1972 - More Gun Play

Dad somehow knew of this back-blocks dairy farm whose owner had a small rifle range squared away, deep in the foothills, immediately below the treeline. Up along a steep twisting, single-lane track, deep in Heininger Country in the shadows of Marshall Mount.

Having discussed our Proposition with the farmer, we proceeded through several paddock gates, careful to stop the car and close and secure each one before reaching the range.

Dad then produced a hessian bag from the boot, and slid his gleaming .22-calibre rifle from it, along with a box of shells. He then found the dozen paper targets he’d laid flat under this lethal load. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, he then strode over the cow-shit strewn, uneven ground to fix several targets in their frames some 100 yards further on.

After several hours of lazy shooting, when our tiny valley seemed weighed down with the stench of gunpowder and decidedly mixed results showed we were generally poor shots, we left.

Several weeks later, with Dad’s approval, I took the car, my friend Tony Clarke, the same rifle, another box of shells and more targets back to the same farm.

Not more than 20 minutes into our target practice, the furious farmer, in shorts and singlet, his black gumboots slapping against his bare calves, strode up demanding what on earth had possessed us to shoot near his cattle. And without permission. Several cows too busy grazing in the next field to even look up, moped gently along in the shadows more than 100 yards to our right.

The farmer demanded we leave immediately, and never return, promising us he’d discuss our transgression with Dad. When I got home, I realised there was no hiding. I blurted it all out to Mum and Dad, who curiously, displayed a meek oh-well, boys-will-be-boys reaction.

The fast and furious phone call came that night, and afterwards, Dad gently, matter-of-factly, told me he agreed with the farmer. That we should have sought permission again, at least forewarning the man of our intention.

I later reflected on the casual familiarity I’d assigned to our outing, and the equally casual way Clarkie and I had handled the weapon.

I never picked up a gun again.

Cats & Dad

Dad loathed cats.

They’d dig his precious vegie patches, the ones edged with gnarled logs and lovingly fertilised.

Cats, while sensing the fertiliser and the neatly turned soil, were always indiscriminate. They’d dig silently, maliciously ,through anything growing. Then deposit their own feline crap before methodically scraping soil, seedlings – even well-established plants – back over their own handiwork.

When he could, and thought he could get away with it – which was always in my childhood – Dad would shepherd these cunning, silent devil predators beneath our house and swiftly dispatch them in the shadowy forest of tall brick footings with a single blast from his side-by-side 12-gauge.

Boom! And sometimes Boom!-Boom! – in quick succession – if a cat dared tried to slink away.

I only once saw Dad come up from under the house, his shotgun snapped open and draped over one arm, a dark, dishevelled bag of devil fur, still dripping, draped over the other.

Our eyes locked in what I now understand to be mutual guilt.

- “They’re homeless and starving. It’s better this way.”
Because he was Dad, I agreed. Silently.

I never did discover what he did with these pellet-riddled carcasses. Dad never said, and I never asked. Nor did my brother John.

By the time I’d started high school, Dad had stopped his secret culling. But by then, he’d also stopped growing vegies.

1971 – Poetry

My friends Tony and Brian encouraged me – ‘dared’ could be closer to the mark – to submit some of my work to Poetry Australia. I was 16.

We were all shocked and surprised (and I was deeply honoured and thrilled) when, several months later, a copy of Issue No. 26 arrived in the mail. Inside, ennobled through print, were the two poems I’d submitted for publication. I treasured that small, soft-covered book for years, but somehow still managed to misplace it, possibly while living in Tasmania as a junior journalist.

But in those final years at home, Brian, Paul and other friends would gather with me on our front verandah and read each other’s work to each other. We thought we were good poets. I loved Brian’s work, and there was no disputing my young abilities . . .

However, I was never published as a poet again . . .

Was War Like

A lonely patch of battlefield soil,
Trickling wet
In early morning light.
Snow flakes falling
Criss-Cross
Into a dead hand
Clutching nothing.
Bitter wind moaning high above through pine trees.
All around
A deep human silence.

1970 – Lost Art

I loved writing letters. And the older I got, the longer, more intimate, descriptive and sharing they’d become.

I wrote to young people my age everywhere, almost daily, trying my best to explain a life. Putting into context what I had no way of knowing was western civilisation’s tipping point for a new millennium.

And I loved receiving letters. From distant ‘pals in India, England, Finland, New Zealand and the Americas, and from friends here in Australia. Wispy-thin blue Airmail letters. Bulging white envelopes holding upwards of a dozen pages. All in different hands. All with different, exotic stamps and post marks. All with strangely different smelling paper. Nearly all upwards of a week old before I’d rake them from our Collins Street letterbox.

I’d keep those I received, reading some until the pages fell apart - literally. Sometimes they’d contain photos, snaps of life in far-distant places I imagined I might, one day, visit. Like London, New York, Montreal, Paignton, Auckland, Helsinki.

I loved the pleasure of feeling pens moving between my fingers, over different types of paper. Light touches. Heavy touches. Fast-flowing writing. Slower, methodical impressions. Often pausing to collect thoughts, or determine more precise descriptions, thoughts, dreams. Or stopping for a minute – or an hour – until the just oh-so-right phrases came to pass.

I loved the smells of different papers, and of different inks.

Letters were different. Simpler. Much quieter and introspective. An ages-old communication, helping me commit, forever, in a slowly developing longhand style.

Letters to and from my boarding-school Jenny were particularly treasured, as they kept our relationship’s embers alive enough for them to explode again, in person, when she’d come home for holidays.

I continued writing at university, and didn’t use a mechanical device – the first being a portable Olivetti typewriter – until 1978, when I entered journalism. I’d move into an electronic world in the early 80s, and onto a much more truncated, filleted email world a decade later.

It’s now more than 30 years since I’ve written, or posted, a personal letter, having now truncated such communications to a few quick pars, perhaps only a few quick words, flicked through the ether at light speed via the clacking of keys.

Not once, though, had I ever thought of myself as a Man Of Letters.

Friends

I can count the number of friends from my school days on less than two hands. But they were good friends.

I can still see them all – Paul, Tony ‘Clarkie’ Clarke, Tony Allan, Michael Carr, then later, in high school, John ‘Heppy’ Hepworth, Brian O’Malley and Jim Pettingel.

My earliest memory fragment of friendship has me walking arm-in-arm with Michael, around our asphalt covered primary school playground, discussing all things vital to 7- and 8-year olds.

Michael left our ranks in high school, courtesy of his parents shockingly separating and divorcing (no other parents I knew had done this yet), and his leaving the district. But his place was quickly filled by Jim, an exasperating tear-away with wiry black hair from Unanderra, south of Wollongong, Heppy, who’d moved up onto the coast from a small, dusty country town not far from Yass, and Bob Spiers from Austinmer. Heppy’s dad had been a one-school-room teacher reassigned to work in the much larger Illawarra.

I spent many early high school Saturday afternoons at Clarkie’s place in Bellambi, where we’d explore the rough bushland between the end of Rothery Road and the sand dunes flanking the ocean about half a mile to the east. Or we’d melt lead in his backyard to make crude fishing sinkers. I’m not sure why, as neither of us liked fishing.

Later in high school, with my first push bike, I’d increasingly spend time with Heppy and Paul who lived quite close to one another in Russell Vale, to the north of Bellambi Lane. Brian, my first real friend in early poetry and writing become increasingly influential. Bob and I explored the wilds of the Austinmer escarpment together.

Some of my most treasured memories, are of Paul, his brother Jerry and myself hunkering down in his parents’ tiny sunroom, working our way through one pile or another of amazing vinyl albums. We’d discuss the music, the styles, the amazing lyrics, believing we were rolling headlong into a world without bounds. And we’d make and share pots of steaming tea with Mrs Reilly, who’d delightedly hover in the wings of her nearby kitchen, savouring our enthusiasm for life.

Jim and I also shared another experience; we both had braces fitted to our teeth, and removed, at the same time. Jim said he was determined to stick with me, so together we could deflect any classroom teasing – which never happened.

And all my friends knew and liked Jennifer, and appreciated us together.

My friendships were fine balancing acts, with no two individuals alike. But I found each rewarding and stimulating and easy as we collectively stumbled wonderfully towards adulthood.
All bar my friendship with Paul, however, have succumbed to the life pressures we’ve all individually faced, and the directions, States and countries our lives have eventually taken us in and to.

But those years between 1967 and 1972 were great. Uncomplicated times of vinyl records, transistor radios, leisurely bike rides along near-country roads that still had years to go before becoming busy, and lazy times spent at the beach. And we all thrilled to our collective, rising excitement as small cogs in the seemingly unstoppable Woodstock Generation machine.

As fashion and mores and music and literature radically changed and buffeted us, we were keenly aware of society changing all around us, rubbing us smoother –for a better future.

Some years later, after I’d graduated from university, I bumped into Jim on Wollongong University campus. He was as manic as ever, and drinking fairly heavily. Not too many months later, Mum called to tell me he and his girl friend had died together in a house fire somewhere south of Wollongong. She thought they’d fallen asleep smoking.

The other lives took paths as different as we’d been as individuals. Tony and I went on journalism – he eventually into radio, me always in print. Heppy’s an architect. Clarkie lives with his family in a small town in Northern New South Wales. Brian spent years as an English Bobby before returning to a life as a Federal public servant. Bob took over his dad’s engineering business in Fairy Meadow. And Paul’s now a nursing sister, caring for the elderly in their own homes.

Michael, a lawyer, somehow managed to wangle a slot in the diplomatic corp., spending several heady years in exotic cities like Vienna. He’s now an Eastern Suburbs art dealer.

My wife, Faye, puts it so clearly . . . She says life’s a train journey. People get on and off at each stop along the way. Some stay only a stop or two. Others ride longer with you before getting off, or changing trains. And some souls enrich your life exceedingly by riding with you all the way to the end of the line.

Even if I could, I would not have changed a thing.

1970 - Jennifer

Jennifer, my first real girlfriend, was lovely. Not petite like so many other girls, she stood tall, her long brown hair pulled carefully back off her face and around the side of her large, friendly face. With a hint of freckles, large blue eyes and delicious teeth, her coy, almost self-conscious smile seriously entered my life when I was 16.

Jenny’s skin was delicate; she could never be accused of being a weekend bikini-brigade girl. And I liked her hips, her bum, her legs and her breasts – although it took me more than a year to bring myself to touch them, feeling their soft, feminine warmth between my young, ignorant fingers.

And I particularly liked her calm voice. Not quite the tone of a woman, but no longer that of a young girl. Always smooth and mellow. And because she liked me too, she touched me well and comfortably.

We’d known each other for years, through a shared primary school experience, but I’d only ever liked her peripherally, from an unemotional distance. Now I liked her immensely, close up and personal. Jenny, her brother, Peter, and her mum and dad lived in a solid, but unassuming rendered brick and tile-roofed house in Tarrawanna, a short bike ride down the highway, and across a small footbridge over Angel Creek on the southern side of Corrimal.

Initially, we’d see each other at school dances and other social events, and increasingly I’d invite Jen to dinner at our home, especially during the holidays of our final high school years. By then, she’d left Holy Cross College which butted up against our boys’ school, and was ensconced in a serious Sydney boarding school. And while our languid afternoon hand-holding train trips home at the end of each school day had ended, we were entering a new, mysterious, erotic world together. We wrote to each other constantly.

She was great company, Jenny, and a great kisser too. I recall as though only yesterday the first time she allowed me to touch her breasts as our lingering kissing wafted skyward on delicious evening pleasure wings. By then I was 17, and still very much the anxious, awkward virgin. She was too. Yet despite this crystal clear memory fragment, I can’t recall our first kiss; it must have been so natural as to have been expected by both of us, and those around us.

We’d also meet up in Wollongong, while she was working at the city’s largest department store during the summer holidays, and she’d always smile coyly and excitedly when I walked up to the counter she was serving on. And we’d go to parties together.

We got better and more practised at exploring each other, slowly, methodically, more comfortably. And we enjoyed the experience immensely. I’d particularly delight in holding Jenny’s hands and kissing her in the back of our car, as Dad drove us back to her place after dinner. I’m not sure what Dad thought. Nor did I care. We never discussed these erotic sojourns.

I just needed as much of Jen and her delicious, young-woman fragrance as I could have at the time.

I’m still not sure what happened in the end. Perhaps it was the almost two years of forced school-year separation. Perhaps it was the sheer weight of fresh university experiences when I, too, moved to Sydney in 1973. Perhaps our relationship just ran its course and, short of taking the next full-blown Great Leap Forward, had nowhere to go.

But for whatever reason – and to Mum’s unspoken relief – I wasn’t quite ready for sex, and I’m not sure Jenny was either.

We just moved on to the next phases of our increasingly complicated lives, farewelling forever the clear-cut, simpler days of lives in Corrimal.

Communion Stones

I recall my First Communion not for my supposed closer embrace of my Catholic God, but for being dressed down severely by the Principal of Corrimal Public School. I was heading off to a chilly early-morning preparatory class, just before 7am.

Cutting through the school’s grounds, to cross the highway to our church, I’d found some stones close to the back of one of the tall brick classroom blocks. I’d taken aim at pigeons foraging on a patch of playground lawn, adjacent to the headmaster’s back fence, and had managed to throw only two large stones before this secular authority figure exploded out his back door, screaming for me to stop. And in shock, I dropped my remaining stones and slunk away to practise at being a good Catholic.

Later that same day, one of our senior nuns called me in front of my class and gave a non-secular dressing down for the same offense.

As I hadn’t aimed at anything other than much flightier birds, I felt my acute embarrassment rising again. I realised that while, on one hand, I should have been better behaved, on the other I’d been far from criminal in intent.

I thought then I could never really trust non-Catholics to keep their silence. For several years, I felt it boiled down to nothing more than religious jealousy.

1965 - Stones & Bottles

Another day soon after, with my top-lip scab still doing its reparative work, I was back on the same lunar landscape of dozens of evenly spaced and high piles of clean fill, my brother, John, and Hartmut in tow.

We were too busy smashing the bottles we’d discovered between several hillocks to see the police car roar up the dirt track and slide to a dusty stop immediately behind us. A firm blue man-mountain of a policeman leapt out, strode up and matter-of-factly demanded names, addresses and other blurred details.

Stunned, we obliged, our policeman admonishing us for making such a dangerous ‘playground’ even more dangerous because of the jagged shards of beer-bottle glass we’d produced.

Later that same afternoon, a sharp series of authoritative raps on our front door produced the same policeman who, in front of my shocked but bemused Dad, proceeded to recount our offense, and warn us in no uncertain terms never to do it again for fear of being charged.

When he’d left and Dad closed the door gently behind him, smiled briefly, but never said a word.

I never smashed another bottle in a public place.

1965 – Stones At Play

I saw the sharp, jagged shape of grey stone gliding slowly through the air, before connecting, mercilessly, with my top lip. For some inexplicable reason, I knew it was going to strike, but froze in the moment.

I felt the sharp stab as that stone stopped dead in its flight, followed by the warmth of blood trickling over my front teeth. Shaking my head, as much to loosen pain tears from my shocked eyes as in stunned disbelief of what had just happened, I could see Hartmut running over the last pile of dump-truck spoils to get to me. To say he was So Sorry, while simultaneously stifling that familiar boyhood glee at having hit his mark.

I knew then we shouldn’t have done it. In a split second I came so close to losing an eye or several teeth. This stone was large enough to bruise my entire upper lip. And adding insult to injury, this was the result of play rather than anger between males.

I used the waistline of my T-shirt to stem the steady flow of blood, and when I got home, Mum inspected the neatly cut skin flap. She calmly said I’d live.

Hartmut, whose German parents owned and ran the small corner store on the corner of Collins and Roberts Streets, and I had been exploring the proposed building up and levelling of clean fill for yet another playing field t Ziems Park. And we’d been engaged in the thoughtless play of throwing stones at one another for less than several minutes.

1963 – The Dog

I’d pressed the button to cross the highway crossing to our school gate, and was waiting for the lights to change.

I saw the elderly black and white spaniel, its black ears dragging through the footpath grass, following its nose to the edge of the road where I stood. Then, without looking up, it stepped between the wheels of a slow-moving cement truck lumbering through only a foot or two in front of me.

The truck’s back wheels rolled up and over the dog’s body, but didn’t stop. Even though it banged heavily back onto the roadway. I’m not sure the driver would have seen him, or could have stopped even if he had.

The dog twitched once, then died where it lay, without a single sound. Traffic following the truck respectfully swerved to avoid hitting the body further.

I quickly crossed when the lights changed, horrified, and told a nun on playground duty.

By lunchtime, the dog had disappeared.

But I had nightmares on and off for years, and never again crossed those lights without thinking of the dog, and how slender the gap between living and death, and how quickly, convincingly and irrevocably it could be breached.