Vaucluse Boys' High School
Class of 1968
When Vaucluse Boys' High School was opened in 1960 it took as its emblem the nearby Macquarie Lighthouse (designed by convict architect Francis Greenway) and adopted as its motto "Lumen Scientiae" - the Light of Learning - for just as the lighthouse guides ships into the harbour, so the light of learning, as taught at the school, guides its students into the harbour of a secure adulthood.
Reunion 2000
Introduction
There are plenty of exclusive clubs and associations that don't really want you around. To belong to some organisations you require wealth or fame or connections. Some clubs and societies can admit you or expel you on a whim. But the members of our particular group are in for life. No-one new may be admitted and no-one can leave. We are the people who were boys in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney in the 1960's and went to school together at Vaucluse High.
Our high school years coincided with a turbulent period in history. We said good-bye to Menzies and the 1950s forever. We greeted every new Beatles release as a personal event. We braced ourselves for the possiblity of being drawn into conscription and the Vietnam war. We wondered whether drugs were going to make our generation high or lay us low. We learned, we played, we bludged and we dreamed.
There is one person who, more than any other, has earned the title of Honorary Life Class Captain. We have been brought together time and again by the efforts of a man who used to rock up to school in a pink Austin Westminster, who ferried classmates to excursions in a convertible Chevrolet Impala and who was otherwise seen scooting around the city on a bonzai motorbike with his knees sticking up in all directions.
Robert Domabyl spent many years living overseas. He came back to Australia with a fearful case of nostalgia and a burning desire to get together with a few school mates. Actually, he decided to get together with all his school mates. And so, from time to time, Rob summoned us back to the neighbourhood to join with him in the celebration of old times.
The reunions Robert convened have given us pleasure and have brought him great honour and credit. Robert sponsored and produced much of the photographic material used in this website.
Some friendships are sustained by correspondence or phonecalls, some by beers or coffee, some by barbecues or restaurants and some by by sentiment alone. There are many kinds of friends: good friends, dear friends, close friends and all the rest. There is another kind of friend, though, whose value is confirmed each time we come together at our high school reunions: old friends. Though we may not be as close as close friends or as dear as dear friends, old friends like us share a bond that can never be broken as long as we live because we were young together.
Sadly, there are many who have passed from among us. We remember all those schoolmates whose time has come and gone, whose lives have run their course. They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old.
Vaucluse Boys' High School
High school reunions have earned a special place in literature and in the movies. Writers delight in making us laugh and cringe at the antics of former fellow pupils who are drawn together like moths to a flame to vie for social supremacy, to settle old scores, to rake over the coals of adolescent frustration and embarrasment and to try to slay the ghosts of all those teachers and classmates who occasionally joined forces, all those years ago, to turn moments of their youth into fragments of living hell.
But those are not the reasons we like to get together every now and then. We do not gather after decades have passed to boast, “I have been better or richer than you or more famous or powerful than you.” None among us would ever be heard to claim, “My joys have been more intense than your joys or my sorrows deeper than your sorrows.” It is unthinkable that anyone would even contemplate saying, “My smart phone has more apps than your smartphone,” or “My science teacher became president and chief executive of a bigger multi-national soft-drink conglomerate than your science teacher.”
We came back and we'll surely come again and again, because it refreshes us to recall memories of our mates and of ourselves when we were young and relatively innocent; when life's challenges and experiences were mostly in the far distant future. We come because we are amazed that we are still able to come and we come in the certain knowledge that lots of people will be happy to see us.
“With common bonds we're gathered here"
John Lenn 2014
Vaucluse from the air