FOR MICHAEL COLLINS, JEFFERY AND ME by JETHRO TULL. Story by BAZ BLAKENEY.

Kalamunda Primary School, Western Australia, July 20, 1969.

The technology that most shaped my life must be television.

I was just a sprig when I saw my first VFL Grand Final on a four-legged black-and-white box in 1966, a mighty tussle that resulted in a one-point triumph for the forces of good over the evil empire. I was smitten, branded for life a fan of the St Kilda Saints, one of the world’s most spectacularly unsuccessful sporting clubs.

I am still waiting for a second flag.

Swathes of my childhood were spent in front of the TV set, sopping up Hanna-Barbera cartoons, cheap Westerns, Jerry Lewis and Elvis movies, the Three Stooges, absurdist sitcoms about tropical castaways and genies in bottles and the cloying sentimentality of the Wonderful World of Disney.

News bulletins told of distant wars in steamy swamps, of civil rights martyrs, of a movie star murdered by brainwashed disciples of a chilling madman.

But one television event outshone all before and has shadowed all since — the day Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module of Apollo 11 onto the surface of the moon.

I watched the moonwalk, broadcast in snowy black and white, on a TV screen mounted on a high shelf in a classroom at Kalamunda Primary School in the Darling Range outside Perth, Western Australia. All the desks had been removed and we squeezed in, cross-legged and wide-eyed, to witness what our teachers had been telling us for weeks was a “historic moment”.

We didn’t need to be told.

We saw Armstrong descend the ladder and utter those words (so potent then, so hackneyed now) and went back to our classes, to lessons that suddenly seemed inadequate, vain, so small.

Neil Armstrong was an instant world hero, Buzz Aldrin his trusty sidekick.

Few people, myself included, gave quite as much thought to the third astronaut of Apollo 11, Michael Collins, the muggins who circled the moon alone before picking up the hitchhikers for the return trip.

A year after the event, British prog-rockers Jethro Tull put out their third album, Benefit, and a standout track was For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me, a hymn to the third moonman who was, for about 21 hours, the loneliest man in human history.

When he was on the dark side of the moon, Collins noted wryly: “If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

Jethro Tull’s melancholy paean to solitude and humanity’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and adventure remains probably my favourite song from the band that started out as a clanky blues outfit, dazzled with a few genre-mashing albums, then seemed to get lost in folksy folderol and fiddledy-dee.

Tull’s songsmith Ian Anderson had a turn of phrase that could elevate the mundane to the mystic and bring the otherworldly thudding back to earth.

To Michael Collins, he gave these words:

I’m with you boys
So please employ just a little extra care
It’s on my mind
I’m left behind when I should have been there
Walking with you.

The lyrics talk of mankind’s endless quest into the unknown to “sow the monkey’s seed” and “the great eternal lie” and we are left with a curious mix of wonder and unease at what humanity has done and could do and maybe never will and possibly shouldn’t.

The song is bafflingly ambiguous, yet pinned precisely on an experience almost every human alive at the time shared.

NASA says the Apollo 11 team took a mixtape to the moon that included Glen Campbell’s Galveston, Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat & Tears and People by Barbra Streisand. Not surprisingly, no Jethro Tull, who were at that time relative unknowns pushing their second album Stand Up.

Then came Benefit, an album Rolling Stone magazine described at the time as “lame and dumb”. But Rolling Stone also panned Neil Young’s Harvest when it first appeared, so what would those numbskulls know?

Trawling through Jethro Tull’s vast output these days is a little like op-shopping — finding forgotten treasures hidden among so many things you just don’t need.

One thing I sorely needed in 1969 and still do is For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me.

The opening line could well describe the feeling at the song’s end as the last suspended Em9 chord fades into the oblivion of silence.

Watery eyes at the last sighing seconds.

To quote a more famous song, my life’s regrets are “too few to mention”. But I will anyway.

I may never see another St Kilda premiership and I will almost certainly never fulfil my dream of going into space.

Recruit well, Saints.

I’m with you boys, so please employ a little extra care.

Stereo story #811