THIS week we come to you from across the Huangpu River - the busy waterway that runs through the booming Chinese city of Shanghai. The Huangpu is a tad bigger than the Wingecarribee River and much more murky, surrounded by towering skyscrapers and millions of people, making it just a little busier than the Bong Bong flats.
LYING back in bed watching Shanghai wake up for some reason got my mind wandering back almost half a century to my years as a young bloke going to primary school in Mittagong, when every young lad had a slingshot, catapult or shanghai at some stage in their lives.
In an amazing coincidence, later that day while wandering through a water village out of Shanghai, we spotted a couple of Chinese kids having a ball with little slingshots their mum had just bought for them from a nearby shop. The boy seemed to be having the most fun as he collected any loose rock he could find to plonk into the nearby drainage canal. Occasionally he peppered his sister’s bum (as boys will do), but she didn’t seem to mind.
ONE of the best stories in the Bible is the old David and Goliath yarn, where the little bloke nails the big bloke with a shanghai so, clearly, these weapons of minimal destruction have been around for a long time. In fact the concept of pulling rubber back to fire off a projectile has been used from the earliest civilisations as part of their warfare arsenal, but these days more sophisticated toys have taken their place.
SHANGHAIS are probably prohibited weapons now in most Australian states, or at best politically incorrect, but they did provide hours of cheap fun for a few generations of kids and I am not sure anyone was too badly damaged by them.
Our parents warned us that a shanghai could take out someone’s eye, so I think we were all pretty careful not to shoot kids in the head.
Our main target was the local starling population. I can’t remember ever hitting a starling, but we sure frightened them off the paling fence. These days we pop in to Council to borrow a trap to catch the pesky birds, which is probably more humane, but not half as much fun.
OUR shanghais were made with a carefully selected forky stick collected from the bush. We then had to find some rubber and a piece of leather, which held the rock.
The difficult bit was attaching the rubber to the forky stick so that it didn’t continue to come off when you pulled the rubber back.
Come to think of it, they were never really very effective because we weren’t strong enough to hold the forky stick firmly enough to allow the rubber to be pulled right back. But it was all a lot of cheap fun, making the shanghai, then firing off little rocks at whatever target we pretended was the enemy.
THE whole shanghai craze would probably only last a few weeks before being replaced by the next fad to take our fancy - yo-yos, marbles, collecting cigarette packets or whatever. It was all a bit of fun that didn’t rely on a television, a computer game, youth committee or an after school care centre to organise our entertainment for us.
FORMER Wingecarribee shire gardener Jim Cosgrove (the bloke they named Cosgrove Park after) always took a shanghai to work.
“He never went off to work without it in his bag,” said his wife with a twinkle, revealing a dark secret at the Leighton Gardens centenary celebration a few years back. It seems that when old Jim caught a dog peeing on his plants in Leighton Gardens, he’d strategically deliver a rock into the nether regions, subtly convincing the dog that life would be less painful if it broke the habit.
“That’s not very nice,” protested Mrs Cosgrove when he told her what the shanghai was for. “How would you like it if someone did it to you, Jim?”
Gentleman Jim just smiled, “But I don’t cock my leg on Rhododendrons, do I dear.”
*Geoff Goodfellow has lived his life in the Southern Highlands and is well known in local sporting and social circles.
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