A snapshot of my brother and I meeting Philip Chapman on 28 Nov 1970.
I was eleven years old at the time.
Parramatta High was founded in 1913 and was the first co-educational
public high school in New South Wales.
Chapman had attended in the 1950's and was the head of the
school cadet corps. Even during my time there, the school had a walk-in
armoury behind a thick steel door and an arsenal of .303's and an
Owen machine-gun. A legacy of its founding during the Great War.
Funny to think of a public school today being supplied weapons by the
government
When Chapman attended Sydney University he joined the university
RAAF corps and learnt to fly in Tiger Moths. An experience
that would no doubt been another tick in the box for astronaut
selection. He went on to training in jet fighters.
I would like to stress that Parramatta High was a public school.
Boys and girls were equal, in the same class rooms and playgrounds.
The demographic of Parramatta was that kids came from families
with varying backgrounds and it was all very egalitarian.
Demographers would say most came from working
class or middle class backgrounds.
So when Chapman visited as an ex-student for the opening of the sports
field that the school had been granted a lease for from the Parramatta Park Trust,
the context was that it was 1970, the prior year we had only just landed
on the moon and this is a guy who is in training for the planned extended
Apollo flights.
Amazing in itself.
But he has gone from a public school in the western suburbs of Sydney
to NASA as an astronaut when astronauts were a rarity.
Thousands would apply whenever NASA put out the call and only an elite few
would be selected.
So it said to me at the time you could be a kid from the western suburbs of
Sydney attending a state run school and yet the sky was the limit.
And it says exactly the same today for any kid growing up in the
suburbs of Australian cities or out in the country. Anything is possible.