The Age of Sensible Rules

I grew up in the Age of Sensible Rules.
No fourteen year old smoked.
No durry hid in a shoe
behind the cricket nets.
Nobody drank.
No goon slid across a tin roof
after lights out.
Casinos waited for adults.
No Year Ten boy swaggered in
on a borrowed licence
that still smelled of cousin.
As boarders we never signed out
for the movies
and visited Nutgrove Beach
where the sand steadied an esky
and the teachers forgot the tide charts.

We kept our halos straight.
Rebellion never crossed our minds.
The adults had banned things previously.
Close the pubs at six,
they said,
and men will sip like saints.
So the Swill taught the country
to inhale beer before sunset.
The banned plant nobody smoked
spread through suburbs
nobody raided.
Courts yawned.
Police filled their shifts
with quiet reflection.
X-rated films stayed rare.
The Northern Territory
did not post plain brown parcels.
No locked drawer rattled
in an office on George Street.

Rock crept in on vinyl.
The careful stations wrinkled their nose.
Their listeners took one week
to find which numbers still played it loud.

Every fence held firm.
No one climbed.
Human nature loved a rule.

Now kids carry small glowing streets
in their pockets.
Adults squint at the light
and call it danger.
So a new plan lands.
Not trust.
Not long talks at the kitchen bench.
Instead a neat line
that cuts the school roll in half
and calls the bottom half fragile.

They will not borrow
a sibling’s cracked Android.
Some lanky fifteen-year-old
definitely will not run
a quiet library of passwords.
They will not ask
the clever kid in Year Nine
to make it all invisible.
The family tablet
will not turn into a sly grog room
behind a calculator icon.
School laptops will not learn
that filters have seams.
The rich house on the hill
will not find a polite workaround.
The flat with three kids
and one tired parent
will not be left with nothing
but a pamphlet.

No one will drift
from noisy safe platforms
to quiet unsafe ones.
No one will learn
that honesty kills access,
so silence becomes habit.
We could teach.
Sit beside them.
Watch the rubbish.
Ask, “What do you make of that?”
Let them train
with home still close.

But teaching has no podium.
No headline.
No morning interview.

So the plan stands.
Turn the bright square
into contraband.
Push the party underground.
Give each twelve-year-old
a mask, a torch,
and the clear lesson
that their stories
are safest
anywhere
their parents
are not.

F.S.F.