It was octagonal – the album was round but the cover was octagonal and it was so cool.
I loved it and it did have all of the best of the Stones up to that year so it was really really played a lot. Unfortunately, later, at a particular friend’s party, who had no albums of her own, I took my albums to her place knowing full well I’d get them back – and I never did.
There must have been at least 20 albums in that collection because they were mainly my records that were played. I do remember thankfully, that there was an album that was by the Commodores and that was that American singer who became very well known later by himself – Lionel Richie. I can’t remember a song on the album, if I heard it I would. But I hated Lionel Richie songs later on so I’m glad I lost that one!
Anyway, I did lose the octagonal album and that was a shame.
Anyway, back to 1973. Sue came into my life. She was gifted. She liked that I did a lot of reading.
I liked poetry and I do remember one night I was looking out of the window at GFS and I sprouted sort of a verse of what it was like, as life sitting there, looking out the window into what was quite bustling.
There were probably only half a dozen people outside, but we were living in the city and I described it. I know that there was a part describing what the streets looked like reflecting the sky and the lights, and it was how I saw it with my eyes without wearing glasses so it was a bit trippy dippy if you like.
I described it and then I became a bit embarrassed once I sort of finished just saying it. And I turned around and she had been looking or staring at me. I laughed, and she said “that would have been so brilliant if you hadn’t laughed at the end”. That put me off and there was no way I could remember what I had just said.
It was just really sort of an honour that she thought something I had said was brilliant in terms of it being really cool.
So from that point on, I remember that I thought “I’m going to think about what I say because I obviously can say things that aren’t just daffy”. However I don’t know if that always worked out with me because a lot of my friends were not as bright as me. That was not my choice.
I do know I wanted people to be as bright as I was but I didn’t think I was particularly bright, but it just seemed that anyone who was as bright as me was never kind or nice. They could be bitchy and knew that they were above everybody else.
Whereas the not so bright people were kind and considerate. I weighed up the two and I went for the kind, considerate people more often than the people who may have helped me intellectually, or who may have built my confidence intellectually.
I often wonder if that was a choice in my life that I made because I wasn’t bright enough. Sometimes I regret it, sometimes I think it probably helped me get through life and I might not have got into the trouble that Sue found herself in.
I may have got through life as well as I did because people around me had my best interests at heart as well as their own best interests at heart.
But there’s a lot more to tell because I haven’t mentioned the role my family played or the role that the Anderson’s came to play.
Sorry Janet
And I do feel very cruel about my friend Janet who had been lovely to me. Sue Butts and Julie had easily just dropped her as a friend, they didn’t consider it, whereas my decision to not see her anymore was done in quite a horrible way.
I just kept saying “no I’m not available” and then I stopped being available to answer the phone. I never went and said “we’ve sort of outgrown each other, we’ve gone our different ways, and we might see each other from time to time”.
But the end of the relationship was a complete cut.