Life is mostly ephemeral froth and bubble and temporary captains and kings, potentates and prime ministers depart, but ABC Television's Play School has been a pillar of Australian life since the olden days. The show's first episode was shown on July 18, 1966.
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No wonder, then, that the National Museum of Australia values and collects Play School artefacts from the show's sets. In a country as baby-young as ours these treasures may have, one day, some of the historical heft that very, very old relics (mummified pharaohs, say, or Viking ships) already have have in the museums of more venerable nations.
Now, to add to some Play School artefacts/treasures already on display, the museum has just installed the iconic Play School arch window.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll explain that for the first series the sets for the Australian show were copied from the sets of the BBC's show of the same name. But all was soon revised and rebuilt, and the new sets included three "magic windows" – arch, round and square – and a flower clock and a rocket clock (the museum has these famous clocks).
These significant objects allowed presenters to explore educational concepts such as telling the time, and to see the outside world through the arch, round and square windows, each differently shaped window offering the spellbound children a differently shaped view of the world and of Life. They remained a part of the Play School sets until 1999. In our picture museum senior curator Sophie Jensen, having reverently donned curatorial gloves, is installing the arch window between its cousins.
Of course most children who grew up in Australia from the 1970s to 1990s will know Benita Collings. She presented 401 episodes of Play School on ABC Television. She has her own distinguished niche in the museum's Eternity gallery.
Don't tell a soul, for it is a little embarrassing and is not in the innocent asexual spirit in which Play School was made, but this father (almost 70 now), watching Play School with young children, used to find Benita fetching in the extreme and may only have watched because of her.
She was gorgeous, and if she seemed athletic and lithe it was because, the museum reveals, the energetic presenter trained regularly at the gym so that however many exhausting takes it took she could jump like a kangaroo or run like an emu.
