A Candle to My Self
I will post a chapter a day from https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1125395
A Candle to My Self
Published by Roditch
at Smashwords
Dedicated to Thida’s Art Shop
She has taught me the last words in the love story
Copyright Roditch 2022
Smashwords Edition
Table of Contents
Chapter 6: Back to Warrnambool
Chapter One: CHILDHOOD
Warrnambool
Warrnambool is a popular summer holiday town, three hours’ drive West, following the coast, from Melbourne. It has moderate hills overlooking the sea, and many streets imperialistically lined with large Norfolk Pine Trees framing beautiful sandstone mansions behind them. While, in the back streets, salt-sprayed cars rot on their tires. Windy Warrnambool, an infamous title for visitors and locals alike. The incessant quick wardrobe changes, if seen from Mars, would look like a day at Faulty Towers. The wind tears at your skin, with cold, deep pummeling lashes. Every day before you go anywhere, you need to step out your front door and be a weatherman, choose your clothes wisely and hope wherever you want to go, you stayed in the same weather vane. In the wind, it felt like the Scottish moors and out of it, a day at Trump’s golf course in Florida. The extreme temperature changes could make you cry: sometimes you step into the sun dressed like a Bison and other times into the Southern Ocean gales dressed in a bikini. For all the locals who lived through the dark winters, the summer holidays rocked.
The population of 18,000, consisted of Irish, Scottish, English interlopers and Australian Aboriginals, plus one Italian, two Greeks and three Dutchmen. They all worked hard during the week and at the weekends went fishing; one hand on the rod and the other on a bottle of Foster’s beer. Some exceptions to the beer scenario were people like Mario, the Italian Tailor. Every Saturday night, he dressed up in his finest handmade suits and romanced the ladies at the Palais De Dance then afterwards sipped fashionable Cappuccinos at the Moomba Cafe.
Even though I lived in Warrnambool up until the Vietnam War days, I didn’t know it very well. Children back in the ’60s were not seen or heard and the tall evil-looking spire of the Catholic Church menaced my development. A daily ritual of Dr Who and curried sausages dimmed most horizons. The only possibilities for adventure could only belonged for, looking out the kitchen window. This routine changed forever after finding my love for swimming and surfing in the ocean. The aboriginal act of enjoying emergence and friendship with nature would change my life and religion completely.
A tour through town would take you past many beautiful sandstone homes, up and down hills, along the beach past the Warrnambool Woolen Mills factory and people water skiing on the lake, only minutes from the beach. Up again to Lava Street Hill, past the YMCA with its underground basketball court. Down the other side to the Warrnambool Football Club, the spiritual home of brother Bill, otherwise known as ‘Dodger McConnell’. Turn left a few times and you are playing 18 holes of golf with father Dave, and Mother Doris. Looking from the 7th hole you can see waves crashing into Penguin Island and the famous breakwater, home to fishing boats and bottles of rum. If you had a pair of binoculars, you could see the Hedditch brothers burning their buttocks, rowing a surf boat way out to sea and on the way back into shore, catching a giant wave, the boat tipping over into a cacophony of boys and men struggling for air and life. The drive to the beach from the Golf Course twists and turns beside the Merri River then turns into a beach car park. Just in time to witness the same men from the boat in blue bather’s sand jogging as fast as they could to the breakwater and back to the clubhouse. At night the tour takes you down the main street, past the widgies, bodgies, sharpies and rockers lined up in their Brylcream and their little dab’ill do yah’s. To the Palais De Dance and Bill’s famous pie cart, upstairs to a large dance hall of sweaty swinging skirts and contortion shoes. If you were too young for so much rockin then you would pass the stairs, and wander past the Warrnambool Hotel to the roller-skating rink. With four wooden wheels, tight jeans, and some cool moves, hanging out at the skating rink took some beating. The last cool stop on the hot tour, the Warrnambool Olympic Swimming Pool. Jumping off the high board into the diving pool, down into the blue peace and then darting back up to life. Then into the pool next door, full of luscious warm pee and kablonkers. There are lots of other things to see in Warrnambool, the hot rods and street parades, the Florado Festival. The Annual Show with the best cake, and the tennis courts. The Catholic Church soaring because they are always drunk and Cannon Hill, still stopping the Japs.
Warrnambool comes alive during the summer holidays. Families come in droves to stay in their large caravans from thirsty farms and the melted footpaths of Melbourne. Around the age of 14, I discovered the beach. I would walk by myself down Liebig Street, past all the shops, turn left at the masturbating angel, then right through the sandstone cutting. Then, the last five minutes’ walk down the hill, over the railway bridge to the beach always hoping to hop through the hot sand over the hill and see perfect surf. Only to meet gales of air booming off the ocean, knocking me off balance. The stuff of jetliners and wind tunnels. Sometimes I carried a long and heavy board with me. One you kneeled on to get out the back and when you caught some slop walked up and down for some exercise. Other days I fought the wind to the shoreline, ran as fast as I could into the melted ice, duck dived through the white bullies, on my way out the back. No matter how bad the surf, I could always seal away three hours and then walk home, crawl home, and sleep peacefully as a happy pickle.
I did most things by myself, a loner, then and now. All my life I have been too scared to belong. I don’t feel comfortable with friends. It could be because my brother wanted to ditch me all the time.
As a child growing up, I had a few options of things to do at the weekend: play football or tennis, go to church, fly down hills in a homemade billy cart, go to the local swimming pool or go surfing. I went surfing because I loved the ocean, the salty water, the freedom wind in my hair and the danger of dying from falling down some cresting, foaming, stallion wave into the waiting razor-sharp teeth of a White Pointer (it’s a very big shark) at the bottom.
I felt deeply connected to the dangerous and mysterious ocean. The sounds and sensation of crashing waves soothed my soul. The ocean, a powerful force of nature in a treeless landscape. The only thing in my environment that I connected with.
On reflection, I didn’t do anything resembling normal in my adolescent days. Football, aimlessly, went around in circles, home had too many TVs, and school lacked poetry and creativity. That left the ocean. I would have been spiritually homeless like my aboriginal friends without it. The wonder of creation can be found anywhere and it will always be the first and best marvel. One we all need to be part of.
Church
Sometimes we went to church and Sunday school: twice I think it was? No one could explain where the bearded guy with the long hair was, because he was nowhere to be found in the big, cold, ambient father church next door either. I am still looking everywhere for him; alas, no luck. The ‘guy’ in Sunday school said, “listen to everything he says, and follow him every day of your life.” And I thought, when I find him, maybe I will.
These two visits with my parents to church were a failed experiment of meaning. Both sides of my family (uncles, cousins, aunties, grandparents) were serious Christians—my father and mother were not. Their personal beliefs never saw the light of day, in my life. Amazingly lucky I think, as I look back and think religion is a construct for bad monkeys. I don’t know what drove them to visit the church a few times when I was around six years old. None of us saw the light and it interfered with their real religion, a Sunday roast dinner and Sunday golf. So, we stopped going as quickly as we came, hoping no one ever saw us, especially God. When Dave was in his 70’s he would talk about the bible, in a good way. His new girlfriend, Aunty Valamai liked layering her evil with goodness. He had to go along with it to keep her happy. Brought up outside the church, it is impossible to embrace something that is not ingrained at birth. His recommendations of the black book, in his 80’s, smacked of fear. I respected his ideas a lot, but I had come to realize, when I was 30, that God never wrote such a confusing lot of monkey meaning: she wrote the universe.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is quite easy to understand, and though Buddha, like Jesus, never put pen to paper, his teachings that were relayed on, placed all the emphasis on personal development: controlling your mind, in a good way, so your life is happy and peaceful. Whereas Christians and the Jews think commandments and parables should control your life. Religions are deeply confusing and need powerful and rich people to interpret their endless (unfathomable) meanings, for money. This is not the way of Buddhism.
Back to free will and God’s will, and never the twain shall meet. I believe that men created religions to give them power over women, children, nature and each other and this is the world’s greatest problem. Women and children are souls the same as men, and men with muscles, the destroyers, are scared of women and children, the creators. We all could all live a wonderful life, beyond religion, by doing one thing: fulfilling our purpose and supporting others to do the same.
Words fall freely into the fires of doom, every time someone questions the presence of God. Churches in Warrnambool made me crazy, the same as the school did: their energy attacking me, an innocent soul, who could have done well on his own, without all the psychological beatings.
All sentient beings are connected via Morphic Resonance. By tuning in to these connections it is possible to experience what people call God as the relationship we have with each other. Those special moments when we feel the other, see the other and love the other. This action, this moment, is God. No amount of words in books can change that. For example, thousands of family relationships have been destroyed because of mum and dad going to the church to worship a carpenter from Nazareth instead of staying home and worshipping a child from Kentucky.
The Hedditch Family
I don’t know much about my family history. My father, a fourth or fifth generation Australian Hedditch. They were originally farmers from Gillingham, Dorset, England. My father’s mother came from Scotland and my mother, an Owen, came from Sussex in England. It is harder to follow family trees on the female side. I can remember visiting my grandparents, and feeling like I had travelled to another land, because of their English accents, and the odour of once loved and eaten pork pie. Sensations, even more extreme, because of the infrequency of the visitations. Somehow my parents had jumped a few generations. My father an inventive genius and my mother, a piano playing hole in one-er. After them, we have kept jumping: my father showed me the way, with a rue smile one day. Sometimes they jumped right over us, forcing independence and self-reliability.
The Hedditch’s were one of the first pioneering families to arrive at the small beach port of Portland, in Western Victoria, after the Henty’s. Two brothers had sailing, cargo ships. One of them is based in Davenport in Tasmania and the other in Portland, Victoria. The Victorian side of the Hedditch family eventually settled on a sheep farm at Cape Bridgewater, 30 minutes from Portland. They built a nice home on a few hundred acres overlooking the expansive ocean of Discovery Bay.
One beautiful, sunny blue-sky day, surfing at White’s beach only two kilometres away, I tore my wet suit and repaired it with special rubber glue, some of which, dribbled off the rubber onto a black volcanic rock below. I instinctively went to clean the glue off the rock and saw some writing carved into it. It said, in memory of Waldy Hedditch who died trying to rescue people from The Jane, a schooner shipwrecked on rocks, nearby in Discovery Bay (one of 638 ships, wrecked on the Australian South Coast). I thought I had ruined this monument to one of the Hedditch’s finest, and tried desperately to get all the glue off the rough blue-stone surface. A poignant moment; my mind drifted through the Hedditch family tree, one ashamedly, I had never climbed.
The Hedditch’s spread from Portland to Coleraine where Dave came from. He eventually settled in Warrnambool where he met my mother, Doris McConnell. Oh! I hardly know anything about my family history and my children have adopted their mother’s Italian name and culture.
Richard Charlton Hedditch of Lal Lal, Bridgewater
The Hedditch family came from Dorset in England. Richard Charlton Hedditch was born on 3 July 1808 in Gillingham, Dorset, the son of Samuel Hedditch and his wife Sarah, nee Charlton who had been married on 16 April 1807. Sarah Charlton came from the nearby village of Mere in Wiltshire.
At the time of his marriage on 28 June 1837, Richard Charlton Hedditch was a farmer living in the parish of Bathwick, near Bath, Somerset. His wife, Rachel Forward Read was also residing in Bathwick parish. About six months after their wedding, they took the stagecoach to London to embark on the 522-ton barque “Eden” which was preparing to sail for Australia. However, their sailing was delayed for a month as the “Eden” was frozen in the Thames but finally departed in mid-February 1838 and after putting in at St. Jago en route, arrived at Adelaide, South Australia on 24 June 1838.
Richard and Rachel Hedditch stayed in Adelaide for about two years before moving on to Van Diemens Land. Their first child, a son named Charlton Waldy Hedditch was born in George Town, V.D.L. on 20 July 1840. After hearing favourable reports about the Henty’s settlement on the mainland, Richard sailed for Portland in the Port Phillip District on 10 June 1841 on the 189-ton brig “Patriot.” Before long they were settled in Portland teaching at the Church of England school.
About 1845, in partnership with the Kennedy family, they moved to Cape Bridgewater on the coast just west of Portland and took up a pastoral lease on land formerly held as an out-station by the Henty brothers.
This partnership lasted until about 1853. Conditions there were described in a letter Mrs Hedditch wrote to her parents in England on Christmas Day, 1848.
“This, you will see, is Christmas Day. We are quite alone, and I trust we shall have a quiet Christmas, as I do not care for company, but I expect my old friend, Mrs Wilkinson, for a few days shortly . . .. There seems to be a revival amongst the church people here. Some very excellent pious men, both bishops and clergy have lately been sent out. The bishop of this diocese has lately visited Portland. The severe weather prevented him from visiting us, but he sent some good books and tracts, and a book of sermons . . .. But although we are not doing better in the country, we have better health, and I think the children are better for being away from others, and children out here are generally brought up badly. I had but a bad account of our affairs to give you the last time I wrote, and have not much better now. Times are very bad indeed. Almost the whole dependence of this district is on wool-growing and tallow, and on account of the disturbed state of Europe the wool at home has fallen in value more than half. Tallow is low also, and it has caused such a depression of business here that it is almost impossible to dispose of anything: or if a sale is made it is difficult to get the cash. I believe I told you something about our new land regulations in my last letter. We have this month notice from the Government (not only ourselves, but all the settlers) that they offer us the purchase of 30 acres of land at £1 per acre and with it a right to commonage of 160 acres, and if we fail to purchase, we risk being turned off without being able to claim any compensation for the improvements we have affected. The land here is very poor indeed, scarce worth cultivating without being greatly manured, but it is excellent pasturing for cattle. Our fences were all burnt, but we have a garden fenced and a half-acre paddock. We have also a comfortable three-roomed cottage and a kitchen and dairy, besides a fowl-house and yard, and it would be a pity to risk losing it for the sake of £30, although these times we shall find it difficult to raise even that small sum. We have both fat cattle and milking cows for sale, but nobody is inclined to purchase. Butchers will not give more than eight shillings a hundred for fat beef, and a fine cow with a calf at the side will not fetch more than £3. There were good milking cows, with their calves, sold by auction last week at about 30/- per head. Butter is now down to 1/- per lb. If things don’t get better, I don’t know what shall become of us all. Our prospects are not worse than that of many others. Indeed, I think we live at less expense than most families here. We have no one with us now, but one of the native blacks to shepherd the cattle by day. I wish we could get a good steady single farming man from home – one who would work without being watched. We would gladly give such a man £25 a year, with board and lodging. The men in this country will not work without a master with them, and Charlton is too easy to be master. I suppose you could not persuade such a man to come out to us. A man that could be depended upon to look to anything that wanted doing.”
On one occasion Richard Hedditch was required to go to Melbourne as a witness in a Crown law case. Afterwards, he walked back to Portland, taking about three weeks to complete the journey. The Hedditch family also took over the local post office and successive generations continued to run it for many decades.
Freehold land was acquired and in 1855 a family home named “Lal Lal’ was built. Located in the Parish of Tarragal, County of Normanby, the surrounding farm is comprised of 372 acres. This residence remained in the Hedditch family for several generations.
Tragedy struck on 6 June 1863 when their eldest son, Charlton Waldy Hedditch died. He was attempting to save passengers from a sinking schooner, the “Jane” in Discovery Bay and had swum out to the ship three times before he drowned.
At some time, probably in the 1850s, Richard’s father Samuel Hedditch arrived and resided with the family until his death in 1869. Little is known about Samuel’s life but he may have been the Samuel Hedditch who was transported out to Van Diemen’s Land on the “Hibernia” in 1818. Richard had siblings who settled in V.D.L. and some of their descendants later settled in New Zealand.
Richard Charlton Hedditch died on 23 November 1893 at Bridgewater and his wife Rachel died on 15 January 1904, having had the issue of three sons and four daughters. Of their younger children: –
Mary Thirza Hedditch was born on 27 August 1844 in Portland. She married James Malseed of Drik Drik in 1864 and had three sons and four daughters.
Emily Hedditch was born on 17 September 1846 in Portland and died on 8 June 1854 at Breakwater.
John Read Hedditch was born 11 October 1849 at Lower Cape Bridgewater and followed pastoral pursuits during his lifetime. He married Mary Jane Holmes in 1873 and died on 12 August 1927 leaving a large family.
Catherine Sarah Charlton Hedditch was born on 2 September 1854 at Lower Cape Bridgewater. She married John Henry Broughton and had one son, Charlton William Broughton.
William Forward Hedditch was born on 12 March 1857 at Lower Cape Bridgewater. He lived continuously at “Lal Lal” for seventy years and carried on farming there until his retirement in 1926. He married Marion Nunn Jones in 1890 and had two sons, Norman Samuel Howard Hedditch and Harold Read Hedditch.
Martha Annie Hedditch was born on 13 March 1859 at Lower Cape Bridgewater. She married James Dominic(k) McKenna in 1890 and had two daughters, Mary McKenna and Rachel McKenna.
Dave and Doris
My mother’s first husband died of a broken heart after he accidentally drove over, and killed a boy one night on the dark and desolate Lava Street Hill—Billy Cart Hill to us kids. From Aunty Darky’s house near where the accident happened, you could sit on the veranda and see two or three boys speeding side by side in old wooden fruit boxes with golf buggy wheels, down the hill, past her front gate. We loved the thrills and the spills from flying down the hill. Every year we got together and officially raced each other, two at a time. The first cart to survive the trip and bump into the hay bales at the bottom, got to race again until we had a proud and happy winner.
After the fun of racing with friends, it took us only 10 minutes to walk straight down the hill, across Fairy Street, following, zombie-like the lusty aroma of Kermond’s juicy, onion filled hamburgers—then feasting on the most perfect food on God’s rock.
After Mum’s husband died, she had to work to take care of her two children, Bill and Vanessa. My father found her, after the war, working as a waitress at the Warrnambool Hotel. His short, heroic stint, in the Australian Air Force as a radio operator, directing aeroplanes to bomb the shit out of the Japanese in the South Pacific Islands. Sometimes they would retaliate, kamikaze Japs, sending him racing for cover under stretcher beds for protection from the bombs.
He liked her, but he never told me why: 12 years older than him with two young children, Bill and Vanessa, an enigma.
This made my father, pretty amazing for his time. He took on an older woman, her two children, had two more, me and my brother Graham, taught himself refrigeration—this teach yourself theme is strong in my life—while working for Ross Motors in Fairy Street, a five-minute stroll down the hill from Johnny the Greek’s fish and chip shop. After a few years at Ross Motors, he started an incredibly successful business in commercial refrigeration. Life got better and better for all of us thanks to his ingenuity. Within a few short years, he became the biggest refrigeration business outside of Melbourne.
They both played golf with style. The house, quite cluttered with his and her golfing trophies. And before that, at the other house in Lava Street, Bill’s trophies for tennis, squash and football-inspired us all. Eventually, I added to the pile a couple for surfing.
I never knew for a long time that he also ‘taught himself’ alternative health from the many health books filling his bookshelves back in the ’50s and 60’s—long before YouTube and Facebook. Dave downed Gotu Kola to make him smart, and that worked. Later on, I would find the same Gotu Kola growing wild everywhere around my house. I marvelled how he drank Dr Wayne Dwyer’s carrot juice to prevent cancer and how he loved to eat large cray’s to make himself happy and content.
Many Western people live by something that God supposedly said “God helps those that helps themselves” because every person you ask for help—money, labour, emotional support would duck, run and hide—my father was the exception. He helped many people with their overdue bills, by giving them time, years, to pay them. His drawer was full of unpaid bills when he died. He also lent heaps of money to people in trouble and often helped family members: me.
One particular loan to an alcoholic fisherman (port, rum and pasties were his staple: boxes of pasties) who taught me how to pilot his boat, one cold and frosty morning at three am. I arrived without sleeping a wink—scared of drowning and hard work. After I got on board and spied his already happy bottle of port (half-empty), he said, “grab the wheel and head out to sea son, take her out to deep water.” Pointing with the port bottle, still in its crinkly brown bag. He slept while I chugged out, way out there and on the long chug a lug, lug way back. The two bottles of port and the pasties floating and bobbing like the boat in his bloated stomach were like a drug, a sleeping drug. No manner of sinking, storming or wailing would wake him up. Eventually, a few years later, it got the better of him. He could not take the boat or himself out to sea anymore. So, he scuttled it like Fletcher Christian at Pitcairn Island, collected the insurance, and became a landlubber, drinking flubber with all the other bad boy bubbers, at the seafaring hotel.
Dear Dad, it’s never too late to say thank you. We live in an energetic universe where words, feelings and thoughts wing like arrows to the one you are thinking of, dreaming about, missing and loving: dead or alive because energy never dies. ‘ When you get to hear these humble, grateful words I want you to know I am eternally grateful for your love and support. You were/are the steam in my stinions, the bunk in my trunk, the brain in my refrain and the heart in my driver. I have so many of your pioneering ideas inside me that cross the divide between man and the universe.
Dear Mom, your heart-warming messages telling everybody to smile and be happy, stuck on the inside of all the cupboard doors in the kitchen and bathroom, once opened, spreading joy and amazement. They did enlighten us, surprisingly, in their simple truths about what matters: happiness. Like Dave and his healthy ways gave me herbs, you were a cupboard poet and gave me words. I am sorry about the night (around 7 PM) I came home to get my car keys after seeing God making waves. It was near the end of a non-frequent acid trip thanks to Peter’s letter from England. I remember opening it at Manifold Street and it was empty. If Peter hadn’t noted something on the envelope about having fun, I would have thought it was a joke and stopped there. I peered deeper into the pale-yellow envelope and there was still nothing. I started looking on the floor, crawling and sweeping it with my hands until I eventually found a tiny piece of paper no bigger than the nail on my little finger. Three of us (two friends) headed off to the beach and had a beautiful trip, looking, feeling and touching what we saw. When we came back to the house, I had to get my keys and car from the kitchen where Dave and Dorie spent their last hours and minutes of a busy day.
The world was still spinning webs of golden hue right there in the kitchen. Seeing you in your purple brunch coat and purple globe like earrings and asking (with a huge grin and sunset eyes) if you were going dancing? When in fact, you were going to bed. You thought I was making fun of you. But I wasn’t able to make this honest question live in the real world.
I couldn’t hit a golf ball like them. It would never go as far as the club. Always trying to hit the ball out of the park, then missing it completely. Often the club slipped from my grip, and sailed like a dead sparrow through the air and hit a tree. One day the unforgiving ball was near a tree stump. I hit the stump. The club broke in half, and the part that is meant to hit the ball, flew over a clump of trees onto the fairway; this was the best shot I can ever remember doing in my disgraceful golfing career.
Maybe this is a lesson I should have learned because I will never have the quiet, soft and gentle, poise of my mother’s swing or the determined backswing of my father. Instead, I hacked the ball from one side of the fairway to the other, eventually getting there, but in spades of frustration and anxiety: long life to learn a little. In sport, golf gave me the most points, by far.
I have tried cooking crayfish with Keen’s curry and strawberry jam like my father, but I could never afford the crayfish. Dave got his cheap or free after fixing the fridges on the local fishing boats. Our house was ‘chock a block’ with crayfish, big ones that lived in our bath for a few days, before flapping out their lives in murderous boiling water. The curry was everywhere in the house and often sat beside the rollmops and black pudding sausages in the fridge.
Primary School
Jamieson Street Primary School, had desks, playgrounds, marching bands and teachers, but no soul—the 60’s, still a decade away. There could be no escape, I had to march for six years; into mediocrity, surrounded by large red brick walls, bell towers and cottage windows. I had no respect for where I was: all the teachers’ certificates proudly hung on the wall; way too high for me to see. As a small child, I survived, knowing but not knowing, life is a construct for industry.
Primary school was a jumping exercise: grade one straight to grade three, then out. Yea, it happened something like that. Whatever natural intelligence I had when I was young (around 2019 NASA discovered we are all born creative geniuses, which is a natural state of being, but as we progress past the age of seven, our natural genius is beaten out of us by older people) did not prepare me for how it would be tested again and again; often failing and flailing between my world and theirs (the conditioned ones and the free thinkers). To survive as a genius, you had to do your work and pass the tests. But my genius wasn’t there, more in creative thinking.
My report cards would say he is very bright. If only he got off his arse and applied himself, we teachers could stop pulling our hair out. I never thought I was lazy; I always wanted to know the deeper meaning behind everything? Creative intelligence, maybe? Or Intuitive intelligence? Whatever intelligence it was, it would never help me in school.
The jumping made life difficult—in and out of the classroom. I struggled with the lessons. The teacher’s voice would always be like my mother’s, asking me to wash the dishes: only a faint sound, like a ghost trying to make contact through a vale of years. The playground was more like a battleground. Maybe the other children hated me for being a jumper, or I didn’t fit in anywhere. Because I left the children my age, like a past affair, and didn’t belong with people in my class: I was too young and a strange stranger interloping into the future: I was often bullied, an alien, alienated.
There would be no letup from this enigma: the intelligent one lost, by himself, in a dreamscape. I would have the same feeling years later after smoking some strong hashish. There was no way out; every morning, eat some curried crayfish, and dawdle to school, allowing the years to eventually release me into the next lot of problems.
One day, I forget why a teacher made me wear a red ribbon in my hair for a day. I probably never knew why I had been punished anyway. A big red ribbon in my hair for being naughty. It would be more a badge of honour, than the shame they intended it to be. An offence too, for all the girls, that somehow, for me to be a girl for four hours is punishment, when a real girl has to be one every day. The war had finished ten years ago. The school felt like Dad’s Army. Every morning two boys, one with a big bass drum and the other with a kettle drum would drum us into class, rum a tum tum—marching like a bunch of crackpots.
When you are young and question everything, hell will play. The question of values, culture and the way they are implemented, differently, every decade means there is no truth. No sustainable truth because whoever is in charge for the day gets to play God. A year later they get kicked out and another cracked pot, replaces them with a new fervour and new innovative ideas. Every year edging closer to a predictable outcome: chaos. I am that one. I never liked tests, because I have a bad memory for details. No matter how much I studied it would all slip out on the day of the exam. Other people could remember every word and pass tests easily. Problem number one in the school system—not everyone has a good memory, so it is not a level playing field. Problem number two—everyone is different, but they will all suffer the same test that concentrates on math’s, science and history. If you are a natural writer, artist or sports person then you will be tested again and again on subjects you will never use, ever. Me again. If I could rewrite the curriculum for a school it would concentrate on each person’s natural skills early on. Like the first year of primary school, each student would have a test. Maybe a Myer Briggs Test that clearly shows their latent skills and abilities and likely career. Then they could choose a pathway early on and be tested on that pathway. Instead of focusing on core subjects that alienate half the school, they could find a balance between core subjects and each person’s likely career path. For example, if someone tested to be a writer; then they would have to have a minimum score of 80% for English but only 50% for Science and Mathematics to pass. For a scientist, they would need to get a minimum of 80% for science and 50% for art to pass.
Teachers and schools are more preoccupied with dinner parties than they are with students.
Around the same time, some other weird thing happened at Jamieson State School; which defined my love of peace and tolerance.
I love tomato soup so much, with toast, cows of butter and cracked pepper. One lunch day in the canteen they served tomato soup with a bread roll and butter. I scoffed it down: dipping a butter-laden bread roll into it and then scooping up the romantic tomatoes into my mouth before the bread broke and slam dunked itself. My father taught me the next trick with quiet glee reserved for crazy parents. At the end of a meal, during those rare moments when my mother wasn’t watching, he loved to lick his plate clean. Much like a soft tornado wiping out Texas. So, I invoked my family culture when the bread roll had completely gone, and my spoon could not slide under the pool of red gold anymore. I deftly picked up the bowl with both hands, tilted the minute amount left up to my mouth and preceded to pour the last little, annoying for dishwashers, pigeon pool of soup in. Then, I committed a terrible sin; I licked the final few red stains off the bowl, with a slurp and a burpy, patchy red grin all over my face. The teacher on patrol in the canteen looking to stamp out slurpy burpers saw me do it. He lunged at me, remembering the army, desperately wanting to snuff out the evil before anyone else could see me. His de-meaner, devil dancing with me for committing the sin of enjoyment. He made me stand up, scorned me with a waterfall of mirth, then said hold out your hand. Wack, the cane bounced off my open palm twice. I could have been stoic and stared him down, through the heat haze coming off my hand or got on my knees and begged God for forgiveness, in front of the whole school that were not slurping or burping their soup, in case they got the punishment I didn’t deserve. But my father taught me this is how real men do the dishes. In this precious moment, I would be tested and stood firm against the world that would never be mine.
Luckily my journey wife got into slurping burping too. Every lunchtime she cocked a crab shell at 45 degrees to the sun and slurped the green-yellow mush down her throat. I got the underdog thing from Dave. He taught me the true meaning of life: truth is thy own.
What can this truth be, you ask? Love, kindness, compassion, creativity, health, nature, animals, communication, confidence, positivity, mindfulness, equality, innovation and self-mastery. The rest is the lie that begins at school: your parents want you to do well, so you can be richer than them.
My father taught himself refrigeration. How to sell them and fix them. He also taught himself natural healing with books you would never see at school or in a local library. He made his own beer and stout. I have followed him and love being able to learn something new every day. This love is my happiness. and it is a happiness I can teach my wife and my kids.
In a lifetime I have taught myself, photography, astrology, writing, cooking, building, teaching, immigration, web design, jazz guitar and fixing things. All of these, I have at some time, made a decent, or partial living apart from cooking. My children’s mother Angie didn’t like cooking much, so I would come home from work every night, wander to the cold kitchen and open cupboards looking for inspiration. Usually, I found lentils, cans of creamed corn, spaghetti and Filo pastry. Most nights the conjuring worked and everyone stuffed their stomach to a cannon they would shoot. Other nights someone ran to the fish and chip shop before they closed. Mary Webb always gave us a huge bag of soggy fish and chips that tasted good for ten minutes: before the fat congealed on the chips and in my digestive system.
One other weird thing I remember about Primary School is the Humpty Dumpty like science teacher who loved playing drop the horizontal stick and catch it if you can before it hit the ground. He held it out around belly button height. We could put our open hand over the stick as long as we didn’t touch it. Then zoom, it went to the floor without resistance. Some people could catch it, rarely, like a Tasmanian Tiger. Oh, and Florence Collins had us boys and girls dancing around a maypole. Each of us would hold a long piece of coloured material attached at the top of the maypole. When the music started, we all had to weave in and out of each other, hang on to the material and look happy. It could have been fun if we could stop the incessant berating from Florence about our boy only chaos.
Secondary School
Dave never stopped wanting me to be an electrician. Which caused a lot of tension in my teen years, and eventually hardship, because it was obvious, I was a photographer and writer by the age of 13. This constant badgering, left me struggling to find my way: it ruined my life for decades. I would never be able to go to school and formalize my education. Instead, I became a wandering fool at the mercy of a plan-less life. Funnily, that would eventually be the making of me. I became a Jack of all trades and a master of some. All the physical, hot, labour transformed my thoughts into concrete action.
After my red ribbon days at primary school, I was sent to a technical college to become a philosopher. Surrounded by wool classer’s, carpenters, plumbers and apple charlottes I would waste my days, 20,000 of them, being a kid philosopher, taking it all in and nothing ever coming out. The normal school I should have gone to, only five minutes’ walk away, would not fulfil my father’s dream. This made the teachers mad as hell. My mind was the flint from two rocks striking each other. One rock my mind and the other society. Sparking, momentarily, between hands of endeavour and the potent potential future: my marks were poor. I was so bored with school I took form four off altogether and unbeknown to my parents went surfing at the beach for a year. I was about 15. I still don’t remember what the teachers were trying to do, if it was methodically distributing facts from a teacher’s plan, it didn’t work for me. It made me so sleepy I swear it was a drug, a sleeping drug, wafting out of his mouth straight into my brain, so powerful, that it glued the side of my head to my desk with a spring in between. The minutes passed, with me being a jack in the box, my head springing up and down. It was hell keeping my eyes open, down on the desk I go again and again and it was hell to get the strap for sleeping.
I learned something at the beach because I was awake, fresh, excited and surfing pretty well. Nature, the sun, wind, the waves are all powerful forces in our lives that we need to understand and live with, like the American Red Indians and the Australian Aboriginals. It is a mad idea, to ignore the energetic life mesmerizing the world with Van Gogh paintings, and instead worship a travel guide to Mars on an iPad.
The reason we go to school is clear: our parents (for the last 500 years, or less) loved getting rid of us at kindergarten. Who then went on to improve their situation—invent more schools to take us off their hands, for another 15 years. I mean, there is more to life than school: there is life. Some kind of balance between consuming information and failing because your memory was no good, and living in a beautiful wonderland of magic and mystery.
Eventually, the teachers stopped pulling their hair out. They knew I was the smartest-dumbest student they ever had. The only way they were going to survive was to pass me on, like a Ron Barassi pigskin.
The most memorable times were hardly academic: in form 4 I won the Australian Ilford Photographic competition; my art teacher Jimmie Frangos glued a beard on me using Araldite so I could be a fortune teller at the school fair. I was heckled by bodgies, widgies, sharpies and nicompoopers for walking down Leibig street with an Aboriginal student. I missed a few years because the waves were calling and I learnt to touch type.
Ilford’s photo competition was for every student in Victoria, Australia. I got 1 first, and 2 seconds. This made me the outright personal winner; unfortunately, another school got 2 firsts between them and knocked me off the post. In all of the State of Victoria, I was number 1. Wow. I won the first prize with a photo of a fishing boat at Port Fairy tied up with a huge rope at the dock I got a beautiful Ilford technical book of photography. For the second place and third, I got packets of Ilford slide film. They were pictures of John Sebastian Tucker playing Villa Lobos on his Ramirez guitar and I forget the other one.
Then the years passed by me until a big wave dumped me straight into the looney bin: to be a psyche nurse.
Brother Graham
Brother Graham jumped onto the planet 17 months before me. He inherited his mother’s genes: a round face, shortish and a great sense of fun. And I got my father’s a bit taller, pointy jaw and a penchant for curried crayfish. He inherited his mother’s emotions, her warmth, her nervous condition and her fun for life. Quite different to what I got: my father’s eccentric, self-learning, coldness, workaholic Peugeot driving genes. There it is, one reason why we didn’t get along, the same as my father and mother didn’t. It will take a few lifetimes for me to loosen up, and be a fun-loving Graham, love life and be carefree. It is not easy being child number two. I think being number one you can learn to plan a course, one which the sibling will follow, until one day you say ‘enough’ and he did. I left and never came back into his world of refrigeration, joints, chess and playing Bob Dylan songs: on special occasions ramping Bob up to the Stones. Yes, I regret every single person in my life I didn’t connect with: that would be everyone, and I am humbled not knowing if I couldn’t speak or the rest of the world couldn’t or wouldn’t. My friend George at the Bricky in Castlemaine lived a similar life: connecting with others, women, offering himself to the other through sex as a way of connecting—bridge gapping. And so have I, been left wanting, all those times when only words work. Creating deep loneliness, a monkish desire, for decades, until at last, freedom, when I found them falling on a page.
When Reuben, then Cecelia, arrived in Rushworth; I could see the jealousy and pain of siblings vying for attention. I could never know what kind of relationship I had with my brother. 17 months was just enough to make me the boring little brother: forever, it seemed. There is no point in dwelling on something impossible to know. Was I normal and he jealous or vice versa? What I do know is, I have spent my entire life feeling like an island, so it is likely I was one back then or did my childhood experience make me one?
It was good to have two brothers that loved playing sport. Bill, more traditional and Graham, first a lifesaver, and then a surfboard rider. I didn’t follow Bill, I followed Graham to the surf club, something which he hated, then the board club next door. I am sure, without their influence, I would never have found my fire: doing, more than thinking and fighting, more than failing. All the notebooks, full—in my bookshelves—of ideas and heartache.
There have been numerous times I have tried to meditate and failed. Ha, today I tried for an hour to count to 20 and had no idea what thought broke my attempt each time. Sometimes my mind is empty and all I see is the colour purple—that’s without trying. The harder I try the more power goes to my mind, not less. This describes my childhood as well: overwhelmed by seeing beauty everywhere, which is why I became a photographer at an early age. What I see is similar to Van Gogh, which is why I don’t need ears either. Graham loved playing the guitar, surfing and his family: so did I. I loved my family without knowing what that meant. It has taken years of reflection to accept my heart needed some fine-tuning and if that failed, a reco one to get me to heaven. Graham and I lived in different worlds, through different windows: sadly.
Brother Bill
My older brother Bill is the closest person I know to superman. In the early 60s, he worked hard during the day at Fletcher ones and studied accounting at night, not an easy task back then. ‘Dodger McConnell’ is a champion at everything he does. He became a very successful accountant finishing his career at Deakin University as Administration Manager. Born a natural athlete: Warrnambool’s most heavily decorated sportsman in the 60’s. Bill is reasonably short and muscular and became a celebrated rover for Warrnambool’s number one football team, hence the name ‘Dodger’. For many years he gladiated the lawn tennis club and championed his water skies, a belting squash player, and a dodging football player and now at 80+, he is a champion cyclist. In his age bracket, he is one of the best in Australia and getting better and faster all the time.
Most summer weekends, when I was young, were spent watching Bill water skiing on Lake Pertobe. A small, shallow weedy pool below the masturbating angel and between the city and the beach. Like all water it had the power to reflect the heavens, creating beauty and wonder, where below there was only a metre or two of green waving weeds.
Bill has always been helpful and supportive. I have always loved his positive and friendly conversation style and still do. His round face, permanently carved with a happy smile, portrays a friendly innocence. He inherited his mother’s small body, same as Graham, and his incredible sports prowess from his father: who I never met. I wish I knew him better, how he thinks, why he left the church, and why he decided to be one of Australia’s best sportsmen. I can imagine playing tennis with his tiny smiling frame zipping around the court. And him dodging between the full-backs on his way to another goal. And watching him play squash, intensely dart around like the flash, mesmerizing the competition. No computers back then, or mobile phones. The current crop of sports players are fooling themselves; life is more real than they will ever know. Their screens of loneliness are pumping out circus music into their despair.
He married the local butcher’s daughter Norma Raynor and they are still going strong with two lovely children. I keep remembering how I mistook something Norma said at their wedding and kissed her (maybe I was ten) much to Bill’s amusement?
I am not sure if he ever knew but I loved Christmas in Warrnambool, mainly because he would come and visit in the morning and have a chat. After seeing Bill’s bike one day in Torquay and his legs of steel I imagined a nice picture of Bill triumphing over age and time and maybe knowingly or not following in the footsteps of another time traveller in Warrnambool, who was still riding his racing bike into his 80’s maybe 90’s, Mr De Grandis.
The more I think of his iron will as a sportsman the more I think it would be great for Cecelia to do a documentary on him. It would be a deep story about a great Victorian sportsman. She could hone in on the sweat dripping off his face, the sinews grinding in his legs, a look in his eye as bright as the glinting sun and listen to the rhythm of wheels as they spin backwards in time and see Mars, the God of War incarnated on the earthly plane, having fun burning the asphalt around the hills of Torquay. I have always loved brother Bill and honour him as someone who has only done good in at least one person’s life: mine.
Going to the movies
The Liberty and Capitol movie theatres in Warrnambool can still step you back in time with their brass and shiny elegance. Not far away from each other, they offer a different choice of movies for the week. Mum always gave Graham and me, 2 shillings every Saturday afternoon so we could go to the movies for 1 shilling and 6 pence and buy an onion roll at halftime, or on the way home, for sixpence. Dave and Doris usually played golf at the weekends; sending me to the movies for a few hours, often alone, to keep their golfing dreams alive.
If Graham said he wanted to see a movie at the Capitol, I had to go to the Liberty and vice versa. I didn’t understand our relationship. The year and a half difference in age separated us throughout our years growing up until he died at the age of 32.
In sibling partnerships, the tightrope between self-knowing and other knowledge can mean walking straight and sure with confidence that the firstborn thrives on because they know other than themselves. For the second-born, a war rages, often silent and deadly. For me, living out second childhood made me stronger and weaker. The strength grew—an antidote to my irrelevance. The weakness never abated. A strong shield of protection deleted the advancement of identity, forever wary of close relationships from loved ones that could bite and devour you in a moment.
Time passed long enough for me to grow taller than him, around the age of 17. Now natural selection came into play. Sometimes I beat him at surfing. One special day I beat him in a long foot race from the Surf Club to the pier and back. Normally I would come last, not today. Instead of wheezing, coughing and stopping; my legs kept going and like magic I got to the front of the pack on the way back. A couple of surf lifesavers back from me, Graham’s legs gained more speed. He wanted to win badly; his vibes, palpable and determined. I could hear his inner voice shouting at me to stop so he could win. My feet slapped the wet sand with rare confidence. In perfect rhythm, my feet and I got further in front, and I won easily. I had time to look back at the pack surging to the finish line and saw Graham’s face clearly: contorted with pain, frustration, anger and sadness.
He never wanted me around, the kid brother, a bad smell. A very painful part of growing up; that I still have that unwanted feeling everywhere I go: never knowing if he didn’t want me because of me or because 17 months difference in age between siblings is a tiebreaker, and the grave won’t know either.
Sadly, this same problem surfaced with Reuben and Cecelia. With more than 4 years separating them. Reuben, the firstborn had more than enough time, building his private world in the sandpit and with his parent’s hearts. When Cecelia finally came along, the stars fell and broke onto what should have blossomed into a loving relationship between brother and sister. Cecelia never knew his jealousy until he hit her. If Graham felt the same about me then I can say with confidence the second born will feel unloved and tormented for no apparent reason, for years, decades and lifetimes. The Firstborn may never know how their jealousy destroyed the best part of any life: the love between siblings. The second-born, as the years grow old, can only shrug it off as a psychological nightmare beyond their control. That is why going to the movies by myself, set the scenery for life.
One day my friends wanted to see a movie. I had no money so one of them said, wait in the toilet upstairs during the first half and at intermission come out and watch the movie. I walked upstairs, went into the toilet and started reading the graffiti on the back of the door. In the male toilets, they always talked about sex. With names of scarlet girls carved deeply into their regret. Often mentioning the names of girls in compromising positions. I read them all, made one of my own and hoped soon, I would hear everyone come noisily into the toilet at half-time, so I would know when to make my move. I heard the odd voice, but not the crescendo I expected from a bunch of peeing males, so I kept waiting. Not having a watch made it more difficult to know how much time had passed. I kept waiting (no mobile phones back then either) and reading the door until I could hear voices, then quiet. I thought this is it, time to make my move. Slightly dazed from the confinement, I opened the toilet door and walked into the foyer, ready to go up the second set of stairs and watch the movie. The dark and quiet foyer looked empty. I slowly climbed the stairs to the movie room, oh no, another empty and darkroom: everyone had gone home. I had waited with such patience through interval, through the second half of the movie and everyone having a pee and going home—three hours. I slowly walked down the stairs to the bottom foyer, enveloped in darkness too. No one in sight, only quiet shadows and cars going past the glass doors outside. Shit, I thought, again, how do I get out? It is all locked up. A fear stilled my heart, I crept, burglar like, to one of the glass doors, gently pulled up the brass rod holding it shut, opened it and slithered out onto the dark street. I turned right up the hill, walking quicker with every step. Once over it and going down the other side, I laughed at my lucky escape from my temporary jail after reading graffiti for free. On reflection, I learned something quite valuable from this crazy experience: don’t trust your friends. Even if I had come out of the toilets at the right time, the ticket guy would have still asked for the other half of the ticket, which is why they didn’t come and get me at the interval, I suppose. I also learned that I can sit happily in a toilet for three hours, without getting uptight and stressed. This event, when added to the medical for the army, is another example of my insanity? that my mother wanted more evidence of for years.
Fairy Street
There was a back entrance to the house in Lava Street that took you down a long lane into Fairy Street. It was a quiet, dark, jungle-like path. It felt good to get to the end and return into the sunlight—like when you die. Usually, I would be on a mission to get bread and pasties from the bakery, on the corner, (which still used horse-drawn bakers’ carts) or turn left past ‘Blackie” the Blacksmith on the way up the hill to Johnny the Greeks for fish and chips. Johnny would always brag about how he had his appendix cut out without anaesthesia, and for listening to him ‘brag’ he would let Graham and I eat all the chip crumbs in the chip tray as they came hot out of the oil; we would eat so many we never ate the chips we bought and stagger home gluttoned. If I walked straight across Fairy Street from the end of the lane, I would enter the Newsagents. Doris was always reading the Women’s Weekly and Dave loved cowboy books: adventures free from the tedium of success. Come to think of it Ross Motors, where he first taught himself refrigeration, was just up a bit from the newsagents. I can remember the grease, oil and the smelting heat of the working man’s shed.
Turning right also took you to one of Dave’s favourite pubs. The one where Olly O’Donnell’s, otherwise known as Jap’s father hung out every night after closing his tire shop. I remember going to a lot of pubs as a young boy. B.G. before gadgets. The days of my youth (14) camping at the beach, surfing, snorkelling, combing the sand dunes for mermaids, roller skating, skateboarding are a mere memory now because it is safer to burn your thumbs than your butt. My life perfectly straddles the normal years and the computer ones. The main difference between the two is freedom and slavery. Most children are kept at home for their safety and given phones to play with, so they can live out their real lives in a fantasy. I remember going anywhere I wanted at the age of 12 and coming home at all hours of the day and night. That is how life used to be, before TV and computers. I can clearly remember when things changed: more murderers, cars, crazy people and drunks on the streets than before. Everyone plays their phone like it’s their mummy and daddy. I often see couples playing with their phones in restaurants, even while they are eating. The next step into oblivion will be everyone wearing virtual reality headsets, hmm, maybe that step is already here. Life is life, living breathing life, and now it’s not, it is all going to robot hell.
So, strolling past the blacksmith, then stopping and popping, in, to smell the burning coke, watching the sparks fly off molten metal, admiring the God of War, and hearing his hammer, strike another beating into shape. For me, truly amazing, mythical and real. I loved Blackie the Blacksmith and all the other smells, sights and sounds of Fairy Street and always will love the same, wherever I am.
The Beach
I remember the beautiful imagery, sounds and smells when I duck dived with dolphins (imaginary) at Warrnambool Surf Coast Beach at the age of 14, during a whole summer with me and my black mate called Mat. He loved taking me to the crest of a giant wave, hovering on the frothing top, and then waiting for the soon to die swell from Van Diemen’s Land to burst and crash down onto the sandy streaked land of Oz, implanting my skull two feet into the sand while Mat bounced and frolicked with disdain as the swell dissipated into nothing but a wet reminder.
There were girls everywhere but I was too shy (in-case Mat got jealous) to look at their exposed bodies burning with heat, lying on their flapping towels, cooking themselves with coconut oil and bikini; all trying to be as black as my mate Mat and the local Aboriginals – the dreaming was casting its spell on these Northern intruders.
The feeling of weightlessness while lying on the bottom of the ocean (6 feet under) with my hands gripping the sand for extra weight and watching the sun’s rays cooled by the green swirling water stream from the surface above into my eyes was even more tangible than breathing. The ocean was an escape into nature that I loved, even though the hot windy walk to the beach in the melting asphalt was hellish, as was the salty walk home with board short rash.
There are many moments when time stands still; because you are not thinking, you are doing or feeling instead. These moments are precious because funnily enough, we are at our happiest when we don’t have to think. Body surfing the waves was one of these moments, and despite the cold Southern water, it was possible to play all day without my brain. I still search for the same experience every day but alas, I can only find responsibilities for others.
To act and not know what thoughts predicated it, is pretty trippy; like skipping school for a year in year 10 to go surfing and two years later living at the beach in an old army tent with a few other guys, living on money from the coin launderette. Every day we could get enough shillings to go and buy a loaf of bread and a packet of chips from the beach kiosk, pull out the centre and fill it full of chips and four of us would have it for tea and if we were extra lucky, we would have a penny for the penny in a slot machine and get to the second row before it fell through a hole into the local bank. On the way back to the tent, we would stop at the changing sheds and perve through a knothole at the naked girls having a shower like Henri Cartier Bresson’s photo of a steelworker watching soccer for free.
As the years droned on, my school reports would say the same thing. A+ for loving the sea; swimming and surfing and C- for anything that taxed my brain. There are endless snaps in my mind of emerald blue water frothing high in the air then crashing into itself with a roar and a pummeling, as I played being a bouncing, bronco riding giant cork. The sea was kind and usually gentle, and not once in 10 years did it bruise my body or soul, as did the life in the town’s streets on the hill overlooking the ocean, where men chose to drink themselves more stupid than men a toad’s bottom.
The Air Rifle
The worst of times came and stayed when at the age of 13 I got my hands on an air rifle. This was my biggest, stupid. I could survive years behind a benign smile with a modicum of respect and normalcy. But with a weapon in my hand, I was mad, not aggressive and mean mad, more like the Joker in Batman, an aimless madness that broke the world going by.
The first weapon of mass destruction was a homemade shanghai which for most people was only dangerous to passing sparrows and pooping pigeons. But, in my hands, it was horrible for a couple of humans. I progressed, darkly, from small stones to staples, because they were easy to get and easy to shoot. Twice I shot them at passing cars out the front of the house. Once, I narrowly missed hitting someone. It was so close, they knew a projectile had hit the car and they came screaming back to complain to my parents #$%^%&%#@$, rightly so.
Their anger transmuted my stupidity around 20% at the time for the good. But not enough for me to not play a shooting game with my friend a few months later. He said he and his friend would throw rocks at me, (from a very high cliff, with me 50 feet below) and I would try to shoot him with the air rifle. You could not hit a beer can with it from 20 feet away so it seemed like it would be more dangerous for me than him; who was hundreds of feet away, and up. And it was for a few minutes as I ran, jumped skidded and screamed as his and his friend’s rocks hailed down on me. I had no intention of shooting at him until one hit me and I fired way over his head in an act of self-defence, useless self-defence because a small pellet 20 feet over his head would neither make a sound nor affect him in any way. But it did, the impossible happened, it hit him in the eye. He screamed, and started rolling over the cliff, his friend grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him back to safety. I heard shouting and had no idea what happened. I couldn’t see them anymore, so I went home. I had a shower and went to the movies. Halfway through the movie, I saw the silhouette of a policeman’s hat rising up the stairs, then turning menacingly towards me. Under it, a weary policeman looking for me. He said that the boy I was playing with had an accident, he had an eye injury and could I accompany him to the police station. I felt incredibly afraid and sad, guilty and limp. I expected to be jailed (at the age of 13) for being the most stupid smart kid in town. We drove to the police station in quietness, even though it was a V8. My parents were already waiting at the police station, solemn, and sorry. The policeman sat down and started speaking slowly. I thought he would tell me about keys and locking and throwing them away. But instead, he said lightly, and encouragingly, that it was an accident, a stupid boy’s accident and that there is no way I could have ever hit him on purpose with the junky air rifle I had, no matter how hard I tried, and he was right. I was free to go home, but the boy would never be free. The pellet had lodged in his eye, it had to be removed and replaced with a glass one. I visited him sometimes and he was friendly and carefree. I wasn’t. I could feel the karma, rightly so, that would come. Stupid is not an excuse, neither is age. I hope by now it is paid in full. Not because I fear God’s judgment. It is the hope that I would learn from my mistakes, willingly, or not. Waking up from a child’s dream. I was somewhat unborn. I had a foot in different worlds and if I was to stay that way forever then I had to find a way to use those dreams for good and stop sleepwalking my way through the world causing grief on every other corner.
Going to the football
Sometimes, we would go to the football to see our famous brother Bill (Dodger they called him) slay the opposition with his expert dodging and weaving into the record books. Back then, surfing ruled. I had little interest in knowing why that bright red pigskin, soaked, usually in mud, could be so important, to get and then get rid of over and over again so quickly. I loved halftime when everybody and their cat, hoed into hot, and saucy Chittick’s Brothers pies and downed buckets of bright red cordial, though. Forty years later, looking back, I cannot count one day that I have willingly gone to see a sporting event. Bill would have made me a hero in Rushworth. The whole town worships football except me. The main reason living in a redneck town would always be a danger to me and my family.
The art of belonging: join a football club. There was something inside of me, the dreamscape from childhood, that took my belonging and longing to another realm and dimension, far from earth. The memories of football are more off the ground than on it. The smell of big, hot tired muscles soaked in rubbing oil of Wintergreen, at halftime. Always by a hatted man, old towel purposefully, Matador like, draping one shoulder. Maybe a smoke burning the side of his mouth. Wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a knitted vest, trousers with ironed cuffs, lightly covering leather shoes with shallow heels. The hot rubbery on the bottom pies, with a brown crusty top, hidden by tomato sauce, blasting the crowds with the wicked smells of Saturday football. I loved pies because I love tomato sauce. Pies dripping in sauce from the local bakeries in Warrnambool beat out Kermond’s hamburgers by five cat’s whiskers.
The idea of winning in a football match connected with fame, accomplishment and success failed me: all I ever saw at a footy match could be considered small and faint. Years later, I can see how people love being a winner in a world outside of their imagination. Brother Bill continues his battles, this time in 2021 for his life. A year ago, at the age of 82, he crashed his racing bike, still riding 50 km a day, and punctured his lungs. When they x rayed him in hospital, they discovered a small tumour on his kidneys. After some recovery from his wounds, they operated and removed the tumour successfully, he said. Nearly a year later he fell and hit his head, another x-ray, this time they found a brain tumour. Another operation, but they couldn’t get it all this time. He had to have chemotherapy and radiation to subdue it. Sadly, when Bill is sick, he doesn’t like talking much, it is now July 2021 and I haven’t heard a word from him in 6 months. He may be getting better or even passed on. I love Bill and will always be grateful for his presence. He is an incredible example of what you can do with your life if you just stand out of your chair and do it: bookkeeper, accountant, manager, mayor of a large city, squash, tennis and football champion for over a decade, father of a doctor, husband to Norma, brother to me and Vanessa. European racing bike champion aged 75, Australian racing bike champion aged 80. An all-around champion who lost his father at an early age grew up with a single mother for a few years, then was adopted by my father when he married my mother. Studied accounting at weekends and became the administrator for Deakin University. What about you?
Other memories
Before I started surfing, I loved climbing trees, playing with Shanghai’s, swimming, watching Dr Who and roller skating.
The extra-long and high evergreen Cyprus Tree fronds along Aunty Darki’s back fence beckoned an adventure. One that involved walking through the lower branches to get inside the trees. Then climbing through the busy, twisted branches, all the way to top, into the sun, with views across the town. You could smell the sticky resin all over your body and permeating the trees. After some time, I summoned the courage to go back down to the ground the fun and dangerous way. To do this, I sat on the biggest and highest branch, covered with green and yellow needle fronds and gradually moved backwards out to the edge of the world. The branch slowly bent down towards the ground, way down below. You have to hang on with both hands and hope the branch when bent enough would take you all the way to the ground. You could ride a good branch—like a long and slender horse going downhill—all the way to the ground and step off like an elevator, or be left hanging 2 or 3 meters off the ground, deciding whether to climb back up, or jump. I loved surfing Cyprus Trees.
One day brother Graham and I, locked ourselves in a refrigerated supermarket display cabinet in the backyard. We got in the cabinet to hide from the rain, and as a safety measure, I tied a rope to the handle on the outside and then slammed the door shut. After a few minutes we thought we were suffocating and we pulled desperately on the rope to get out, but of course it did nothing as it was jammed in the door. Then we panicked and kicked the glass out of the cabinet, breaking it and Dad’s bank balance at the same time.
When I was a baby, my father drove his Zephyr Ute into the river at Port Fairy, after missing the bridge completely. I was never told why he did that. I cannot remember him ever being drunk, he was the man with the golden cravat, after all. Maybe he was drunk when he drove it in the river and that cured him for the rest of his life. Life, always wants you to be living.
Stays in Hospital
The first time I went for a trolley ride to the operating room was an emergency. My appendix had burst, I needed an operation quickly to save my life. The ride on the stainless-steel trolley was a blur thanks to the pre-med they give you an hour before the operation to make you sleepy and fearless. I remember looking at the ceiling in the long blue corridor, and wondering if I would see it again on the way back: the fear. We finally went through a door where doctors and nurses, gowned up, looked misty, in a sea of yellow light. The anaesthetist came to my bed holding a gas mask. He smiled behind his Covid like face mask and gently slipped the gas one over my face. He held up his fingers and asked me to count them. He turned on the gas, it ssssssssssssssed down to my lungs, then back up to my brain. 1, 2..,3…,1/4, sleeping soundly. Like magic, a few hours later, I woke up, unable to eat grass anymore, to my mother saying Hi.
A few years later my tonsils were swollen so much I could hardly talk. There I was, back on the trolley, watching the same blurry ceiling as before, counting the same fingers, lying, while ghosts cut and slashed, then being transported back to my bed in the ward with the sun shining on chirping birds outside my window, heralding and encouraging my return from Hades, like before. I had three more operations after these all within a few years of each other.
The next one was to get my knee sewn up after a tractor plough fell over and pinned me and my knee to the ground with a three-inch bolt. Brother Graham was playing king of the castle on top of a new orange plough. It was standing up vertical, on display for sale. I was a dirty rascal. He was jumping up and down with too much glee and knocked it over, straight into my knee. Someone carried me home, blood pouring out of the side of my knee. Back to the hospital again, this time for stitches. The doctor said a blood clot the size of a tennis ball came out. A bare 1/2-inch bolt 3 inches long, welded to the frame, had stuck into my knee like a whale’s tooth. This would have been another time I was away for school; at least a month or two. If I was doing research on absenteeism and excelling at school, I would already know by now. After three operations and months off school that it puts you behind so much: and there were more coming. The teachers were flummoxed, like me and my mum. There was no option but to accept my fate: at the ripe age of 10, I didn’t belong in school anymore.
Probably the longest stay in hospital was when I had to have a testicle ‘brought down.’ I was born with only one. The other one didn’t descend from its tube at birth. The operation left a scar opposite the one left from my appendix being removed. After a few days, I was roaming the wards in a wheelchair, searching for egg and bacon pies, friends to play with, and exploring abandoned passageways. Every day going further away from the ‘children’s ward’, like the Famous Five and Biggles seeking adventure. It was a lot of fun; a lot like the days I would run and hike through the eight feet high saltbush covering the dunes at Thunder Point. There were miles of corridors and dunes to explore, get lost in. Sometimes I would easily remember all the twists and turns that took me back to the road and other times I would have to stop and look for clues, anything familiar that would show me the way out of the maze. Later on, I would have dreams of being lost in a maze and trying to find my way out.
The last operation was when I was in my 30’s, living at Killarney with Pamela. I had a fistula in my butt. The fistula was like a leaking pipe of goo near my anus. It smelled and it was a social and personal problem. When I was a boy in hospital it felt like a dream; this time, I would put off the operation for months. I was scared and apprehensive. When I finally went after months of procrastination, I didn’t have the pre-med which is what makes you blurry and dizzy before and after the operation. My brother Bill had an operation a month before. He said if you don’t have it, you will wake up after the operation without being sick and groggy: he was right, I did wake up with a zing. The only problem was that without the pre-med I was wide awake, all the way down the birth canal and into the operating theatre. I was able to annoy everyone—chatting nervously about the weather and other mindless stuff.
Hospital was an important part of my early years growing up. If I wasn’t hanging ten at the beach, I was doing broadsides in my wheelchair. Every operation back then meant at least a month off school. And, when I did come back to school, I felt like an outcast. The students forgot me and I was so far behind in the work, it forgot me too. Hmm, too many crazy things happened in my early school days, that eventually broke the conforming threads I had started cutting in kindergarten—the hospital days just finished the job.
