Scouting out history

Andrew Mathieson
GHOSTS from the past hover around Geelong’s scout museum.
They stretch back, in all forms, to 1909 and forward to this year, celebrating a century of the scouting movement in the Geelong region.
Old records, faded photos, a splattering of traditional khaki uniforms from different scout groups, right back to the first Geelong Try Boys, haunt the inside of the museum in a Newcomb hall.
Graham Monk, the museum’s curator, considers himself somehow among the walking dead.
“I died in 2004,” he remarks.
“I didn’t have a heartbeat for two to three minutes.”
Graham was gone, clinically dead, but somehow survived the heart failure.
The brush with death has affected the 80-year-old’s balance to the point where he no longer drives to the museum from his Belmont home.
He believes it also makes sorting through the museum’s thousands of priceless collectables even harder.
“You can count them for me,” Graham asks.
“The hall is absolutely crammed. We have boxes and boxes of scout stuff still there.”
Some memorabilia is also in his makeshift study, in desk drawers, in tin canisters and in more boxes still.
The museum and heritage centre was established in 1997 when old scout troops were closing down and their memorabilia was deteriorating in dusty halls.
The pieces of history found a new home at first in Eumeralla Scout Camp, near Anglesea, but its storage space filled up quickly.
Graham has hundreds of scout notes on his computer files and can chronicle back through the past.
He tells how Geelong established the boys brigades – a popular youth organisation in Britain – more than a decade before the scouts existed, which led to the famous Try Boys name.
Church groups at St Pauls, St Stephens, All Saints, Christ Church and Yarra Street Methodist churches later sponsored Queen’s scout groups.
“Since scouting started in Geelong, there have been 167 groups here,” Graham says.
“Naturally, we can’t locate all of them.”
Graham’s father is part of the history, having started Queenscliff’s first scout group after serving in World War One.
“A bit before my time, that was,” Graham grins.
During the next world war, an eager Graham became a scout emulating Australia’s heroes on the other side of the world.
‘Be prepared’, the scout’s undying creed, never rang truer than in 1941 – the year of founder Robert Baden Powell’s death.
“Scouts were used as messengers in case the war broke out in Australia,” Graham remembers.
Jamborees were the growing rage then and Graham remembers showing up to the third ever in Australia, near modern-day Lilydale, with hundreds of others.
Making bridges and flying foxes illustrated different values back in those halcyon days.
Now it would be an occupational health and safety issue, Graham suggest while shaking his head.
He thinks back and utters two words: obedience and ingenuity.
Such disciplines were ensconced into the boys’ psyche when he was a scout leader in the 1960s and ’70s at 3rd Corio, even in the simple bottle drives and bob-a-job schemes, a staple of the scout diet.
That was scouting then but its precepts have now changed.
“When I joined, there weren’t as many houses around as there are now,” Graham adds.
“We used to camp close to our scout hall.”
Like fashion aficionados, the powers that be decided that hats were out.
“They had the old peak hat, they went away from that, which was the wrong thing to do, and went to the akubra and from there went to the beret and from there went to nothing,” Graham points out.
Well, not on Graham’s head, at least – the hats are safely stored away where his scouting heart is.