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Always on a Friday. (Ryan).

Article Excerpt
SHORTLY AFTER 5 p.m. one recent Friday, I drove into the yard behind a large Melbourne near-city church. This might have come as a shock to my weather-beaten old utility, more accustomed at that hour to visiting the parking lot attached to the local pub; but the car was hardly more surprised than its owner.

There, at an hour when you might have expected most children to be at home getting ready for their tea, a hundred or more of them appeared to be just settling down in class. No, they were not the naughty ones "kept in" for discipline. They were the brightest, liveliest, happiest lot you ever saw, bursting with exuberance yet settling seriously down to work. For this was no ordinary school; this was the "Friday Night School", which assembles weekly behind the square, brown-brick tower of St John's Catholic church in East Melbourne.

There appeared to be no sternly marshalled and formal organisation of classes, each with an adult teacher up front. Among the little groups of four or five, seated at small crowded-together tables, it was difficult at first to spot any "Australian" faces. But there was every other kind of face--every colour and every nationality, boys and girls from around the whole world.

Then, with a bit of a...