The Last Great Rockfight

"As a grotty kid in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs in the 1970s, I knew one thing: It’d be the height of gracelessness not to help instigate rockfights whenever there was a chance to fling an arc of rock at some other idiot. Playing rugby league and rugby union growing up, there was no class difference. Only good shots and bad shots, and wimps who’d limp away crying. But if you were injured and didn’t cry and didn’t dob then you were all right. Headshots were the only unacceptable exception to the rule, especially if there was a nun cross-examining you a week before your First Holy Communion.  

There wasn’t a time when boys didn’t throw rocks at each other back then. You'd even mention it to your mum when you got home, much like an unexamined bullet-point as to how your day was. If you weren’t bleeding, well too badly, everything was obviously all right. If you were injured, then, you were an idiot who should’ve known better. Meaningless “Won’t do it again” promises were spoken

Truth is, rockfighting is literally just bloody good fun. 

It always has been and always will be.

It was a great leveller between boys at their most rugged. Inevitably, there’d be teams, cliques or groups or sides and you learnt how to work with those on your side against all-comers. The dependency upon one another was instantaneous. A handful of gravel, some good round rocks and something flat which could spin and skim across the air between your throw and the target was all you’d need. Hairline fractures were commonplace. Plus a bit of bravery perhaps. From memory, it was all pretty fair and the Gods of Fortune perhaps kept more of an eye upon us than our parents. For better or for worse, there were no phones, no evidence, no social media commodification of a moments. Life was lived without edits, AI enhancements nor too much parental interference. 

The last great rockfight I had was up at a small cave at Queens Park in Sydney. A few of us had just finished playing footy for Waverley College, 9th June 1979. The entrance as was a strange portal, an elliptical shape which had naturally evolved from the sandstone, shooting upwards at between thirty to forty-five degrees to a large chamber where a each of us seven blokes (who’d been playing School footy and had finished watching the 1st XV run-around) could sit. A couple of weeks before, I’d been with four of them (who were the year above me) ice-skating at Prince Alfred Park. We’d met some girls from Cronulla I seem to recall which was the most exotic sounding place anyone who lived in Bondi could ever meet. 

In the cave of the last great rockfight, there was a small thin grubby mattress. The cave was generally wet, dank and muddy. So were we. There was a sheet of corrogated tin on the tunnel floor, which had been covered in the bones, grease and carcase of a BBQ’d rooster which had probably been there from a night or two, as well as the remnants of a fire place. The spot may have been used for tribal rockfights for millennia. 

The magical thing about this cave was this. Above the large chamber where the mattress was, there was an upper level you could stand up in where there was a natural slit in the sandstone as perfect as any a machine gunners pill-box. It had a view out to an open ledge where no-one could crawl through, but there was room enough to throw rocks out and not be seen. 

All of us had who’d previously been cleaning out the cave’s excess mud together so we could climb through more easily, without announcement nor malice, divided into two rock-fighting sides: those inside the cave with the gunnery ledge - versus - those on the outside. It was a fun and willing affair and had to be over quickly because most of the lads were heading off to mass and then going off to Luna Park afterwards. 

No-one got especially injured and we wandered up to Charing Cross to catch buses. 

Those lucky enough to head off to Luna Park kindly invited the rest of us in the last great rockfight come with them, but as far as I was concerned, my family was far too poor to spend money outside of birthdays. Just so happened by chance it was my mother’s birthday dinner that night, so I recalled being happy to be invited out, and happy not to go because we were too poor, yet happier still that, for a rare change, I had a more noble reason than our pathetic Dickensian poverty not to be able to go out with others and have fun.

Anyway, last great rockfight I ever had. The entrance to that magical cave has long since silted up. But, if you feel like digging it up and reviving the place, just walk along the path at the top of Queens Park where you enter near the small sandstone cliffs near Queens Park Road. That’s if the majestic Moreton Bay fig trees haven’t taken over completely. Find some kids your own own age, throw rocks at them. If they don’t run away and start throwing some back, it’s game on. 

Enjoy."