And why shouldn't there be an ice-skating rink in Alice, given there've been lofty proposals for an artificial lake expressed many times by many a Town Councillor?
At lunch-time today, I set off with one of my former colleagues and her 14 yo nephew to partake in the pleasures of the ice skating rink at the convention centre. This is one of the summer delights currently on offer on school holidays in the Springs.
My friend R, a water-quality person of sorts, relinquished all her ecological principles to participate in this pursuit.
'You know this is going to make us feel very middle-aged?' I said on meeting her, hovering like some outcast wraith on the limen of a Hades. (I had seen the young people inside -- teenagers, tweenagers and younger tikes, only occasionally in the presence of a flailing mum or dad -- often doing strange teenagery things, like wearing skin-tight stonewashed jeans and skating in tight posses, taking photographs of each other on digital cameras.)
'I'm feeling more middle-aged all the time wherever I go,' she said.
The rink was not as vast as I expected it to be -- in fact, part of a large conference room had been partitioned off to provide a space for the rink (no bigger than the one that used to exist at Homebush). A kind of chill emanated through the foyer of the convention centre, even before you made it to the rink -- a chill beyond that of the normal air-conditioning.
We hired skates, and R and I, feeling game, broached the ice, while R's nephew sat, like some great calf who'd been corralled into an enclosure he didn't want to enter, not even donning his skates. He told us he'd had three dramatic collisions on ice to date, one involving stitches to his chin.
<The Todd under water but not ice>
'He's been very co-operative until now,' R said. She put his recalcitrance down to fear of making a fool of himself in front of (a) A Boy from Down the Street and (b) Girls.
And did we make a fool of ourselves? Not really. I doubt we were all that visible. When I left home, I'd wondered if I would overheat in my layered clothing and explorer socks; when I arrived, I wondered if I'd be chilled. But the combination of activity and the cool of the ice was refreshing.
Ice skating has fond associations for me, because I did it as a 'bludge' sport during some winters at school. 'Bludge' sports existed for the more unco and maybe unclubbable kids who didn't get chosen for team sports (I did play soccer and hockey some years, tho only as a back -- a good position for talking and daydreaming. In fact I remember having the thought down the back of a hockeyfield that realism wasn't a 'slice of life', as Mr Hardage our English teacher said, as it was impossible, and maybe even boring, to try and capture every detail of daily life in writing).
<Crevice on the mountainbike track after the rain>
Anyway, ice-skating-as-a-sport as I remember it: we were never trained in cross-overs or back-skating or anything else; just bused and dumped unceremoniously at Homebush rink (a fair distance away) and left to make our own way home. I'm guessing this would never happen these days, but hey, it's made us the resilient souls we are. Inside, we skated to the heavy metal pulse of 'I was made for loving you, baby' (KISS -- 'Kings in Satan's Service') and Christopher Cross. The place stank of wet moldy carpet and smelly socks. But it was far and away the best sport to do.
Homebush Rink (near the abattoirs and now no doubt now subsumed by Olympic Park) was pretty small and scungy. I think I was introduced to ice skating much earlier in Year 7 by Linda, who took me to the much more magnificent rink at Blacktown, where she and her sister went rather mysteriously To Meet Boys. (From memory, some of these encounters later became material for award-winning teen dramas set in detention centres and scripted by L.) Boys or no boys, ice skating always had a mysterious allure, a vague sense of danger and of Other Climes. Later, another grand rink opened up at the Macquarie Centre, to which I think I went once. I was rather too old to skate by then and too young to do it without irony and nostalgia.
In summer, the bludge sport of choice was jazz ballet -- laugh if you will, but a big improvement on house softball. We corralled into the Music Room and later the School Auditorium to do what must have been the forerunner of jazzercise, aerobics, and all those Jane Fonda/Olivia Newton John-type activities. I spent a lot of time during those classes (and also the musical production rehearsals) pondering whether I would one day end up with a large, bell-shaped bottom like the Year 11 and 12 girls: what was it that happened to people when they got old? 
Jazz ballet was originally conducted by an unmemorable person then an Only Too Memorable Person with an name like Gabriela or Daniella, who seemed very beautiful and extremely joozified, a bit like a vampire queen. I guess she was about 25 but she seemed old at the time. Gabriela despaired of us, because we never took jazz ballet seriously, unlike the girls at (insert names of notorious western sydney schools), jazz ballet probably being the only class where they received any teaching.
'Girls, girls, how will you ever get men?' she used to say.
In fact, there were two boys who attended jazz ballet, Alex Mc and Stephen K, fey pretty boys of the sort you suspect are gay, tho I later met Stephen K in my mid-30s in a creative writing class, where he was much less pretty and definitely not gay. At one stage, we developed some kind of Dance of the Bumblebees routines, where we ran, er, danced around Alex or Stephen, who would arise at some significant moment as Queen Bees.
Gabriela was doomed with kids at a selective school, receiving feminist instruction from bearded intellectuals educated at Macquarie Uni. She did try to teach us How to Run Across the Beach in Such a Way as to Attract Men, which consisted of dragging one foot behind the other, then casting a languid head toss over one shoulder, which we later imitated with much mirth on the playground. (You can tell I never paid enough attention at the time...now.)
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