For my parents generation 21 was the passing into adulthood ( key to the door and all that). Never mind that half of them were married and had kids by then it was a significant stage in life.
Seems to be eighteen nowadays but when I was growing up in Oz your 21st was a major event and there was a format!!
The celebrant (or in reality their parents) was obliged to lay on a full evening of food and drink. If you were hosting us lot the number of beers consumed could quite easily get well into the hundreds so it wasn’t cheap. The quid pro quo was that guests were expected to bring a decent present. The presents were usually collected by the parents and stored safely away for opening on the following day when you weren’t too befuddled to remember who’d clubbed together to get a new squash racquet or the latest Bowie CD.
My own passed quite uneventfully except when the old man was making a speech. He made the foolish comment that I’d never done anything to embarrass him and my Mum. Cue a lot of loud laughter and me fighting off friends eager to correct that misconception.
We were all of an age and there seemed to be one of these events every three weeks for a while.
Some of them did not go as planned.
A cricket colleague had his in the back room of a pub. I arrived with the girlfriend and was well into my third Tooheys when I spotted something wrong. Rather than being securely locked in the boot of his parents’ car the presents were on display on a trestle table at the front of the room.
Shit – he’s going to open them in front of the crowd!
21st’s were one of the few occasions where friends mixed socially with parents, grandparents and other aged relatives. Often this was fine but on occasion it could go horribly wrong.
The problem with opening gifts in public is that you were never quite sure what was actually in them. All went well and items like sports gear, CDs and books were safely opened.
There remained a suspicious looking cube which I would have pretended not to notice. Once you’ve opened upwards of 20 gifts though baulking at the last one would be a bit weird.
The parcel was duly opened to “The Sound of Silence”. Someone ( and no it wasn’t me although I’d have been proud to come up with the notion) had ripped the head off an inflatable woman filled it with scrunched up newspaper then mounted it on a piece of particle board.
It was a much cheaper version than this and didn’t have the real hair. It sat there with its cavernous mouth gaping while the mate’s grandparents tried to work out its function and those under 25 tried not to laugh out loud. I didn’t know the Mum real well but the Dad used to come down to the cricket quite often and I was desperately trying to avoid his eye as he was laughing as much as the rest of us.
On another such occasion a set of benevolent parents had hired out the local golf club for their son’s event. A good friend who I’d met through my brother and played football and cricket with.
All was going well until the beers started to kick in. We were on the dance floor giving it our all to Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson.
Unbeknownst to us another sporting colleague had managed to break into the cleaners cupboard and extract one of those old upright hoovers. Periodically he would emerge from behind a bank of slot machines and make a swift run across the dance floor pushing the thing in front of him like a cowcatcher on 19th century US trains. Feet, ankles, shins and knees were in serious danger and I was still a bit tender a couple of weeks later.
Most parents were quite glad to tell us to fuck off home at 11pm presumably in the hope they wouldn’t have to deal with us en masse for several months or, even better, years.
The parents on this occasion though made the schoolboy error of inviting us back to the family home. They weren’t stupid or drunk enough to let us inside but there was a nice front patio overlooking a gently sloping lawn on to a suburban cul-de-sac.
I was still recovering from trying to avoid that fucking hoover earlier in the evening and wondering whether the girlfriend would be up for a bit of late night horizontal jogging when I heard a cry from the road below.
Another sporting colleague had decided it was a good idea to strip naked and run down the middle of the road shouting “Hi Boys” while waving to the crowd like someone carrying the Olympic torch into the stadium.
The aged relatives were shocked whilst the more alert amongst us immediately headed in the direction from which he’d emerged. Finding his clothes and then hoofing them over a fence into a backyard with a large dog seemed a good idea at the time. He’d planned ahead though and hidden them well – certainly too well for a three quarters cut me to work out.
It was a fun time and eventually we all had to grow up (or try to) and there were many such events that just made life worth living
© ArthurDaley 2026
