This year marks 40 years since the first Blue Light event was held at Kilsyth Memorial Hall in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The police-supervised underage dances have spread across the globe, with Blue Light now boasting chapters in New Zealand, Polynesia, the UK and Europe. Mikayla has been coming to the Darebin disco for three years, having been introduced by a friend.
While Mikayla and a growing mob of children and parents wait outside, Joanna Parissis, a youth resource officer with Victoria Police, is inside with the volunteers readying for the chaos. Known as Copper Jo, Ms Parissis became involved with Blue Light through work in but now volunteers her time out of hours. The doors open, and nine-year-old Phoenix, dressed stylishly in jacket and baseball cap, is among the first to hit the dancefloor.
The music, according to DJ Jason Davis, is "mostly top 40 — anything that the kids would listen to on the radio or their iPads". Mr Davis keeps across the latest music trends with the help of his two children. One of them, Joshua, is behind the decks this evening. One of those with fond childhood memories of Blue Light is Karen Day, who is among the surge of parents dropping off their children for the night's event. It was the first time I actually felt like I was becoming older, you know, I was becoming my own person," she says.
Later in the night, nine-year-old Grace cites another benefit to having the 'blue' in Blue Light. Mr Ray, now retired, says police in the east Melbourne suburb were constantly being confronted with young children saying, "we've got nothing to do". In an effort to solve the problem, Mr Ray and his colleagues hired two bands and booked the nearby Kilsyth Memorial Hall for an underage event billed as the Blue Light Dance.
Held on June 12, and attended by 82 children, the event was a success and the dances continued once a fortnight. Mr Ray says the dances prevent youth crime by distracting children and giving them something to talk about. Underage dances were not a new idea, Mr Ray says, having been tried by local service clubs in the past. Mooroolbark was not the only police station to launch their own dance; across the city in Essendon local police held their first Essendon Youth Dance at about the same time.
Mr Ray rang the officer in charge at Essendon and convinced him to change the name of their event to Blue Light. Within a few years the Blue Light events had switched from dances to discos — "that was the trend when Grease came out," Mr Ray says — and spread across the state.
Soon, the events became magnets for rising local celebrities keen to build their profile, such as Young Talent Time's Tina Arena. By the early s, Blue Light was also holding a star-studded annual summer event at the Billboard nightclub in Melbourne's CBD, bussing children in from across Victoria. Officers were often rostered on to attend discos, the force assigned staff to oversee the organisation's administration, and police attending Blue Light events while off-duty could claim the hours towards leave.
However, that all changed in when Victoria Police announced it could no longer spare the resources required to staff the underage institution. For some smaller towns, the changes seemed to threaten the only underage entertainment on offer to the local children. Newspaper reporters interviewed the officers in charge of their local stations about the future of their disco.
Deb Robertson, a superintendent with 34 years' experience and the current president of Blue Light, says she understood why the changes were made. Blue Light is now placing a greater focus on its camp in Maldon, which it has held since and been a destination for school groups for many years. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
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