Chapter 2 A Candle to Myself
Chapter 2: A Teenager
The Bat Caves
Warrnambool has a lot of near famous citizens; probably more than anywhere else in the world. It is also famous for its beaches and landscape. One of them being the bat caves about 20 kilometres from town. There are soaring cliffs (around 50 meters high) battered by the Southern Ocean waves to the East of Warrnambool. They are home to many shipwrecks, (hundreds of ghostly remains from England and Ireland, so close to their new home, now doomed to roam the tumbling seas in gowns and tunics) and halfway up one of them there is a big cave, an eerie entrance to other large caves, full of bats and bat shit: looks like my childhood chocolaty health drink, Acta-Vite.
There are three large bat caves all connected by tunnels. To get to the first one, overlooking the ocean you need to climb down a cliff nearby, using a rope (about halfway) then scramble the other half by frog jumping on boulders until you got to the sandy beach at the bottom. Then walk for five minutes on squeaky sand, dodging the massive waves breaking on the sand nearby. Then a scramble back up some boulders, about halfway up the cliff, then into a large cave. If I had stopped here and gone home, I would have already thought I had fallen right into Enid Blyton’s Famous Five book, “Smugglers Cove”.
At the back of the cave, there is a 45-degree shaft like a tunnel, you can navigate by sliding down on your butt, in the bat shit, yes, there are thousands of bats, all the way down to below sea level. With only a couple of torches, it felt pretty scary, without one it would be a monster’s lair. Like willingly climbing and sliding into a giant whale.
At the bottom there is a horizontal tunnel, with stalactites to dodge here and there, that leads to the first cathedral.
Walking carefully by torchlight, through the tunnel for 5 minutes, you come into a magnificent cathedral—the Sistine Chapel quickly comes to mind. A huge cave, shaped like a cone that soars 60 meters from where we were standing, below sea level, to the farmer’s grassy paddock at the top.
Two small holes in the paddock above shafted the most ethereal beams of light, illuminating the cave and the bats swirling through it, way above our heads. There were thousands of years of bat shit covering the floor and all the rocks. Incredibly, my brother-in-law, years ago, came to this cave with a friend and collected bat shit to sell as fertilizer. They had a winch at the top and lowered down a big bucket they filled from way down below.
I thought wow, I am looking at the 8th wonder of the world when I saw it and imagined, being in a church like Notre Dame in France. The bats swirling through heavenly light, beaming from heaven, illuminating me. Every sunny day is just another one until you literally stand in the sun’s rays and figure them sacred.
I loved this place and came back two more times to show friends. On the third visit, I brought many friends to see this ‘wonder’. We all eagerly and safely scrambled down the cliff, walked quickly along the beach, then up again into the large cave overlooking the Southern Ocean, down the shaft, along the tunnel and into the heavenly vision. The atmosphere was one of awe until the batteries in our torches died. Enough light poured into the cathedral to see, but the trackback through the tunnel and up the shaft was in complete darkness. The five of us stood at the edge of the cathedral, staring into the darkness. Thinking soon we would have to step out of the light and walk back into the primaeval darkness. Without any choice, we finally left the light behind and tripped over rocks, bumped into walls with no idea where to go. The tunnel twisted and turned. Unexplored chambers became treacherous hazards, and time was running out. It would be dark outside soon. We took comfort in knowing one of us decided not to climb down the cliff. If we didn’t get back before dark they would run for help.
Around and around in circles, each bump and scrape became more serious and more painful. The darkness now resembled the inside of our brains. Everything looked the same with our eyes open or closed. After each mistaken step, we all started to think about sleeping in bat shit and knew we would never know if the sun shone outside or not.
Then someone said, I can feel fresh air on my face, this could be the way out. We all agreed to follow the air to the shaft that took us back up to the cave above. It sounded easy, but we zigged and zagged, like bees chasing honey, trying to keep it on our faces like a compass. It worked. The air got stronger and stronger; we could hear the waves crashing on the rocks below. We finally found the shaft and started the long climb up to the upper cave to the waning light and freedom. Wow, we did it. Jubilation, mixed with remorse about the torches and lack of planning. For a few minutes, we sat on the lip of the cave and marvelled at the scene stretching out in front of us, all the way to Tasmania. The now grey sky flooded the ocean with remorse and relief. Luckily, we kept our cool and hooked more into the challenge than the potential disaster. We climbed up to the farmland above as the sun finally set, and drove home with a wonderful sense of peace and adventure: something a computer game can and will never be able to do. The smell of the salty air. The sounds of the waves pounding and washing the cliffs. The heavy breathing with each slippery step down the cliff and the puffs of breath that silently escaped our lungs when we first saw our own Notre Dame. The sore muscles from walking, climbing, sliding and staring in awe. And lastly, the spiritual feeling of awe; seeing light coming from one world to another, for real.
Penguin Island
It was 10 years before the bat caves that I fell in love with Penguin Island. A small island near the Warrnambool breakwater, you could walk to on low tide, through Stingray Bay. When I was a kid, I surfed Sting Ray Bay a couple of times. When the swells boomed in from the South, they created nice small left-hand waves. Sometimes, inside the tube, you could see the famous stingrays swimming below.
The Merri River left its earthly constraints here too. Everyone loved swimming in the warm, salt-free river before it joined the cold ocean a few meters away. I met an English woman called Sally whose father loved fishing for the small garfish in the bay. He would get buckets of them using a small net, and a torch on his head to attract them at night, then take them home in a few flapping buckets, fry them up crispy and crunchy in batter and feast with a beer and footy match.
One night I asked him if penguins really did live on the island and he said, yep, there were penguins on Penguin Island and offered to take me there one night to see them. Soon enough, the night arrived. We carefully waded through waist-high water, across the flowing remnants of the Merri River to the island. Then, soaked and squeaky, we climbed up to the top, and then carefully climbed down the other side, facing the open ocean. We sat quietly waiting for the penguins to come home after their daily fishing trip. The Sun had left the earth for only a few minutes. Then, in the bright moonlight, I could see them jumping out of the ocean below and waddling up the hill, in a line, on a well-worn path, right past us, to their home in mini caves? at the top of the hill. I never saw their home or even asked what kind of home penguins have—awestruck by their presence. They have been doing this for thousands of years, and I thought Warrnambool only had Widgies, pie floaters and lousy surf. This experience, along with the Bat Caves, brought me closer to God, than any word I had heard or read about God before. More experiences like this came in the future that added to the same awakening: that which is spiritual is not uttered by a living soul.
My brother-in-law, George (the one who sold bat shit from the bat caves), often went snorkelling around Penguin Island, looking for fish with his spear gun. He was a real, macho guy, with plumber’s muscles patched all over him and a zest for nature. He towered over my little mound of fear. I am afraid of the sea and sharks, and manta rays and, everything that moves in the ocean. If I go under the surface, I imagine them everywhere. When I am surfing, I focus on the waves and not the shadows menacing my dangling legs below.
George’s muscles could throw fridges across the kitchen into the lounge room when he drank too much. He saw so many amazing things under the water. Some of them are beautiful and some dangerous. Manta Rays and Moray Eels poking, hungrily, out of their hideouts in the rocks. Small Sharks and lots of yummy fish. The big yummy fish came home with him, still spiked on his spear, which he could eat all week and go back after a week of clobbering rocks and clay, next weekend for more.
Using his natural power (back then plumbers dug everything by hand) and I guess his super-duper spear gun he got to know the ocean like the back of his hand and felt comfortable floating and diving in the stormy seas that hammered Penguin Island. I wish I did, but I was a weakling. The Southern swells from Tasmania were relentlessly washing and machining the coast into an underwater sand storm; protecting you from being seen by sharks and also you from seeing them. Sometimes, rarely, the water looked like a blue sky and felt calm, like a tranquil fishbowl. During these rare moments, scuba diving took your breath away and probably the times when George did his best fishing.
In the few, fleeting times, I ducked dived down amongst the forest of kelp near the Island I saw swirls of sand, like seals, doing a spiralling dance in the clouds. But, the constant stream of shadows, and ghosts, made me freak out and rocket back to the surface.
I have been scared of flying, heights, red-back spiders, sharks nearly all of my life. Some things have changed a bit over time. Now I can fly in an aeroplane thanks to an Indian Engineer going home to Dubai for his son’s wedding sitting beside me, who said that the aeroplane is well made and they check every bolt.
Penguin Island and the nearby Lady Bay and breakwater were his Aboriginal, his totem and his wildness. Every Sunday morning, he would meet some of his friends near the island, make a cosy spot in the sand dunes and drink dozens of bottles of beer. I don’t know if he went diving, before or after this embellishment of his senses—he certainly got into a fridge throwing mood.
George also loved the 6 pm swill every night after work. Every working man’s bar in town shackled their timbers with flying beer and rafted their senses. From 5 pm, when the prisons shut, all the men in town flew like hungry vampires, needing to sink their teeth into a brew or two, as fast as their wings could flap. Dreams fulfilled, in a magic hour of fun and madness, and then home for steak and chips.
In the ’60s the law changed; hotels could stay open until 10 pm. No more magic swills anymore. Now they all could be drunk and crazy all the time. The fun and madness had set. Now, with more time to take a sip, everyone felt like drinking a drip, and only having a bit: sanity is sometimes insane.
Penguin Island and the Bat Caves are going on. The waves that left Tasmania a week ago, now rest on its angry shore. So will we all.
The Vietnam War
One night I was at my friend Peter’s house watching a movie in conscription Australia—the Australia that owes a never-ending debt of gratitude to the USA for saving it in the second world war. My number 30 came up. It was amazing to think that in a minute moment when I am peacefully watching TV the Australian Government could wrap its hairy muscle ridden arms around my neck and pitch me into a war where they don’t eat pizza. I didn’t feel anything much and wondered what would happen next. There were lots of draft dodgers already in Australia and seeing I was already a culture dodger it didn’t seem to be a big leap to join the other dodgers in the mosquito-ridden valleys of Nimbin.
Some weeks later, I went for a medical exam at the hospital, and a friend of mine said if I smoke a large marijuana joint before I go, they will think I am crazy and not let me in. I thought it was a good idea and smoked ‘the joint’ and drove off in a psychedelic dream to the hospital. I was told by the doctor to go pee in a bottle. I walked into the toilet and found a line of young Aussies like me straining to find the pee to put in the bottle, and saying what a lot of fun it would be to travel and see a new country, and how proud their fathers were of them already. I didn’t think like them at all, I was way too out of it to think anything.
We took the yellow water back to the waiting doctor who said, would everyone please come back tomorrow for a further examination. I thought… OH NO not another giant joint. I woke up the next morning and begged my friend to make the giant joint a minny one but he was unmovable. He said it has to be bigger than yesterday if you have any chance at all of being insane. Okay, okay, let’s do it and get it over with. After waiting for half an hour, it was my turn to be interviewed by the doctor. Wait–interview? –what happened to the medical–does the army know already I have the kind of pee that kills and maims and murders. The doctor said to stand on the scales, and as I stood on them, I thought if I make myself heavy, they will think I am too fat and my pee was wrong—some other guys—a mix-up. I grabbed the window sill beside the scales and pulled down on it as hard as I could to make my weight at least double and when he measured my height, I bent my knees so I was at least a foot shorter. The combinations of extra weight and shortness of stature that I magically and secretly created made me a sure bet to be REJECTED, I thought to myself as he played with his notes.
The next part of the examination was a long list of questions about family and the one I remember the most was when he asked me if there was a history of mental illness in my family? No, no, not yet, as far as I know, I said with great confidence. At the end of this ‘adventure’, he said he was referring me to a psychiatrist for further screening and that would be him. Another joint and another mystical drive on the wrong side of the road to the hospital a week later took me through a psychiatrist’s door void of stethoscopes and pee bottles.
We sat opposite each other at a table and he asked me what I saw as I looked at pages of pretty black splodges on blotting paper. I wanted to tell him his drawings weren’t as good as Rolf Harris, but quite honestly, I felt baffled when all I could see were shapes no different to the shapes you see on the souls of your shoes or the shadows on your bedroom wall. At the end of the test, he said you don’t want to go into the Army do you and I said hmm, no and left. I never received a letter of thanks for trying to be called up–but no cigar–or details of my test result, just silence because they were too busy chasing people through the Nimbin hills. My mother said more than once how much she would like to see the test results.
As the sixties died in a hail of gunfire many people were weakened at the loss of John Lennon, JFK and Martin Luther King. The sixties were doomed to become a business and so many people who worked and loved and searched with all their hearts to make the world a better place are now retired with their superannuation in Queensland and Florida.
My Aboriginal Friends
Between the ages of 16 -18, I didn’t understand the world and felt very confused about black Americans (Africans) and slavery. It made no sense: Christians, treating the Indigenous Indians and the African slaves worse than their family pet. In Australia, the Aboriginals got much the same deal. I had many Aboriginal friends at school which was easy – just treat them with some normal behaviour instead of what most people did: beat them up with their foul mouths and bare knuckles for being dirty boongs. And 50 years later nothing has changed. All Aboriginals around the world are evil because they understand God’s creation, and all Europeans are angels because they understand books written by men?
A painful dilemma. All my superiors close to me: teachers, parents, siblings, police and the government had no idea how evil they (themselves) were. If it wasn’t for homosexuals, all the Aboriginals walking the streets of Warrnambool at night could have died in a hail of hate, instead of some.
I had no idea what I could do about any of this, but I can remember clearly the day I pushed a pram with the baby of a teen Aboriginal, a friend of mine from school inside, down the main street of Warrnambool and felt the soul of the town burning–with rage. I was seventeen and lacked the clarity of mind to follow the political thread and take action to help them. Let’s face it, God created the earth and everyone on it—every one created in her image. Aboriginals love God’s creation and the English do not.
The Aboriginals mostly lived at Framlingham Settlement. A collective dairy farm thirty km’s from Warrnambool in the middle of 100 acres of forest; the only forest in Western Victoria. The English cut down the rest because they don’t like God. I visited the settlement sometimes and loved it there and the people.
Later on, when I was working for the Truth Newspaper and had the chance to do some good, I didn’t. I let my Australian Aboriginal friends down when they needed me most. When they asked me to take their story of unfair evictions to the newspapers, I didn’t, because my newspaper did not write about the truth. I gave up easily and never found a way to help them. A shame, for all my life. I am also ashamed because I didn’t stand up and protect my Aboriginal friends at school, from the bullying and racism that was part of their daily lives.
Now, I think a lot about how the lower classes in the world are treated by religious people and faint: India, Thailand, USA, Mexico, Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand, Africa, Laos, China, ye gods, everywhere. And, can see how far we haven’t come in evolution. Before long, we will all be back in the trees wondering what happened.
I remember Ian and Lenny Clark more than most. They came to my house a couple of times and I went to theirs. Brothers, but you would never know. Lenny had some extra flesh and a happy smile, Ian more the fighter—his muscles bloomed everywhere, on a small thin frame. I lost touch with them, when at the age of 17, I moved to Perth, Sydney, Adelaide then Castlemaine. Ian eventually went to jail after a serious fight with a boong basher. Lenny became politically active and will be remembered for decades for all the good work he has done for his people. White is God and black is the devil, is what many think. Books are divine and nature is evil, that is also what most people think. Money is from heaven and herbs are from hell. Doctors are angels and natural healers are trash. Priests are divine messengers and meditators are going to hell. I hope the world changes before it dies in its own greed and filth. Why do only the rich deserve a place at the table and the poor become manure for their garden? When someone asks you what you have done to make the world a better place, will you move your lips with joy or famine of heart? Ask yourself again and again if what the Stones sang about so long ago makes any sense to you at all. “Think about all the good times I’ve been wastin havin good times.” Not preaching here. Reminding, remembering, wondering and hoping that the 12 monkeys get to you and me in time. That the world is equally good for everyone one day and that can only happen if everyone is equally good today and every day.
Yesterday I became a Vulcan and my new logical mind says: people are better than religions.
The Motorbikes
I chose motorbikes before cars when I turned 18 because of the allure and price. Quite the mistake, because motorbikes loved to remind me who was boss, more than once.
The first reminder looked like an old Triumph Tiger that I swapped for some great photography books that I bought from Brendan Stretch. It was a bomb, a dangerous mixed up bitsa motorbike put together by a 16-year-old teenager and I bought it right in the chops.
In a moment, one full of inspirational delusion I decided to ride it to Tasmania and see some friends. On the first day, I stopped at a small town (about halfway between Warrnambool and Melbourne) called Cobden to see some mates who had bikes. One of them said I will come to Geelong with you and off we went, he rode a stallion and I, a jackass. The sun went down as we turned onto the Princess Highway. My friend who had a normal bike sped off down the highway thinking I would follow, and I did, but my lights went off. The teenager had the dynamo wired backwards and the faster I went the dimmer my lights went until they went out altogether. But I was still powering along behind him using the moonlight to see my way, until, he stopped in front of me. He couldn’t see my lights in his mirrors and thought he lost me and stopped in the middle of his side of the road. Maybe to turn around and come and find me, or pull over to the left and wait and see if I turned up. In the second or two, I had to think, I had no idea whether he would turn left or stay where he was. So, I panicked, slammed on the front and back brakes and quickly discovered the teenager sold me a bike with no front brakes.
A millisecond after I braked the bike dipped sharply down to my left and my left hand, luckily with new gloves on, touched the road for a split second, before the bike whipped me back up straight again causing me to fly through the air—shot out of a canon. The first thing my friend knew of my whereabouts was when I literally flew through the air past him, at his eye height, maybe a meter away and landing quite a long way away past him on the side of the road with a crumpling thud. His eyes looked like frightened dish plates and his mouth stood still: open.
I lay in the grass on the side of the road moaning. Within a minute or two, a car pulled up and a woman got out and ran over to me, fussing and screaming and jabbing me, asking where it hurts, until I said I am not too bad don’t worry. I think she drove off in a huff thinking she had stumbled across a Marlon Brando movie in the outback and no one needed real help.
Then, another minute later, an army convoy stopped to help, (change the movie) and they, with cool heads, lifted me immediately into a jeep and took me to Camperdown Hospital. When I was admitted, they gave me some painkillers and told me to read a Phantom comic because soon they would stitch a few holes.
My second reminder, only a year later was on a 175 Kawasaki I bought in Warrnambool to go to Melbourne to look for jobs as a filmmaker’s apprentice. The day I left for the big city, I packed some food and decided to take the Great Ocean Road because of all the nice curves and hills. I stopped and had lunch at a beautiful surf beach and eventually made it to my friend John Tucker’s house in Toorak, six hours later. I had organised an interview the next day at the Melbourne Theatre Company, for a job as an apprentice stagehand. I left John’s around 8 am and thought it would be an easy ride into the city. But, as I turned from Toorak Rd into the main street, I went as far left as I could to a service road that had two lanes. A minute after turning a concrete mixing truck on my right, without any warning, made a left turn, from the right-hand lane and under I went. The early morning streets of Melbourne bellowed with the sounds of scraping metal, screams, hissing brakes and my beating heart. Within minutes the truck stopped.
People came running and screaming as I lay under the back wheels with my jacket caught under the huge tires. This (the screaming) distracted me from turning the screaming engine off on my bike and pulling myself free from under the wheels.
Once I got free of the wheel I started cussing because the handmade ring a friend had given me earlier, had been squashed into my finger. It was a miracle I was still alive. The tires dragged and skidded with his braking on the bike, instead of rolling over me for quite a way. The screaming just got louder until a man came and helped me into his car to wait for an ambulance. I kept biting my ring to take the pressure off my finger all the way to the hospital. I can’t remember what type of comics the Alfred Hospital had but I lay there waiting for the anaesthetic to kick in while they sewed up quite a few new holes here and there.
Eventually, within two hours, they released me and I could see that all my clothes were nearly torn from my body and thought in the taxi on my way back to John’s he will be surprised to see me back so soon.
Maybe, just maybe I have done my time with bike riding horizontal. I had miraculously survived going through a barbed wire farmer’s fence late one night with a pissed Potty Grauer doing over a 100k’s an hour, the Marlon Brandon movie and now this.
Brother Graham and Portland
Reg Hedditch, a successful real estate mogul of Portland, and his famous mother, the Mayor of Portland were close relations I never knew.
The last time I was in Portland I went to insulate Reg’s office block, brother Graham decided to come too, in separate cars and fix some fridges. We booked into a hotel around 6 pm, and Graham wanted to go to a dance, as he always did, so we went for a walk and miraculously found one in full swing. Willing dancing girls greeted us. Within seconds, not like the Palais De Dance of my youth, our feet moved like castanets.
Graham danced wildly, swinging and jiving, knees popping up and down, arms up in a surrender position, his version of Irish dancing. Then suddenly, his knee crashed into another dancer’s knee, with painful consequences. Because he was drunk, he did not feel much pain, some, time to go, though. I helped him hobble back to the hotel. On the way back we found an abandoned shopping trolley, which was a perfect way to get him home. I pushed him slowly while he yabbered in beer. The sun left the horizon hours ago; the streets were deserted. Looking and listening to the ocean’s yarns, and the trolley squeaked. Then like magic, we came to a street, at its steep bottom it had the flashing lights (for drunken men) of a pizza restaurant. He said, he wanted pizza so I turned the trolley left to go carefully down the hill, when, he suddenly stood up, yabbering again, surf, fun, let me go, I want to ride this monster wave, let it go he said, I did and he surfed the shopping trolley down the hill. He went flying, zigging and zagging, hollering and shouting. About halfway down, a miracle he got that far, he crashed into a parking meter, rolled his trolley, and wiped out on solid concrete, landing on his good knee and chipping some bone off it. Laughing like a madman, he said let’s get some pizza.
Now he had one knee with torn cartilage and another with some bone chips. Luckily but not for long, he crashed just outside the pizza shop. He beckoned me to carry him in to get some sobering pizza, but the lone man said sorry we are closed. Graham was irate, crazy for pizza, called him a fucking wanker, a Greek bastard, and made me carry him back to the hotel on my back—the trolley was broken, and he was still drunk and happy.
We sat outside, among the warm stars and played guitar and banjo for half an hour; then I carried him up the stairs to the third story bedroom and we fell asleep. I woke up to him moaning and groaning in pain around 3 am. The alcohol had left his brain and he could feel the pain of too much fun in one night in Portland. I carried him, on my back again, down the stairs and we went looking for a hospital. I found a small private one which reluctantly gave him some Panadol, and went back to the hotel, back up the stairs, weary steps by now, to bed.
When he woke up in the morning he was still in a lot of pain, more pain. The kind of pain that followed his ceaseless desire for fun, stupid pain, that fashioned his boring refrigerated life for all his days
l had to do some work on Reg’s ceiling, so I carried him down those endless stairs again and put him in his car. He managed to drive home with two broken knees the agonizing 60 minutes back to Warrnambool, alone. I heard a few days later that when he got to Dave and Dori’s, he crawled out of the car, up the small flight of stairs to the door, rang the doorbell and said, “hello I am home.” Were they amused? No, it was a tossup some days, more than others between me and him who lacked Buddhist wisdom the most. Without the foresight of intelligence at the time, and the hindsight now, we had no idea if we were normal kids: or not. Oh, I think not. Their two sons, daily amused, abused and bemused them: not always at the same time. Age exposes the truth, like a rock found in the bottom of a milkshake. My rock was bigger and uglier than the others, I imagined. Only in their deceased, can I bear witness to my need to do good, and find balance before judgment.
On a similar surfing trip, we went to Cape Bridgewater, a ten-minute drive from Portland, instead of taking the left turn going down to the beach you drive straight ahead onto a dirt road, which takes you to Whites Beach, a popular surfing spot at the end of the massive Discovery Bay: home to many ancient shipwrecks. There are underground caves there too. When you get to the beach, the car park is on a hill, overlooking near-perfect point surf for goofy footers on the left, and if you look to the right and over your right shoulder, towards Adelaide you will see Discovery Bay, from behind the waves: giant whales, lined up in rows, of steaming white, racing a kilometre or more to the uninhabited shores.
One day Graham decided (bored with the small waves on the point) to paddle his meagre surfboard nearly half a kilometre, to where the waves were breaking in the bay behind us, to check out the quality of the waves. I waited for him as he turned into a speck and wondered about his dangerous adventure. A very long and stressful hour later, I saw his speck, growing larger, paddling as fast as he could back to the point. Oh my god, I could see another speck paddling behind him and heard him yelling. The second speck was a big white pointer following him: all the way back to the point. I was scared, while I watched the 30-minute race—like an accident in slow motion—between a crazy man and a hungry shark play out. Nothing I could do but wonder if the blood-curdling screams scared the shark or me more, and the shark was dam hungry. Amazingly, it stayed hungry and we, reflectively and exuberantly, were able to drive home in two pieces. It would make much more sense to drive around the bay and check out the waves in the bay from the safety of our car, but there weren’t any roads. The only roads we found, took us to the Hedditch homestead where my great grandfather was born or to Adelaide through the steamy whale mist groaning onto the shore: where men came first, but not last.
Dave Dawson and Sunbury Pop Festival
In the ’90s Dave Dawson went from writing lies and wanton imaginings for the Truth newspaper to writing the truth about Country singers from the U.S. that touched his heart. This love was originally fermented with his beloved Bob Dylan. I remember three special times with Dave so clearly. The first, when he was showing me a Bob Dylan LP and saying how good he was. This was in the age of the Beatles when everyone was listening to them. I remember at our local skating rink they had to bring a TV so everyone could see their first live concert. But I wasn’t and neither was Dave. My first records were Billy Halliday and Ray Charles. Singers who resonated the words in the books I was reading about. Black Americans fighting for their freedom like George Jackson’s book: Soledad Brothers. There was an aboriginal settlement near where I lived and at least 10 children from there went to the same school as me. I felt deeply for their sad and desperate lives: living like dogs in their own country, usurped and vilified by their white invaders. This was the beginning of knowing, knowing how many people’s lives have been destroyed by the Anglo-Saxon invaders all around the world: and it is only getting worse, centuries later.
The merchants from England are like cancer, growing out of control, on this world. No matter how many wise words were spoken by the American Red Indians, the Africans, the Australian Aboriginals, the Thais, the Mexicans, the Hawaiians, the Māori’s, the Tibetans, the… the tingling sound of cash drowns them all out. I understand why Dave love’s country music: it has taken a long time I must admit. A man, (usually a man) on his horse, on a mountain, overlooking a deep valley, with the Sun going down thinking to himself, I am free and so he was until the pale-faced English banker came to town, intent on building his empire. Now all these empires are complete and the myriad of them have enough power to turn our (natives) lights off forever.
The second was in 1972 on a farm near Melbourne I went with Dave to the Sunbury Rock Festival: Australia’s answer to Woodstock. Max Merritt and the Meteors, along with Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs rocked all the joints. I interloped with a friend, dropped some acid, then died of fright walking to the stage (to see Billy Thorpe) through a gang of Hell’s Angels and got back just in time to rescue Dave from being bashed up by a lesbian he tried to kiss.
The third was back in the Bob Dylan days walking the streets of Warrnambool late at night when a loud, crass, insolent voice bellowed over the rumbling Studebaker’s engine, “go home yah poofta.” Two policemen prowling the streets looking for long-haired Bob Dylan devotees, saw us, with our shoulder-length hair and struck gold. It was the same mentality in the town that boofed an Italian migrant, Mario the Tailor, every day, “go home yah wog.” Oh, and the same pot-bellied policemen were always yelling at the local Aboriginals too, “go, home darky.”
And the bodgies and widgies and rockers and hippies and sharpies; all got the same, motherly support from the local constabulary, “go home before I beat your brains out.” Dave was a light, returning to a fisherman’s town, everyone drunk on plonk, with a window to another world he had found in faraway Melbourne Town.
Surfing
Addictions start and end with surfing. School bells, short skirts and parental considerations blur into a thick white salty spray. Warrnambool didn’t have very good surf, and the water is bitterly cold, so we donned our raincoats and jackets to keep off the icy wind in the long wait for a good set to come in: often it was years. We were literally wearing wet suits. If they came down to our ankles, we could rest our bloody knees on the gaberdine, slowing the onslaught of sand and wax that was slowly grinding to our bones. It is hard writing about the past without sounding ancient, like a neanderthal that no one has ever met; yet, the waves are eternal, before Christ. Time is measured in rocks ground to sand. How many millions of waves did surfers miss before they swung out of trees into the wild blue yonder. This is a story about happiness obtained from wet salt that knows no bounds in its eternal assault onto the land of lubbers as you, yourself, become salty encrusted, somewhat transformed, from human to a fishy beast.
No matter what was beneath your dangling legs, the waves on the surface were an endless playground; enhanced by the summer sun and Kermond’s hamburgers. A clear purpose etched into your alarm clock: riding the perfect wave. Quite solitary and mindful of nature in its raw beauty and how we all came from the ocean: before.
When I was 16, I camped at the beach all summer (I remember my parents visited once) I did walk home some days for food otherwise I bought a loaf of bread and stuffed it with potato crisps and that cost a penny and lasted a couple of days. There was a small group of surfers in Warrnambool who stuck together. As time passed, we were old enough to buy shagging wagons that would take a mob of us to better surf in Port Fairy and Portland. And, as I am still, always oblivious, of the reality eerily forming the ghosts and shadows of a world not sitting in a Corroboree.
The alternatives to surfing were go-go dancers, the Rolling Stones, endless barrels of beer full of “talking shit” the Vietnam War and carpeting your mind with grass: I liked the surfing. Because, the surf and beach and waves and sun and sky, and birds, and wind came before the monkeys eat the fruit of the tree of progress. It was years later that I would leave Warrnambool and return to an isolated beach at night and see the ocean mirrored in the stars and finally, at last, understand what Aboriginals had been trying to tell us for centuries. And see the desperate contrast of that beauty and the drunken devils slurping out of hotel doors, slithering into their chariots and farting home, all of this, as I was walking back home through town. The really funny thing is that I would have more ease and luck explaining this to a frog than I would to anybody, sadly, including my family.
So, does surfing mean anything to you? Can you imagine being half seal, half whale, bobbing under the sun on liquid salt, waiting for a perfect moment, when you and the ocean, having an equal purpose, the ecstasy of fun, washing, together, onto the souls of humans who lost their trees and minds? Sure, one wave won’t change the world, unless you think about how you will be too old to have one when you are retired.
Brierly
My first job around the age of 20 was as a trainee psychiatric nurse at Brierly Mental Institution. My cousin Peter worked there and got me a job. I liked the job because all the crazy people, were still people, just like American Indians and Australian aboriginals are too.
On my first day, I stuck a needle into an orange. The second day I stuck it into Jack Donaldson’s screaming butt. I liked Jack a lot. Every 10 minutes he would say, “best country in the world for drying clothes, never to be released. Oomph not bad, oomph all right.” That’s all he ever said until one fateful full moon night when I was doing night shift, I asked him to scratch my itchy back. He scratched away, silently, then out of another universe he said, “I will wear my fucking fingernails out if I keep this up much longer! oomph not bad, oomph all right.”
There were others I loved to see too, like catatonic Bill. He loved smoking hospital tobacco, which was a big problem. I often gathered everyone for breakfast but Bill was always missing. His catatonia made him into a human sculpture. Without warning, he would freeze, stiff as concrete. Usually, I would find him with one leg up in the air, mid-walk, with a cigarette burning another hole through his charred fingers. I can’t remember if I could wake him up or I had to extinguish his cigarette and let nature take its course.
And there was Harry. A big guy, yea a gentle giant, who wouldn’t talk to me. I had to take him outside sometimes on work duties. He didn’t like me bossing him around, not that I did. Hey, Harry, let’s dig here, no reply. His serious look didn’t scare me much but it bathed me in hopelessness gravy. Sometimes though, when he was really upset, (I asked him twice to dig a hole), he would grab my two arms by my side and pick me up. My feet would lift off the ground and I would stop being his boss for 30 minutes and try again—sheepishly. He was smarter than me, the upstart, the boy. No matter how often I tried to get him to dig a hole, he didn’t and I am sure he was cackling like a hippo on heat, to himself. He was having fun at my expense which looking back was a fair deal. I popped some of his pills one day to see if it made me smart like him—big white, smarty shaped beans. Within five minutes my heart was ga booping, my face was behind a waterfall and my legs belonged to Jerry Lewis. No wonder getting out of bed and walking outside into the bright sun to dig a hole, was as impossible as a machine gun marrying a rabbit.
Another nice guy, ended up in this looney bin because his daughter fell in love with an aboriginal. There was no way back then, in the 70s, that blacks kissed whites. He didn’t know what to do, so he drank and drank until his mind didn’t matter anymore. That’s how the story went. Who told me? I don’t remember. This place was life-changing in so many ways. I came in a refugee from the Vietnam War and got thrown out six months later, with a small beginning of mileage, Ray Charles I am coming.
My perfect memory of this job was when (before they fired me after having a wild party at the hospital school in Ballarat) I took them to the movies. They got dressed nicely, around 20 of them. They shuffled onto the bus after lunch and sat quietly in expectation. I happily got behind the wheel and started tootling along the road into town. While tootling I had a brainwave: I should buy them a beer and go for a drive down to the beach first. We sat sipping the beer—some couldn’t, wouldn’t—watching the surfers wiping out, and the surfi chicks cooking on the bright white sand. After 20 minutes they all hassled me to go to the movies. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest was playing and they were keen to see it. They loved the movie and the outing, and I loved all of them. We went back to the ‘bin’ had dinner with a squirt of Largactyl and they slept peacefully.
My father loved everyone. He was a businessman who actually worked for a living, took care of his family and many others. I never saw him put people down. To this day I feel I have continued his legacy of loving normal people (like me) who work for a living and take good care of each other— quite the opposite with the others. Words fail when I think about the rich and the poor, at war, except when I think, “wow, Jesus was a carpenter.” Inheritance can be of genes or money. The genes were a little crazy sometimes and the money was in someone else’s bank. The life of my genes was a gene dream, far from the crowds. Time better spent at home cooking lobster with jam and peanut butter with mustard and ham. Hobbits most of the time, elves once in a while, wizards only in the kitchen and yes, the goblins and orcs came to stay once too often.
Jack Wilkins
Jack Wilkins was my best friend for years. We were both photographers, missing a few screws, loved taking portraits, eating junk food at the beach, and feeling the crazy in our blood. When he was in his twenties he played around with photographic chemicals and created award-winning abstract black and white photographs. Snow and ice like shapes in a dark landscape. The National Gallery of Victoria bought some that gave him a little bit of fame. I never asked him the obvious questions, like what do you do for a living? And do you have a girlfriend? When we came together, often in his father’s studio taking large-format pictures of each other and then later go down to the breakwater, sit on some rocks popping dims sims and beer late at night. Watching the waves washing souls, through open windows, in town.
Jack—when I think of Jack I think Nicholson—went on to become one of the best portrait photographers in Australia, arguably, the best. His portraits of friends in their environment are stunning. Every two or three years he would collect some and put them into a book: Certain Connections 1,2,3,4. They are priceless not only because of their photographic skill but also as a record of the dozens of truly amazing people: artists, musicians, workers, farmers and hippies that sprang out of the most fertile, ‘character’ soil in the known world.
Like all my friends, we drifted, I drifted, apart. In his forties, he did some great abstract seascapes and town-scapes. And in his sixties, he became a great painter. His restlessness landed him on a new canvas and mine, a new town. After eating dim sims on the moonlit rocks at the breakwater.
The next things I remember well, are the chilli sauce capade at the Chinese restaurant and him having his first kiss at a party with all his friends watching and cheering. Her back against the wall in George’s living room. His tongue boring, tunnelling, slurping forbidden ice cream, noises of pleasure, joy, loud ones. The hours of inhibition, the show, was memorable, and intriguing. Everyone loved him; no armor only amore.
The first time Jack had chili sauce after he saw me eating it one night in my favourite Chinese restaurant, he nearly destroyed the joint. He asked me what is that red sauce on your dim sims? I said Chinese tomato sauce so he smothered his dim sims with it and woofed them down. Ha ha, he had never eaten chilli before. He ran around the restaurant, knocking over chairs and tables, screaming water, water. All the patrons couldn’t believe their eyes and ears, while the normal decorum got blasted away by Jack’s uninhibited display of agony. Someone gave him water from a jug. He poured it down his burning throat, spilling it over his face and his clothes, because he was still running, over everyone else in the room. I had been eating alone at the restaurant for a few years—two or three times a week my parents gave me money to go there and eat fried rice covered in dims sims, sweet and sour sauce and Chinese tomato sauce, ha, ha, ha—because I said I didn’t eat meat anymore. I had gotten used to the fiery red sauce and could eat a lot without any problems, but I am sure I played a joke on him that night, that was no joke, for the first five minutes. With his outlandish behaviour though, it is hard to tell if the chilli could have been that hot, or not.
Then, a few years ago he died in a foreign country, far from me. I hoped he died with a big feeling of success and accomplishment. His art was exceptional and will be a national treasure, more than it is now. But I think we don’t die gracefully like autumn leaves sprinkling and fertilizing the soil in an everlasting cycle: it’s more like a thud in the heart that will require kick-starting after he has gone and come back.
Parties
For two decades all the parties I went to were the same. A fair balance of beer and weed, music and song, sex and sin. I was completely in the dark about what they were for. Wherever I went, day and night, there was always me. An underdeveloped negative of a man. Shadows on shadows, waiting for the sun to be exposed properly, and start living life. In the meantime, I participated in all the rituals.
Some mornings, usually around 3 AM at a party, I would often wake up in freezing snow after too much weed. Spinning out, throwing up, a decidedly unpleasant social thing to do. Others, I woke up in hot muff after too much beer. One extra special night Potty Grauer, a stoned, drunk, slurping, smiling Potty said, let’s go for a ride on his bike. Do I have a death wish? Am I just crazy? Am I being polite? Ok, let’s go. It was a 600cc Honda, bigger than both of us. The party was in the middle of dark, friendly, dairy farms. The cows could see us pull out of the driveway, head up the hill, gather speed, try to turn right, cannot, no way, power through a barbed wire fence, slide in the wet cold grass, through some cow paddies, come to a stop among the moans and groans, laughter and madness: we limped home like two dwarfs stoned on mead at a buckwheat party.
Parties at Duncan and Barbara McKenzie’s were more civilized than most of the others. After a few tugs and burps, Duncan would set up four chessboards and four players that he would then trounce, and pounce with the glee of a splengriferous mite—in minutes. Sometimes I could keep his orgasm at bay for nearly 30 minutes: no cigar, eventually lying dead, beaten, shocked and humiliated. Then there were the early morning, stoned choruses of Duncan chortling, “let’s play another one.” Parties in Warrnambool and Castlemaine were a sight to behold if you were a god-fearing Christian. Just like the 60s, that was the point. Now the weary, think back and think, how lucky they were to be born during, the everything that ever happened, happened, decades.
Port Fairy
Her mother had a small bakery shop in Port Fairy. I met her at a school social, where the girls transformed, Cinderella-like. For a few golden hours, I became a prince and followed her perfume trail home. Only 16, I couldn’t drive the 18 miles to Port Fairy. I had to wait for a ride or catch a bus. We hung out together in town on some Saturday afternoons.
My first love brought me to the ‘Port’ for a few months. The romance could not last very long because I could not easily get there. I missed her a lot. One night around 8 pm I snuck out of the house to call her from a phone box. We could talk for hours and this night with my back to the street I talked and romanced and talked, oblivious to a crowd forming outside. Out of nowhere, a voice yelled at me to get out of the box, they needed to make a call. I looked around and saw four people waiting for me to finish. They looked angry and fed up. I needed to hang up quickly but she kept talking. And like a selfish fool, I let her talk for another five minutes, which felt like hours, while the blood boiled over outside. Finally, I hung up and walked outside into—thinking of the vibes—a lynch mob. A memory that lives deep into my guilt bones. Whenever I want to kick and punch myself up, this memory appears and drowns me.
One very special day we went to see a movie at Pinhead’s picture theatre. After paying for the ticket and going inside we heard his projector had blown up. So he didn’t lose any money, he rolled his personal TV onto the stage, switched it on, hoping to keep our ticket money. Everyone heckled him with boos and hisses and left demanding a refund on the way out. We never went back to Pinhead’s picture theatre after that and lost the ca-noodling and future wedding opportunities it promised.
Port Fairy had a river that went out to sea (the one my father drove into 10 years before). Fishing boats could trundle down the river and tie up safely on the pier. Over the years I built a relationship with Port Fairy and often wanted to live there. My first experience came when my father after a night of drinking drove his family into the river by missing the bridge altogether. Graham and I were only a few years old. We all survived the dunking in the Moyne River, somehow. Dave never explained what happened; like a lot of other things going on in his life. It became the first of many cinematic experiences—like watching a Super 8 movie on a fading and shadowy pink wall in Cuba—in my life.
A few years later some of the older surfers from the Warrnambool Surf Life Saving Club discovered the ‘Passage’. The Warrnambool beaches had no reefs to make good surf. All the years I surfed the beach break I can’t remember ever having a really good ride. At some point, seconds after taking off, the wave would close out making surfing impossible. The surfing gang often dreamed about dumping cars in the water and making an artificial reef. Thinking back, we should have done it.
Surfing the Passage at Port Fairy in comparison took your breath away. The waves broke on a shallow reef covered with seaweed and the average size of ten feet made the takeoff feel like you could die any second. Hovering at the top of the wave as it started to curl, your board cutting a minute grip into the water, enough to start the harrowing journey down the face. If you survived this part and reached the bottom, you had to dig your inside rail in to turn and race the whitewater tumbling behind you. People sitting on the rocks watching all this happen would cheer when you made the wave and headed safely on it into the quiet part of the bay. Sometimes I hovered too long on the shoulder of the moving water mountain and fell into the seaweed carpet below. We called it bull kelp. When this happened, you had to pull your way through the bull kelp and retrieve your surfboard languishing in some rock pool.
I often surfed here with brother Graham. We both had a small problem of not knowing where to stay on our boards to catch the next wave. One day we drifted too far West without knowing. A large swell came, Graham paddled furiously to catch it, started to stand up and looked down, only to see an exposed reef below him. He pulled out of the wave with a second to spare. I saw it happen and felt terrified and stupid that we could drift so far from the only decent take-off spot. When the swells were huge, and you looked out the back and saw them coming, sometimes all you could do to survive would be paddle so fast to meet them and not get caught inside.
Most of the time in our twenties we surfed the Passage in Port Fairy. Now there are so many good surf spots between Torquay and Portland that have been discovered. I wish we knew back then.
In our late twenties, we visited the Port Fairy Folk Festival that became very famous. One day Graham played his banjo and sang a few tunes to a small attentive audience, on a street corner. Our Irish Band played there once. We were not famous like some of the stars from overseas but the small crowd that did come to see us danced with abandon.
When I moved to Castlemaine, I lost touch with my beloved ocean forever. A different, forestry affair took over, when I moved back to Warrnambool 10 years later to play in the Irish band with Peter and Su, I wanted to rekindle my love of the ocean and surfing. It didn’t go to plan. I had no surfboard or wet suit, no board racks, and no free time. My dreams melted with the responsibilities of old age: 29. I regret leaving my ocean for the hot forests of Castlemaine and Rushworth. I wish I had my shit together and a good job bought a house and become the old man of the sea. Maybe another life another universe. For now, I have to be content with the bare bones of survival. Survival in love, financially, emotionally and spiritually. So far so good. My life is getting better if you mean by getting better, less selfish, more disciplined, hardworking and more loving: less water more heart.
The Triumph Boys
Triumph sports cars were popular in Warrnambool for a few decades. When I was 15 the streets rumbled with the sound of Ford Customlines and Studebakers. By the time I had my 18th birthday, it was Triumph TR3s, TR4s and MGB’s. I hung out with the Triumphers like Stinky Thompson and Ken Altman. Their favourite pastime was racing each other on the Princess Highway, a few miles out of town, late at night when the roads were empty. A race would start with two Triumphs side by side, often it would be Stinky in his TR3 and Ken in his TR4. One had to be on the wrong side of the road at the start. One of the gang would drop a flag, and the highly tuned cars would do an English roar, slip and slide until their rubber got traction, then it was on. One night I was with Stinky in his TR3. The flag dropped and he quickly took the lead: 100, 110, 120 miles an hour. Steering with his knees, while glubbing a tasty pie and a cheap bottle of port. Ha ha ha, this was a lot of fun for the quiet dreamy boy from school who could not stay out of trouble. One Saturday Ken and I drove to Melbourne, he wanted to trade his TR4 in for an MGB. The trade went well until the salesman said the paperwork wouldn’t be ready for a few days: he couldn’t drive his new MGB home. We had to beat the sun out of town—walking with our thumbs catching the tail wind of cars going West. Travelling in a car, the trip back to Warrnambool took three hours. If we had to walk all the way it would be a few weeks. We trusted our thumbs and around 2 pm started the long journey home. It would be slim pickings for two males on the road. We got home late that night after catching four different rides and waiting over an hour, sometimes two in between the good and brave Samaritans. Hitchhiking back in the ’60s could be a lot of fun: meeting new people and the scary risk of sleeping under a tree at night.
My brother Graham decided to visit a mediation retreat near Mangrove Mountain, North West of Sydney. I went with him to keep him company in his Ford Transit “shaggin waggin”. We had surfboards, wet suits and no desire to surf. Up and up the East coast we went. Without his six-foot length of plastic pipe, we would have had to stop for a pee in every town. We had a good time together. The turmoil of separation we both lived with, made our lives precarious without our wives stabilizing influence. Our wives gave us the stability we didn’t want, but needed, more than any hot rod. Now they had flown, we had to grow up and wash our own clothes, cook our own food and find our inner centre—think, impossible. The meditation retreat would be Graham’s last chance to do what he wanted: shed the boy skin and become a man with his own ideas and revolutions. Finally, after driving for a couple of days, we slowly crawled up the mountain. Graham’s accelerator wanted to turn the car home, back to the past, and forget about becoming himself. He even asked me if I wanted to become a hippy with him. I declined because Pamela wanted me back home in the potatoes.
Some nice people came to meet us which made me feel good. Wearing colourful clothes, hanging on smiles and friendly too. My arms said goodbye around him with the love and hope of his redemption. I then headed off, barefooted down the mountain to Sydney. One hour walking and one hour getting a lift. The sunset over the mountain when I sadly looked back and the potatoes, 700 miles away, waited for my calloused feet to patter up the dirt road. It took all night to get to Sydney. Then I caught a train to the outer suburbs so I could hitch a ride on the open highway. The rides came and went. I walked and walked and loved looking at my bare feet take one step after another. Revelling in the multitude of laughing Kookaburras and jolly Magpies flapping through gnarled infinity trees that filled the world on either side of this black strip of civilization, I attached myself to—Aboriginal means: living off the strip.
This is the third time I have journeyed back to Pamela instead of having the courage to say goodbye and become a monk. Each time, greeting her on the front veranda with happiness and without the knowing. With luck and love, after saying goodbye to Graham two days ago, I could finally smell the rotting potatoes and salty surf I called home.
The trip back to Warrnambool with Ken happened years earlier, but the same sunsets and hopes in humanity imbued the road the same.
A Flippin Vauxhall
Was it a Vauxhall Viva 1600? Named after a popular pleasure garden on the south bank of the Thames in London, c. 1661-1859. The name is Middle English Faukeshale (late 13c.), “Hall or manor of a man called Falkes,” an Old French personal name. Haha, life in the ’60s and ’70s could be quite funny. The tales of cars and bikes flippin, and crashin, flyin and dintin, are legend back in the times before breathalysers when men were real crazy after a few hops and weed that saw cars commonly crash and dinkum dunkum. This lively image though is tainted with drunkenness, frivolity, madness, over the joy of an inebriated death.
One night coming back from a party, the Vauxhall, packed with no brains, swerved and cheered. Clipped the byways and flew over bends, suddenly and joyously came to an end. The left-hand corner, tight as my thumb, stood no chance with three bottles of rum. We swerved left so hard, the car took to the sky, rolled, like a summer storm, with gobsmacked passersby (farmers milking their cows). The tumbling of men and rum, my head in his bum, flew so far, touched no tar, then a rough landing, the wheels up in the air, slipping and sliding, skidding like a ski, we finally stopped crashing, with loud shouting of glee. We all untangled, the queer we once were, climbed out through the windows and could only stare. The Vauxhall had saved us, now we could tell everyone at the pub, later that night, we are the rollers, the flyers and skidders in town, with heaps of laughter and nary a frown.
Chivalry and the Knight of Lake Pertobe
The hippest hotel in Warrnambool in the 70s, the Lady Bay Hotel, stood proudly near the Breakwater, with a river on one side and the ocean on the other. By day, the fishermen lost their legs. By night, all my friends lost their virginity. Not a good place for loners like myself. I loved driving to the hotel along the beach road to see my friends, a nice place to hang out. Sadly, every time I walked into the lounge, the ghostly me, could only peer and ponder back through the veil, and wonder, why they could not see me—a weekly, sometimes daily ritual of rejection and fear of being normal.
One special? night at the Lady Bay Hotel the same thing happened, so I left pretty quickly, feeling very sad. My hope, of losing my virginity—like every night—on the way, never wavered, and never prospered. The kind of despair that would find solace in baked beans on toast and a phantom comic. So, this sad night on my way home, I saw a damsel, walking slowly along the side of the road, all alone under the pine trees, on the dark and windy stretch by the sea. I stopped the car and my negative reverie and asked if she needed a ride. She said yes, hopped in the car and explained how some boys were hassling her. Maybe they fought, her boyfriend? over sex, and she said, ‘fuck off I am going home.” The walk home on the black crow-less night had to be better than losing your virginity, again and again, to an asshole. I asked where she lived, she said where, I knew the place, and quietly taxied her home.
I putted along, singing a song because tonight a girl was with me. I got to her home and said goodnight. One adventure closed another quickly opened. When her front door closed, the guy in the other car turned up. He had followed us home and intended to kill me. I took off, terrified, racing with my heart. A bright sun in my mirror, grew bigger and brighter by the second. I could hear the car making his angry noises, chasing me. Holy shit, her boyfriend had found me, his car, full of hoodlums like him. I gunned my car as fast as I could to turn down his lights, then so did he. Now a supernova in my mirror; no matter how much I gunned it; I knew soon he would crash into my car. Terror overwhelmed my thinking, what should I do? Where can I go? I had only one chance to live: beat them back to the Lady Bay Hotel where my friends would protect me. Going through the cutting on two wheels, taking off into the air going over the railway bridge, swaying my end at the bottom of the hill, then pinging as fast as I could to the pub. I got to the pub, screeched to a halt, ran inside as fast as I could, they ran after me, yelling about my impending death, and there, for the first time, my friends could see me and my fright. They turned their might to the creeps near the door, they fled in fear, whence they came and yippee I am not dead nor a ghost anymore.
Stealing buses and cars
Not real thieves, only circumstantial ones. Not a heaven breaker, but afterwards no peace. When Graham turned 18, he bought a cute red, Renault Dauphine. Being two years older, his rights of passage were ruined by my not understanding at our age, two years made a lot of difference. Another selfish, jealous, brainless thing I did. One stupid night, full Moon? I snuck out of bed, past Dave, Doris and Graham snoozing snoozes, down the long passage, out the side door, along the driveway to the car. I quietly opened the car door and rolled his car down the drive and then down the hill. I didn’t know cars needed a key to start, so, no matter how hard I tried rolling down the short hill to start it, nothing but obstinate whining emitted from its engine. Without knowing why it didn’t start, I managed to park it on the side of the road, ran back to bed, and slept a guilty sleep.
In the morning they woke before me and quickly, excitedly, told me the story about someone trying to steal Graham’s car last night; while looking knowingly and suspiciously at me. No honest sound came out of my mouth, only a shrug and a sentence about how lucky to get it back, and some people are crazy out there.
Five years later it was Graham’s turn to be a car thief. One day we went to Port Fairy to surf and party. The two brothers with two women, drinking and dancing beer on the beach. Sometimes dancing and other times fancing, each other: I fancied the wrong girl. Graham wanted her and they were having a lot of fun and then she u-turned into my arms. He may be, understandably, got upset and grabbed his surfboard and at 1 am said goodbye and started walking home, the 18 miles to Warrnambool. I heard a few days later he found a school bus that was open and had keys in it. He apparently threw his board in the bus, got it started, and drove it back to Warrnambool. Deep down we were not thieves, not by a long shot. On the surface though, insanity prevailed on sorry sordid days and most of the time we survived to live another good day. As long as the very long arm of the law, stayed a safe distance from our temporary insanities.
The Rolling Stones
I didn’t like them much, but someone said they were playing at St Kilda Palais next week and I should check em out. The Rolling Stones’ 1965 Far East Tour was the first concert tour of Oceania by the band. The tour commenced on 22 January and concluded on 16 February 1965. This series of concerts was a package tour with Roy Orbison, The Newbeats, and Ray Columbus & the Invaders, and was promoted by Harry M. Miller. In Australia, there were different local support acts in each city. Like other famous bands I had gone to see I didn’t expect this to be much different. I organised a ticket and headed off to the Palais a week later. Their set list:
“Not Fade Away”
“Walking The Dog”
“Under The Boardwalk”
“Little Red Rooster”
“Around and Around
“Heart of Stone”
“Time Is On My Side”
“It’s All Over Now”
And I was right. The girls screamed so loudly that their voices and instruments through their pathetic PA and their skimpy Marshall amps sounded more like an air raid siren in Timbuktu and I never felt the need to scream. Maybe sometimes I did, but not at rock concerts when I think about it; after a really good left-hander at South Beach, Port Fairy. Life’s mysteries are never sorted. A man sings a song and a girl screams and throws her undies.
This was an amazing time; the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and the Rolling Stones set us free. I would scream too if I wore a cross, but I didn’t. I was blessed at birth with the freedom to be myself. I witnessed the world’s greatest revolution going on around me. The revolution is still happening in 2021. It is about the truth: we are all Gods, and Gods have the power to choose. Martin Luther King was one of many who started this revolution: the musicians and poets of the 60s have finished it off. God save the Stones.
I checked the dates they played in Melbourne. I was only 14 years old. How did I get to Melbourne from Warrnambool by myself, pay the ticket and get home again? The other time they played in Australia at Kooyong Stadium in 1973, I saw them at the Palais in St Kilda at the ripe young age of 14—incredible. No wonder I did so many crazy things. I was let out before I was ripe enough.
28 January 1965 St. Kilda, Australia, Palais Theatre (2 shows)
29 January 1965 St. Kilda, Australia, Palais Theatre (3 shows)
Thinking back to my life at 14-16 is shocking. Somehow, I missed the world’s intentions and made up my own. I think my father’s constant desire for me to be an electrician, backfired. The vibes at the wool classing school said I could have been an alien. No doubt alienism was in my blood: it took no effort. The further I could get from wool classers and mechanics the better. We (all humans) often don’t listen to each other. I told my father umpteen times I would be a photographer one day, not an electrician. He knew better than me: stable job, stable life and a stable nightmare. All I could do in response to the badgering was to go quite crazy. A crazy surfer, loner, dropout, pre-hippy, beach camper, dim sim and chilli eater, blues singer and Nikon F shutterbug, at the age of 14. Why oh why, have I spent the second half of my life looking for love and contentment when I have enough mileage to live with the stars.
Palais De Dance
In the 60s the Palais De Dance in Warrnambool rocked. With a large dance floor upstairs and two stages, one for the Ghost Riders and the other for the Vampires, the guys with their Burns Guitars.
In the early 1960s, some budding young rockers were dreaming of standing on centre stage at Warrnambool’s celebrated Palais, they were the Ghostriders, the rock ‘n’ rollers with boundless youthful energy and a passion for good times. They went on to dominate Warrnambool’s entertainment scene for a decade. The Ghostriders’ legend began in 1960 when four young friends – Billy Fish, 21, Barry Wickham, 21, Bob Dennis, 19, and Joe Willis, 17 – started to teach each other the guitar. With a Coles guitar manual that showed the basic chords and a couple of old Bellini acoustic guitars, the guys started on a legendary ride through the 60s.
The women sat along one wall waiting for rich handsome men to ask them for a dance. I couldn’t dance and I couldn’t hide my terror when asking them for a dance. So, I would often go home alone, cook some baked beans and eat them with a Phantom comic, yum. This happened every night I went out. I had the wrong idea about women. I thought they were special people. Princesses, angels, ladies and sweet. This mad idea stayed with me for 60 years. Now I finally know the truth. Apart from wanting to marry a rich man and have an easy life they are much like men with long hair, big breasts and short skirts.
The Palais De Dance ended up being hell on Earth. I kept trying to have my first dance there for over five years, without luck, and I am pretty handsome. So, Mum’s baked beans kept mysteriously disappearing and Dad’s bill at the newsagents kept going up—I booked up two comics a week to him. The years tore off the calendar, by the time I hit 21, wisdom could not be called my major achievement.
Without the sweet perfume, blossoming in my arms, I still enjoyed listening to the music and watching everyone jiving and twisting. It never occurred to me to learn how to dance. I am sure if I asked Dave and Doris, they would have taught me how to jive. Another benefit of visiting the Palais De Dance, and not dancing, was having a pie floater from Bill’s pie cart. A pie floater could soothe the most damaged and rejected soul. The smell of his pasties and pies smelt like trumpets from heaven. Bill had a huge pot of ham and pea soup simmering away its beckoning charm till 3 am. This could be called staple fisherman’s food because it stuck to your ribs and warmed the cockles. So, on any moonless night, if you wanted your cockles red hot like his old wood stove, you would get him to fill a large bowl with green soup then plunk a delicious pie on top with a large squirt of tomato sauce. Some would correctly say, this food could make you sober in 30 minutes. And there is no way you could go to the Palais De Dance and not walk downstairs, across the street and not have a pie floater. If food can be a solace, then baked beans and pie floaters solaced me to 21. Brother Graham used the food solace thing too. He loved Kermond’s Hamburgers, bacon and cheese, and some special hot dogs from a canteen on the beach road. Kermonds have been selling the best hamburgers for 60 years and still going strong. They were famous long before crappy McDonalds came to town. Their buns were not sweet. They tasted like yeast buns, slightly crunchy. They grilled sliced onions until they turned brown and super soft. Their meat patties came from a butcher in town—real meat. They were fresh and big, even after they pressed and pressed them into the hotplate. Their large bacon strips snapped when your teeth cleaved their flavour, and their eggs, perfectly done inside an aluminum ring. They warmed the buns on the grill, slightly toasted. We lived across the highway and up a hill and I swear some days I could smell their hamburgers, flying past the nearby church, straight through our window, delicious. When I went to the movies by myself, I had sixpence leftover and would often buy a toasted bun with tomato sauce and some onion to eat on the way home. It still tasted incredible.
The Palais eventually closed, when hotels were allowed to open after 6 pm. They often had live bands but the emphasis on dancing instead of drinking made the Palais stand out, albeit in the past, as a beacon to romance, femininity and rock and roll. Before boys and girls gave their friends a note to give to someone, they like at school instead of manning up and doing it themselves. Hell, it took me some 20 years, but I got there in the end.
Roditch March 2022
Roditch
Biography
I am a retired Photography Teacher, Refugee Settlement Manager, and Builder. For the past 10 years, I have been teaching part-time, writing books, taking photos and doing lots of research.
All the books I write come from experience and research. Yes, in my life so far I have worked with refugees, taught art, built houses, studied herbs, and health. I have also studied astrology spirituality including meditation, animal welfare, and poetry.
I sincerely hope that you can gain valuable information from my books (usually short and sweet introductions) to different facets of life I have visited.
Where to find Roditch online
Website: http://roditch.com
Blog: http://roditch.com
Books
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 103,380. Language: English. Published: January 6, 2022. Categories: Nonfiction » Biography » Autobiographies & Memoirs
A story about my life in Warrnambool, Castlemaine and Rushworth
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 249,020. Language: English. Published: December 19, 2021. Categories: Nonfiction » Children’s Books » Lifestyles / Country Life
Time to dropout and start a new, secure and sustainable life.
Price: $2.00 USD. Language: English. Published: October 26, 2021. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
Portraits by Roditch. These photos are a collection of Roditch’s portraits over the past 5 years. They are a reflection of the person.
Price: $2.00 USD. Language: English. Published: October 26, 2021. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
This is a collection of photographs of rural Thailand. Including farmers, Monks, temples and farms
Price: $2.00 USD. Language: English. Published: October 24, 2021. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
Original Photos of Buddha sculptures Thailand taken by famous photographer Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 170. Language: English. Published: December 6, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Inspiration » Spiritual inspiration
One reason I love Buddha is because he knew that animals had sentience, consciousness, and that consciousness was as valuable, respectable, sacred as any Homosapien.
Thailand of Dreams Series 1 by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 170. Language: English. Published: December 4, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Inspiration » Spiritual inspiration
Thailand is a country is worth exploring to regain your imagination, love of nature, fairy tales and spirits of the land.
Portraits and Souls Series 1 by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 180. Language: English. Published: December 4, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Inspiration » Spiritual inspiration
Portraits have always been there as a window into someone’s soul if only we are to look and care.
Beautiful Buddha Series 1 by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 180. Language: English. Published: December 4, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Inspiration » Spiritual inspiration
Buddha is the peace in the world. Everyone can benefit from Buddha,s teachings.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 140. Language: English. Published: December 4, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Inspiration » Spiritual inspiration
Children are the magic in the world. NASA has done research that confirms that all children are born creative geniuses, but, by the time they are 7 years old their genius has been retired by cultural and family conditioning.
Musing with the Fishes Series 1 by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 180. Language: English. Published: December 4, 2020. Categories: Fiction » Inspirational
It is a wonderful way to relax and tune in with nature; just looking into water and musing with the fishes.
Off the Fence Posts by Roditch
Price: $3.00 USD. Words: 20. Language: English. Published: April 18, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
This book is a collection of posts I have made over the past 3 years.
Musing with the Fishes by Roditch
Price: $10.00 USD. Words: 530. Language: English. Published: April 16, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
What is real? As you look into these pictures you can see spirits and goblins and all sorts of magical things
Price: $10.00 USD. Words: 600. Language: English. Published: April 15, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
Thailand people love family, culture, Buddha, music, and celebrations.
Price: $7.00 USD. Words: 1,090. Language: English. Published: April 15, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – Photo books
Thailand has a unique balance of culture, spirituality, art, agriculture, and the environment.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 7,120. Language: English. Published: April 14, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Inspiration » General self-help
Right now you are creating your future if nothing else. This book is about a future that belongs to the rich and powerful.
Teaching ESL English Zen by Roditch
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 5,990. Language: English. Published: April 14, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Education & Study Guides » Teaching methods & materials / language arts
10 years of experience teaching ESL English to Kindergarten, Primary, Secondary, University, and Teachers.
Animal Sentience Zen by Roditch
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 10,700. Language: English. Published: April 13, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Science & Nature » Animals
Sentience is the word we use to say that we are animals like animals are human.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 3,550. Language: English. Published: April 13, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Contemporary Poetry
Poetry is a way to communicate more deeply and completely. It is not just about writing a poem it is being a poem for your family, friends, and society.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 2,900. Language: English. Published: April 13, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Photography – how to
Photography comes from the soul as any art does, the deeper you go the better your photos will be.
Price: $3.00 USD. Words: 750. Language: English. Published: April 13, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Art, Architecture, Photography » Artists
Shepparton, Victoria, Australia has produced an amazing amount of brilliant artists over the years.
Price: $3.00 USD. Words: 790. Language: English. Published: April 13, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Science & Nature » Environment
The conservationists in the Goulburn Valley, Victoria Australia are outstanding people.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 1,560. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Contemporary Poetry
Poetry from your own pen is a baby bird flying from the nest into the stars.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 190. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 190. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 220. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 210. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 210. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 180. Language: English. Published: April 12, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 180. Language: English. Published: April 11, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 190. Language: English. Published: April 11, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This is a book of original poems and photographs by Roditch, inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 200. Language: English. Published: April 10, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This book of original poems and photographs is inspired by Zen Koans
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 200. Language: English. Published: April 10, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Ancient Poetry
This book of original poems and photographs is inspired by Zen Koans.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 190. Language: English. Published: April 10, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Contemporary Poetry
This book of original poems and photographs is inspired by Zen Koans
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 170. Language: English. Published: April 9, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Religion & Spirituality » Ancient
This book of original poems and photographs is inspired by Zen Koans. The words come in an inspirational moment and have more meaning than you first think and challenge your mind; like Zen Koans.
Meditation and Prayer Zen by Roditch
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 9,640. Language: English. Published: April 9, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Health, wellbeing, & medicine » Mental health
Throughout history, meditators have been both influential and mysterious. To look at some of the great meditators, see their works and know them more deeply helps when meditating your way to a fuller and richer life.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 11,920. Language: English. Published: April 8, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Health, wellbeing, & medicine » Aging well
The fountain of youth is real. By fasting 1 day a week, taking resveratrol, Metformin and AMPK you can live much longer, be more healthy and energetic
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 8,580. Language: English. Published: April 8, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Health, wellbeing, & medicine » Aging well
There are many places in the world where people still get a large proportion of their food in the wild. And there are just as many who go hunting for their food in supermarkets.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 6,580. Language: English. Published: April 7, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Health, wellbeing, & medicine » Aging well
People worry about dying from Covid-19 but most of us are dying early because of cancer, heart and liver disease already.
GMO and Glyphosate Zen by Roditch
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 6,870. Language: English. Published: April 7, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Health, wellbeing, & medicine » Family health
If we don’t have the land or the time to grow our own food then we should buy only organic because Genetically Modified Food plastered with Glyphosate is not an option for a long and happy life
Fruits of Our Labour by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 21,200. Language: English. Published: April 6, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » History » Australia & New Zealand
This book is a history of the Goulburn Valley Fruit Industry.
Teresa – Love on the Riverbank by Roditch
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 1,810. Language: English. Published: April 4, 2020. Categories: Poetry » Epic
Our heart is silent when it wants to scream out “I am here, love me.” Poetry is kissing with words, words that can cross infinite boundaries of the mind to pierce the heart of a willing soul.
A Suitcase Full of Dreams by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 83,830. Language: English. Published: April 3, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » History » Australia & New Zealand
The Goulburn Valley, Victoria, Australia is home to thousands of refugees and immigrants from around the world. Shepparton is the main city in the Goulburn Valley which is surrounded by orchards.
Francis of Warrnambool by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 7,870. Language: English. Published: April 3, 2020. Categories: Fiction » Fairy tales
A lot of very talented people were born in Warrnambool in the ’50s. Like Dave Dawson, Peter Lucas and Jack Wilkins.
Debt and Self Sufficiency by Roditch
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 6,090. Language: English. Published: April 2, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Self-improvement » Emotional healing
We all have too much debt. It is time to pay it all back and remain debt-free forever.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 4,870. Language: English. Published: April 2, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Politics & Current Affairs » Civil & human rights
Everyone has the right to physical,. emotional and intellectual freedom. These rights are eroding and it is time to make a stand.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 7,380. Language: English. Published: March 30, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Engineering, trades, & technology » Construction / General
Many years ago I built my own house out of second-hand materials.
Price: $4.00 USD. Words: 7,420. Language: English. Published: March 30, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » New Age » Astrology
This is a small Astrology book. Like all the ZEN series it is a simple introduction about a vast topic.
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 1,360. Language: English. Published: March 30, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Music » History & Criticism
The Sunbury Pop Festival in 1972, photos and poems. Original photos and Poems by Roditch
Swat the Fly – A Covid-19 Self Help Guide by Roditch
Price: $5.00 USD. Words: 26,300. Language: English. Published: March 29, 2020. Categories: Nonfiction » Health, wellbeing, & medicine » Alternative medicine
This book is a collection of natural remedies used by Doctors that will help you prevent and overcome the covid-19 virus.
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