7000 DAYS

1970 - Love On The Afternoon Train

2008-10-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

I’m not certain when I became Jennifer’s first boyfriend. Or she became my first girlfriend. But our delicious afternoon meetings, beneath the trees midway along Bellambi platform, followed by dreamy hand-holding all the way over the hill south to Corrimal was recognised, understood and accepted by our peers.

I cherished those innocent days throughout my third and fourth high school years of 1969 and 1970. The couplings had clunked and ground in unison as the ancient wooden passenger cars groaned behind the diesels’ distinctive exhaust beat. We held hands and stared into each others’ eyes, equally astonished by feelings we shared for each other – well ahead of experiencing anything like it for those life’s loves to come.

I still see myself, wishing against the clock, wanting the train to go even more slowly than its crawling reality, wanting to stay holding Jen’s hand as long as possible. Wanting to capture her sweet smell for as long as possible. Wanting to watch Jen’s excited, blushing smile for as long as possible. Delighting in her bottle green school uniform, white blouse and sheer tan nylon stockings – the ones that always accentuated her wonderful knees.

When Jen left for boarding school at the end of Year 10, I happily took to my push bike for the ride to and from Bellambi. There was no need for the circuitous train trips, my ride taking no more than 15 minutes each way.

Jen and I stayed a pair until the end of our school days, but never again shared innocent hand-holding on afternoon trains.

1965 - Strange David

2008-10-22T18:32:00.000-07:00

David was oddly strange, always vaguely standing outside our classroom group. Not quite fitting in somehow, in ways none of us could pin down or explain.

Thick set and dark haired, he had strange habits. Like picking his nose with his thumb nail and showing us the contents. And farting to matching, gleeful giggles. And sticking his tongue out, firmly clenched between his teeth, when concentrating on small things. Which he often did.
I noticed, too, that while his nails were strong and perfect – I chewed mine to their stumps – they were always grubby, carrying beneath them the collected baggage and behaviour of something near wild.

David was the only boy I ever knew who could deftly catch flies and tie lengths of cotton around their bodies, then tie the other ends to the end of his wooden ruler. Those flies would often circle, only six inches off his desktop, for hours on end. And if they had enough strength, they’d occasionally lift the end of the ruler off the surface, causing it to flap up and down, much to David’s glee and sense of peculiar achievement. Mind you, boys in the class, including me, were always highly amused and in awe of his skills.

His sense of humour was oddly strange too. He always had a joke, often gleaned from older, more vulgar brothers, and laughed at the drop of a hat. I guess you could describe him as genuinely easy going. Seemingly nearly always happy.

But our primary school nuns were watching from the wings, carefully, sure somehow that he was nearly always up to no good, and nearly always willing to corrupt those more innocent around him.

The final straw came one afternoon, when behind the school’s huge cast iron incinerator, itself tucked carefully into a back corner of the school yard edging Cox’s Lane he decided it was time to show off his bum. And for more than 20 minutes, he’d pull his pants down, expose his bum, and gently rub it’s pinkness for anyone willing to look. And all the while, his tongue sticking out, clenched between his teeth, trying to stifle a most satisfied laugh. Or laughing along oddly with any of us who found this funny.

Word of his exploit spread like wildfire. And I remember being shocked, staring at him doubled over, bum as high in the air as he could get it, his face turned almost over his back to ensure the show was delivering according to expectations, that tongue clenched firmer than ever, and hand motions in order. I’d always been too afraid to use the school’s toilets, frightened other boys might hear me farting. I’d never dream of exposing my lower body, let alone for collective amusement.

As the throng grew larger, none of us noticed the nun wading through, arms flailing to get at David and his exposed bum. And when she reached him, his smile was climactic. “What an achievement!” I read in his sparkling eyes.

David didn’t come to school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, David never came back to our school. Nor did he go to our Catholic boys’ high school in Bellambi, despite living just across the street from it. A story soon quietly seeped through our primary class that David was somehow a pervert-in-the-making, and he’d fortunately been nipped in the bud. Just in the nick of time.

I saw him a number of times in subsequent years, in his green Woonona High School uniform (which reminded me, oddly, of the contents of his much younger nose). Although he seemed content, I never knew if he continued his schoolyard exploits. Nor did I ever see him smile again.

1968 – Real Death

2008-10-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

Five years later, early in my second high school year, the ancient two-car diesel railmotor train rocked and rolled through Corrimal station right on the knocker at 8am on its regular high-speed morning dash from Thirroul into Wollongong. As it roared alongside the weathered fence edging the brick railway worker’s cottage immediately north of the Railway Street level crossing, the railmotor kicked up a huge, ominous dark dust cloud, swirling with sheets of paper. I saw it clearly from the platform on which I stood, another 100 yards further south, but didn’t comprehend.

Moments later, after the two-car train had screamed through Corrimal at better than 110km/hr, terrified kids in tears pelted onto the platform, racing straight into the station master’s office without knocking.

This was the first I realised Alice DeMartin had been struck, and that same sensation of untimely horror swept through and emptied me. Mary, and the dog, flashed across my eyes. Nothing as final as death was supposed to happen to us this early stage. Alice, my age, attended the girls’ high school adjacent to our boys’ school.

I still see the ashen-faced station master and two teenage platform assistants dashing along the platform and bobbing north across and between the lines to where a group of people were milling near the level crossing’s eastern boongate.

I had known Alice since kindergarten. We went to the same Catholic primary school, high on Corrimal hill.

Alice, with Italian parents and a younger brother, had always been quiet. I can’t remember ever saying more than three or four words to her the whole time I knew her. High School Alice always walked alongside the railway line to the level crossing, her back to Wollongong-bound trains. Why she wasn’t aware of the speeding railmotor, I’ll never know.

Like almost all other mornings, it was on deadly time this fateful day. It had scooped Alice up from behind, and carried her forward at lightning speed before thrusting her headlong into a steel post by the level crossing. She would have been terrified for a second or two before, in a blink of an eye, being catapulted to somewhere infinitely calm, surrounded by angels.

As our school train slowly laboured past the scene, someone in the milling crowd had thankfully covered Alice’s tiny body with a tartan car blanket. Looking down from my carriage window, full of horror dread, I also saw her smashed school case lying close by, along with one of her empty brown shoes.

Apart from almost being struck myself by an extremely quiet and lethal steam locomotive gliding through a freight yard many, many years later, I have never seen another rail accident at close quarters.

1963 – Near Death

2008-10-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

As much as they have excited me from the earliest age, trains and railways could be deadly with little or no emotional notice. Like the time we were walking along the platform at Otford railway station, on the far southern end of the Royal National Park, south of Sydney.

We were only kids, and my sister, Mary, would have been lucky to have been five. The surrounding sub-tropical rainforest of this part of the Park smelt damp and richly rotting, of aging timbers sinking back into their landscape, constantly washed by repeated rains. The bush birds called incessantly to each other across the narrow valley in which the station is jammed, and the brilliant spring morning sunshine struggled to break through between the trees and branches towering over the station.

But the smell and sounds came to an abrupt end as my young sister, Mary, somehow slipped off the edge of the platform. One second she was with us, walking and chatting as part of our family along the eastern platform. Next second, she was sprawled between the tracks. One second more and she was on her feet, looking up at us, hands reaching upwards in begging grasps. The look on her terrified little face said it all without a word. I have realised down through the years that I was terrified, instantly, of losing her, knowing the expected southbound train would be here at any second.

Dad leapt over the edge, and in a single, swinging motion, lifted Mary up to us and safety. Then, with a deft side hop and a push, he was up alongside us all – just as that south-bound, Wollongong train steamed around the bend to the north and rolled purposefully, almost regally, into the station area, gliding around the curved platform. The gap between fall and train rolling over the same spot wasn’t more than 30 seconds, but it felt like an entire slow-moving, shuddering, freezing afternoon.

It still does when it comes to mind, which, interestingly, it often does. Ironically, Mary is now near 50, and the C32 Class steam loco only survived another few years before falling to the scrapper’s torch.

The House My Dad Grew Up In

2008-10-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

Nana’s and Grandfather’s Campbell Street, Wollongong, house, while nothing fancy in its weatherboard siding and corrugated iron roofing, became precious down through the years simply because it didn’t change.

The bathroom/laundry was still out back, attached to the rear, along with a flush toilet at the very end of the building. This had been installed when the sewer was first run into Wollongong, and like everything else, was original. To use any of these facilities, you’d step out the slapping back screen door, and walk up the side of an ancient concrete courtyard. Dad said it originally contained a well for drinking water, which explained why it’s concrete surface had drooped towards its centre.

Even the external colour scheme reflected an age long gone, and before nostalgia restored it to popularity. Light mustard-tan coloured weatherboards, pure white window frames and Indian Red roof.

Inside, all walls and ceilings were delicately, yet starkly, lined in pine match-board, with ceilings white and walls a deliciously dark cream colour. With no further covering, these walls had no way of obscuring accumulating soul.

All pine-board floors, including that in the main drawing room that was set up with a formal table setting we never used, were covered in ancient, dark and shining linoleum – complete with intricate Deco patterns – which added to the aging aroma. The centerpiece of this long dark-timber dining table was a green-grey ceramic bower birds' nest with several small ceramic eggs securely positioned deep inside. One of my visiting rituals was to peer inside, and run my tiny fingers over these small, smooth, cold eggs, while the small pair of frozen green birds watched down eternally from atop their nest.

My Dad’s old room, off this formal room, contained yet more treasures from another era. Several Boys’ Own annuals from the 1920s and very early 1930s, and an oval tin filled with Dad’s childhood marbles. I’d pour over the crude line drawings of these musty books, while marveling at the beauty of some of the marbles, already well past being found among crude Japanese marbles sold by the bag-full by our local newsagent.

I found it curious that Nana and Grandfather maintained separate bedrooms on both sides of the front door. Both had large, austere iron double beds. Nana’s room had a large metal trunk set under its bay window, and I always assumed it brimmed with Nana Treasures. Her mirror-mounted chest of drawers set in one corner always had brushes, combs and other womanly objects neatly arranged on crisp linen doilies.

Grandfather’s room on the opposite side of the hallway contained only his bed, a single wardrobe and small chest of wooden drawers. Yet unlike Nana’s, which always had its shades drawn to induce gloom, Grandfather’s spartan room was light-filled, even delicate. Today, Grandfather’s taste could be described as delightfully minimalist, bordering on monastic. Something you’d expect to find in Japanese serentity. Perhaps he couldn’t shake his military past.

Grandfather always kept two sheep grazing in the yards around the house, and once a year would have a man come by and shear them. He’d give them lumps of rock salt to lick, and they’d reward with the best looking buffalo grass lawns I’ve ever seen. He’d rake their droppings in to fertilise everything.

Five generations of Heininger men, including me and my son (also named Joe) have called that house home through the years. First there was Grandfather and his dad. Then my Dad.

My sister, Mary, her husband, Horst, and their son, Paul, now live in it, and while its basic shape remains intact, it’s overshadowed by blocks of home units on two sides and behind.

PostScrpit And More Poetry

2008-10-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

Life after Hilary, after university, after finding initial full-time work, was a manic, erratic blur of sex, dope, dead-end jobs, adventures and determined hopes. Then I pushed my way into my first newspaper job, in Launceston, Tasmania.

However, seven years later, having spent that time as a reporting journalist and sub-editor, working my way across Australia, up through the grades, on various rounds and on various quality newspapers, I thought I’d had enough. Well, certainly for then.

Already millions of words past university, I needed a break. I was burnt on all sides, as well as top and bottom. So I vented my frustrations and exhaustion in the only way I knew. In words . . .

Brace yourself!

******

There Was Still More Poetry

I continued reflection on school days, and on trains, the things that had sparked me from the outset . . .

School Boys

From one generation
to the next
they're grubby cuffs,
loose shirt tails
and stone-cut shoe leather toes.
Scraping and scrapping along,
pushing and shoving
- 14 or 15 years or so -
in unison
with mouldy oranges
in dark recesses.

School boys
never change.

******************

Standing on one of Sydney's busy far western, multi-platform suburban railway stations, in the midst of a dry summer setting sun almost 30 years ago, just after carefree university, caused me think momentarily of how Columbus - arguably the world's greatest dead-reckoning navigator - and his crews battled their way through sunsets and superstitions - towards their New World . . .

Devils, Dragons & Trains Rolling West

We form three crews
in this
reddening anywhere railway place
near the world's western edge.

Our platforms blister and paints flake as
dust swirls in dry-heat dancing.

Ochre teeth scuttle
up and by
crackling, cackling, cracking
at the west,
uncaring of long-past Columbus passions,
coercion
and dead reckoning.

And boisterous trains slide by,
between our standing crews,
one
after the other
after the other
after the other
with blank souls they’ll inject again,
out there. Further west.

We feel no green-blue salt spray or swell.
No cool water-logged, rolling timber decks.
No mission for a malevolent god.

Yet rust-red trainsroll on, relentless.
Roaring headless towards setting sun blood.
Towards dragons,
devils
and lost salvation
our lust-filled ancestors dreaded.

1973 - Problem With Roots

2008-10-22T17:52:00.000-07:00

By the end of 1972, the year I finished high school, I had a major-league problem with my home city of Wollongong.

In bitterness struggling to break out, I wrote: Wollongong's nothing more than a three-shift steel-mill town, a sad string of soulless suburbs, staggering down the coastline in search of a city.

Where haute cuisine is an Hawaiian pizza on a Friday night - and you can find it after the bars shut, and it isn't cold . . .

It's always still cold in the morning . . .

1971 – Braces accident

2008-10-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t seen the blue car stopped dead in Rothery Road, heading west into a low-slung sun.

Perhaps it was the sun playing tricks. Perhaps it was practised familiarity. But head down, peddling down the slight incline from the Rothery Road rail bridge, the first I knew of that car, waiting to turn right into its driveway, was me sailing gracefully through the air – a split second after my old bike hit its chrome rear bumper.

I marvelled, momentarily - as my bike’s front fork buckled - then sailed, seemingly timeless, before my face slammed into the car’s roof. The braces on my teeth drove deep into the soft, warm flesh of my mouth. Numbness and blood mixed as I rolled off hard into the sharp gravel beside the car.

I blacked out, but not before wondering in horror how much damage I’d done to my mouth, and those expensive, unpleasant braces, due to come off in less than a month.

The equally shocked middle-aged driver somehow managed to find out who I was and where I lived, me equally shocked at fumbling with my own home phone number. Where I went to school wasn’t in dispute, despite blood and saliva that had splashed down the front of my white shirt and over my loose blue tie.

The man left his car standing in the middle of the street and lifted and walked me to the back of his house where his wife gave me water and a place to sit inside their dark, cool back room. Their cat meowed loudly, and their caged birds shrieked their own welcome.

I’m not sure how long it took Dad to turn up to load me, still dazed, and my battered bike for the short drive home.

I stayed away from school for several days, unable to move my raw, smashed mouth around those unforgiving braces and wiring, but relieved I hadn’t damaged anything.

And when those braces came off at their allotted time, my mouth felt utterly empty. My gleaming teeth seemed assembled tightly in a cavernous, breezy cathedral. And while they were beautiful, I was left with those stubbornly healing scars. Like two strands of fleshy barded-wire welts, one inside my top lip, the other inside the lower lip. What’s more, I was to find they’d never disappear.

I replaced my bike’s bent fork the following week with a different coloured one, and resumed my riding to and from school. The different-coloured fork and my healing scars were badges of honour, and a constant reminder to stay vigilant.

Several years later, at university, I’d find myself pondering issues while rolling my tongue gently across those welts. Slowly, from one side to the other, then back again. First the top scar, then its lower running mate.

1969 - Ilario lost

2008-10-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

The grey surf had welded itself to the grey of a sullen late-summer sky, on an afternoon when the ocean’s horizon seemed less than a ship length offshore. Those boiling, eccentric waves should have been enough of a warning. Yet after a solid hour’s work-out on Bellambi beach, towards the close of classes, we were hot, and the water cold. Besides, we were invincible and 15.

School was less than 300 yards away, and we’d only be in those waves for minutes. Plenty of time to get back. Get changed. Get on our bikes and trains. Get home.

The sandbank was deceptively soft underfoot; calm despite snapping, snarling frothing salt water thrashing in at us at all angles. Before any of us could comprehend, the entire class was rushing forward, fast into deeper water. Into instant dark terror. We were being pulled by a savage force that suddenly showed no mercy.

The harder I swam against the force, the more it wanted me. The more it wanted my classmates. The more it was determined to have us all. The Devil Is Making Me Do It, it seemed to scream. Panic swelling inside. The taste of salt water climbed my throat, scoured the back of my nose. Sand scraped my chest, my back, tore at my hair. I swam like life depended on finding energy I didn’t believe I could muster.

Then we were clear enough, several of us, to struggle against the tugging. Sea down below our hips, then below our knees, then below our ankles, freeing us enough to collapse, face first, into the cold lumpy sand. Then more of us struggled to the sand, face first, panting our panic away.

Just as the light grey rain started falling.

Father Lionel Dean was running desperately back and forth, counting all his charges, realising in his agony that one was missing.

Ilario Ceroni had never been a strong athlete. We never thought of him ever being a strong swimmer. He’d always been quiet.

It must have been an hour of us waiting in hope, watching Father Dean thrashing through that killing surf, before we realised Ilario wasn’t coming back. Wasn’t getting changed. Wasn’t riding his bike or the train. Wasn’t going home. By then other teachers were at the beach. Then police arrived, and the tragedy slammed into us all as volunteers pushed the surf club’s boat out through the raging swell.

When I finally got home, I found it impossible to find words to tell Mum what had happened. I was filled with a grief I’d never felt before, one all the sharper because it could have been any one of us. It could have been me. Unlike other, impersonal tragedies, I had a front row seat.

I simply could not imagine the fathomless grief his parents felt that night. They, nor any of us, ever saw Ilario again. He’d left home, gone to school, then gone to sea. Forever.

1972 - More Gun Play

2008-01-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:30:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:18:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:17:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T22:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Secluded mystery

2007-11-14T03:08:00.000-08:00

Mrs Mascord’s flaking once-painted-white brick house next door was always a secluded childhood mystery.

Brooding and heavy on its unkempt block, a seeming maze of overgrown, crumbling greenhouses and sheds out the back, it begged for exploration.

Thick, shiny vines smothered the dank walkway sheltering its back door. The main delinquent greenhouse was always humid and richly rotting, with countless plants jostling madly in whispering chaos, seeming to hold its fragile glass sheets aloft.

I always knew when Mr Mascord, a brooding, grey, thickset man, was working to assemble the evening’s firewood. His humming bench saw, set in the darkest recess of the adjoining garage, would screech as each fresh lump was reduced to manageable lengths. And the tang of freshly wounded wood and swirling sawdust would waft out the open tilt-lift door, up and over the weathered paling fence marking our boundary.

I’m not sure when it dawned on me that Mr Mascord was no more an addition to his household than the gleaming cream Rover car he’d ferry Mrs Mascord around in. A ‘Poor Man’s Roll Royce’ Dad always called it; a way of hinting at having money without overstepping one's mark.

Mrs Mascord controlled her inherited fortune, being a younger sister of Edwin Street, the Corrimal store keeper who’d created a far bigger fortune from Streets Icecream, and the factory he’d built to produce it on the corner of the Princes Highway and Tarrawanna Road. It was Wollongong’s first building with a blinking neon sign – a huge polar bear licking a cone.

Mum and Dad had bought our house from the Mascords. And when we could least afford it, in our early, thin financial days, Dad suspected Mr Mascord of relieving us of a bag of cement resting under our back awning. They never forgot how 'miserable' they thought he was.

But Mrs Mascord was a round, happy woman, always smiling behind her glasses. She – unlike her stone-faced husband – liked us kids.

She’d always conjure up some ‘surprise’. Sometimes from her gloomy kitchen. Sometimes from even darker recesses. Once, inside her home, I was aware of its fallen glory, of windows that always seemed drawn and of that vague, sweet smell of aging newspaper print.

I remember her giving me a small rag doll one day, and clinging to it until Dad came home and took it off me.

Later, after Mr Mascord had died, and Mrs Mascord sank further into the dark folds of her flaking fortress, my brother John and I would crawl through a broken window pane of her back shed and explore its rusting, dust-covered marvels stacked inside on sagging, mummified shelves. Or push our way around the tight, choking confines of the steamy, crumbling greenhouse.

I’m not sure how Dad negotiated use of Mrs Mascord’s detached garage, long after her Rover disappeared. But in short order, he’d fashioned a crude gate into the fence, immediately behind the tilt door, giving us access to the space we then used to house our first car.

But Dad never touched the bench holding Mr Mascord’s electric circular firewood saw. Years later, it and Mr Mascord’s final small pile of sawn timber still sat there, slowly succumbing to the same weight of dust burying everything next door.

At some point, Mrs Mascord disappeared to a small retirement unit in Corrimal, continued exploring the wider world with a series of personally funded travelling companions, and appeared briefly in a WIN TV regional support ad.

Then she, too, died.

Terror incognito

2007-09-25T04:45:00.000-07:00

Nuns taught me in primary school. Shapeless, clear-skinned, plainsong women whose pinched lips and crystal-clear eyes protruded beyond starched white face frames. Their heavy brown, ground-scraping habits sublimated anything hinting of personality.

Cattle-whip rosaries hung long, menacing and heavy and brooding from black buckled belts marking where waists should be. And severe black shoe-boots clipped along the ground and school floors.

All seemed stamped – some short, some tall, some slimmer than others – from the same Australian Josephite mould. And all with borrowed saintly names designed to resolutely close doors on any sense of the individual.

I realised early that nuns were orderded in Orders.

Even their smell was ordered. Sensible common soap and regulation toothpaste. With never a hint of fragrance.

Yet despite this regimented sameness, one stood out in brutal solitude. My fifth grade teacher, Sister Theopholis. Like so many before who’d made life-shattering mistakes, this one was determined to shatter all in her path, especially young, impressionable flesh.

Theopholis radiated perfected terror as her omnipresent identity.

Canes, long, flat wooden rulers, backs of hands, and a vicious, barbed tongue were her weapons of choice, often wielded in unison. With piercing liquid-blue eyes, she’d dart effortlessly into the lonliest recesses of young souls with practised precision . . . and start cutting.

Theopholis' world was pure Dark Ages discipline of-the-line. Of forcing us to learn slabs of irrelevant social studies text on equally irrelevant, long-dead souls I struggled to imagine clearly, or arcane mental arithmetic, or obtuse lists of spelling words.

And every morning, she’d parade slowly up and down between us, standing motionless next to our desks, drinking in every fear pheromone our 40 or so young bodies could exude.

There were group recitals, at the front of the classroom, of learnt-by-heart poetry and other works for no more seeming reason than to allow fear to hover just above our heads, beating time like evil black wings.

Even today, more than 40 years on, in another century, I can still taste the fear. And see Theopholis enjoying every second of her handiwork. Barking her staccato questions, pounding on booming desk lids. Flailing into stammering children who stumbled – no matter how briefly – in her withering line of fire.

Her favoured method was division. Culling the weaker from the pack. Then administering measured pain and humiliation with seasoned alacrity.

How any of us maintained a liking for school and learning after Theopholis remains one of my life’s enduring mysteries. And I’m still not convinced she’s dead.

I sense her still, drifting somewhere silently, precisely, wickedly between heaven and hell . . . even though 1965 seems so long ago . . .

One dark, warm Christmas morning

2007-05-17T01:20:00.001-07:00

Christmas was always warm and gentle in the Heininger household. Not just because Christmas falls at the height of the Australian summer, but because . . . well . . . it was a time when peace and tranquility always descended on our Collins Street home.

Mum and Dad never fought through the short Christmas break. They deftly called whatever unspoken truce was necessary in any personal, ongoing trench skirmishes they happened to be involved in during our early childhood.

Christmas was for sharing, for laughing, for feeling summer’s heat, for rich baked dinners at Nana Lizzie’s and Grandfather Ted’s Campbell Street home. And for recognising – for better or worse – we were all OK together. When my brother, sister and I were very young, we may not have been swimming in luxury, but we constantly and smoothly swam in each other.

While almost all childhood Christmases are blurs, I remember one in particular – a year Mum and Dad must have been struggling financially behind our young backs.

It’s a fragmentary, yet calm, memory. So fragmentary, I can’t remember how old I was. All I can remember is that it was just before I started school.

The house was dark, so it must have been very early on an extremely excitable gift-giving morning. The walls of the living room towered over us all, and the room itself felt cool and spare, the carpet square failing to reach the edge of the unpolished hardwood floor. Our tiny stockings had been pinned to the mantelpiece above the Cozy coke heater – the one that came with the house, and would be replaced in the years ahead by a far more modern and functional chrome-covered wood-burning heater – set into the main wall.

Our stockings were small but bulging, only adding to our young excitement. There were so many small things inside. Tiny, intimate toys, many metal, and many of them wind-up. I remember silver paint . . . There were pencils and other small things designed to fit neatly into very small, trembling hands.

I can still see my tiny arms and hands protruding from my checkered dressing gown, and can feel it rubbing against my summer pajamas. Making me feel particularly secure. I’m aware of the cord fluting around the cuffs.

Mum said something about there not being many presents this year, but I'm aware of being delighted with the number and intricacy of the many small things. My brother and I had these treasures spread around our feet, and I can see us playing with one after the other after the other, and with each other.

I must have been excited, so unaware of adult matters that Mum and Dad so deftly maneuvered us around.

I'm not sure how long these tiny treasures lasted, but they obviously had no way of outliving the memory.

My Mum, Dulcie Irene

2007-03-06T22:42:00.001-08:00

My Mum, Dulcie, could only be described as a product of her times. Her name – and the fact she didn’t have a decent pair of shoes until she was almost five – was hard, and said it all.

The eldest of three children, she roamed NSW as a penniless Depression child, as her father, a laid-off government railways worker, desperately sought work. Those early years moulded her, and her marriage to my Father, Joe, set her hard.

Mum’s earliest shared memory is of her father walking with her from their down-at-heel rented home in Balmain to the official opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge. She was seven.

She’s never talked about the Depression much, or what it was like being a child in a struggling, poor, unemployed household, with hunger snapping constantly close by. I only ever saw her cry over it once, and that’s when I found out about her shoes. Her tears for grinding poverty were mixed with bitterness and long-remembered fears of Hitler, Tojo and other 30s and 40s maniacs who continued to rob her generation of any glimmer of innocent childhood and youth.

When her father finally found work, it was at the Port Kembla steelworks in the late 30s, and he’d trudge daily to and from their small weatherboard house in Banks Street, Wollongong to the mill some three miles further south. Mum says she remembers watching him walking past other unemployed men, leaning over their front gates and wishing him well. She says he found that the hardest part of the day.

Mum was a good student by the time she got to St Mary’s College, Wollongong. By then she’d somehow developed a wonderful smile that, looking back, belied any troubles she’d experienced. It also masked her fears of impending global war. Her parents eventually managed to put a deposit on their house, and all seemed well enough . . .

But no matter how gentle the smile, no matter how secure and settled life appeared to have become, hardness remained just under her skin. Like tungsten.

It surfaced, according to her younger brothers, Jimmy and Kevin, whenever she had to look after them as small children. It surfaced when her mother told her to steer clear of Dad until she’d been educated and had secure work of her own. It surfaced when her father died relatively suddenly, courtesy of his industrial accident at the same steelworks. And it continued surfacing all through my childhood, whenever she and Dad increasingly fought over whatever it was that parents battle over.

I loved my Mum beyond words when I was young. I always felt secure around her, especially when I’d feel the dread of my father returning from work on many an afternoon. I sensed her deep-buried softness.

I sense her smiling lovingly at me as a very young child while I crawled into one kitchen cupboard, squeezed through pots and pans, to emerge from behind another painted Masonite door several feet away. Mum often let me be whoever, and whatever, I wanted to be.

But I could also fear her rages. I’d often disappear as far from the house as I could while she screamed and ranted and cried at Dad, often for days on end about one or two subjects I could never comprehend as a child. I’d cower somewhere secure, praying to my tiny God for her to stop. For life to return to normal. To climb down off its infinitely high knife edge. And all the time, Dad simply remained stoically silent.

This ongoing series of parental battles – interspersed with genuine care for one another – reached fever-pitch towards my closing primary school years.

But Mum would also try and stand up for me, and for my brother and sister. Like the time Mrs Mascord next door gave me a small rag doll, which Dad took from me that very afternoon when he returned from work.

- “For God’s sake, Joe, it’s just a dolly . . . “
- “No bloody boy should play with dolls . . . Boys don’t play with dolls!”

I apparently loved that doll, but Dad took it anyway, and I never saw it again. Mum said I sobbed, but she couldn’t win the argument either.

She’d also fiercely come to my protection when Dad boxed me around the ears.

- “For God’s sake Joe, don’t ever hit the children around ht ears!”
- “Well if it was good enough for me with the Christian Brothers, I can’t see why it’s not good enough for my own . . .”
- “And what ever made the Christian Brothers right?!”

My first strong school memory of Mum was when she came to my school for a day's relief teaching. Lazlo Able and I were whispering to each other behind our shared, lifted desk lids, Mum seemingly miles away at the front of the classroom.

- “Won’t we get in trouble for talking?”
- “No . . . Mum won’t do anything . . .”

Bang! Our desk lids crashed down out of our hands, and both of us were dragged, by arms and shoulders, then pushed, to the front of the room. It happened so quickly, it took ages for embarrassment to seep in. Mum dressed Lazlo and I down in full view of everyone’s shocked sniggers, and I understood the tungsten. She meant business. And I can still feel her humiliating, stinging slap across the backs of my legs.

Later that day, at home, she told me quietly and firmly that the last thing she needed was for the rest of the class to feel as though her own boy was receiving anything but equal treatment at her hands.

Mum would work routinely, every school night, with us on our homework and other exercises, around our kitchen table. It always felt like an educational swing shift; Round II of an otherwise cramming day. But no matter how hard I tried, I was never much chop at mathematics, even quite early on.

One night, early in my primary days, Mum became so agitated over my inability to grasp a mathematical concept that she bellowed at me the way she'd bellow at Dad, and scooted me out the back door, to continue her loud throwing and clattering of kitchen utensils – her way of relieving frustration. I’d never felt so crushed, or so bereft of her support, something I’d taken for granted until then and carried with me like a comfort blanket. I so much wanted her to take me under her wing again, and softly explain what she meant. But she didn’t. I remember walking into the front yard and sobbing for ages, every now and then returning to the back of the house, pleading for her to help me. But she didn’t. I went to bed that night crying, not having been helped, and thinking my days of support at school had ended abruptly.

The next day was bright, cold cobalt blue sunshine, and Mum didn’t say she was sorry, or made up for the rejection. It was as if the previous evening had never been. She did, however, resume helping me. While I remember reading, spelling and other exercises using her home-made collection of word cards, I can’t ever recall her help again with maths.

As I grew up and Mum aged, she seemed to soften. She was gentler with us kids, but more matter-of-fact in her own burgeoning high-school teaching career. She even reached a point where arguments with Dad subsided. Most of the time she seemed happy enough with life – although her soft, gentle smile continued fading. By the time I’d been at university for a year, it seemed to have faded altogether.

My softer Mum somehow seemed resigned to life. Not long after that, she and Dad started globe-trotting, entering a new phase of learning about each other, and understanding more about the wider world . . .

Holidays, Uniforms & Trains

2007-02-28T20:11:00.000-08:00

I always associate childhood holidays with trains. And with memories of early morning excitement, on the day we'd depart for exotic destinations, coupled with spic-n-span school uniforms and shiny brown school shoes.

It seems odd looking back, but at the time - before I was 10 - I always saw wearing my school uniform, on a train going somewhere further than the extremes of the Illawarra District, on a holiday morning, as somewhat reverent.

Suit cases would be packed and ready the night before, standing to neat attention in the hallway near the front door. Dad would have called to order a cab to take us to the station, usually not long after dawn - or so it seemed. We’d all be up early, excited, having breakfast, while Mum disposed of last-minute perishable items from the bottom of our fridge. She’d then turn it off at the wall, leaving the door jammed open to stop mould from developing while we were away.

The finale was Dad neatly combing my hair, and that of my brother John, while Mum put sister Mary’s hair in pigtails. Usually as the cab beeped its horn outside. There’d be a mad scramble, as Mum checked she’d switched off other appliances and pulled electric cords from walls. This mad, excited scramble would continue until we were all safely seated on our train, catching our breath, heading north to Sydney.

Sydney was exotic enough a destination for kids without a family car. Yet we always knew holidays were to be had further afield, needing changes of trains at Central station. Another mad scramble from one platform to another, hauling cases and coats and travelling rugs as quickly as possible. The change to very different trains meant different lines, different stations along the way, different scenery beyond Sydney’s limits.

Summer weeks spent on Tuggerah Lake, near The Entrance, meant we’d leave Sydney in a quiet, all-steel, air-conditioned Express Train coupled behind a gleaming tuscan-red electric loco. Train refreshment crew staff in pale blue uniforms and white aprons would glide between us as we hurried smoothly along, heading towards Newcastle, offering delicacies such as vanilla icecream in tiny waxed-card buckets. I’d feel like a privileged prince with tasty treatures like these . . . But when our train arrived at Gosford, Dad would invariably disembark - and have us join him on the platform - in time to see the electric wheeled off, and a huge, well-maintained back C38 Pacific express steam loco pushed back into the traces for the next short stage of our dash north. While we’d only ever go as far as Wyong, the train would continue full throttle, behind steam, all the way to Newcastle, another 50 miles further ahead.

Wyong was the place to see all sorts of steam still operating along the Short North. I remember one afternoon seeing a double-headed freight lumber through while we were waiting for the cab to take us to the holiday resort. Heading south, back towards the Gosford change-over, two elderly Standard Goods wheezed their way through, squeezing gently down the side of the double locos' train of over-stacked, tarp-covered wagons. Steam, by now, had disappeared from the Illawarra, and had been replaced by 48 Class diesel locos that - from Day One - always seemed too under-powered for whatever task they were given.

Holidays to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, brought different scenery, and different trains - what we kids called Silver Trains - stainless steel multiple-unit electric trains introduced to the steep line with electrification in the late 1950s.

These trains were fast off the mark, always slick away from any station - even those on the steep mountain slopes heading almost due west towards Katoomba. And we rarely rode electrics, even in Sydney (where all electric services were handled by so-called Red Rattler suburban trains). Red Rattler passengers nonchalantly leaned out of every other wide vestibule door, nearly always pinned back while in screaming motion, using nothing more than deft balance and a firm grip on well hand-polished brass poles bolted floor to ceiling.

The Blue Mountains trains had no such vestibules. Once inside their sensible end-car doors, there was nothing to do but to occupy vacant green vinyl-covered seats. Occasionally, you might have to swing a seat from its old position to the travelling direction. But that was it; no further subtlety. Just stainless steel, effortless speed and vinyl-clad cleanliness. And I always equate this cleanliness and the gleaming fluted stainless steel sides of these train cars with Katoomba’s thin bracing, crisp air, smacking our young faces as we alighted at the end of Katooba Street. It was different from the thicker, balmy coastal air or Wollongong, especially in Autumn or Winter.
Yet no matter where we went for our annual two-week holiday, we kids would invariably head off in our neatest school uniforms. It didn’t affect us then, and never raised second looks from fellow passengers.

A wigwam for a goose's bridle

2007-02-20T21:57:00.000-08:00

I remember two phrases from my childhood. Both phrases from another generation. One a description. The other a destination. Both brimming with gentle mystery . . .

When I’d ask my Nana Lizzie what this was, or what that was, she’d answer sagely that ‘it’ was a ‘wigwam for a goose’s bridle’ I used to spend hours as a very young child contemplating what this contraption could possibly look like, or why you’d want to put a bridle on a goose in the first place. My only conclusion was that those fairies at the top end of my grandparents’ yard – the ones adults couldn’t see because of some collective loss of innocence or concern with other, more pressing matters – would somehow saddle up geese, and ride them solemnly around secret, distant places . . . Places I fervently believed these large birds loved congregating.

Then there were the geese from the pages of children’s stories . . . all white, gentle and never angry. And none of them wore bridles either.

My Grandfather Ted used another phrase.

“Where are you going Grandfather? What are you doing now?”
“Oh . . . I’m just going to see a man about a dog . . .”

I knew grandfather liked greyhounds. He had fading sepia-tone pictures of some, standing to attention, sideways (always looking left), draped in multiple racing sashes. And I knew his association with greyhound racing in Wollongong must have meant he’d meet and deal with other men his age. Other men from a fast-disappearing era. Men in serge trousers held firmly aloft by grey button-up braces starkly contrasting their clean, collarless white cotton shirts with rolled sleeves. Men in high laced black-leather boots with metal toe and heel clips that ‘clacked’ when they walked along hard surfaces. Men topped by weather- and time-worn grey Akubra dress hats finished in wide bands of black.

I’d often rummage through Grandfather’s side table drawers out in the back sunroom – among their mysterious treasures of small note books, short graphite pencils, newspaper clippings relating to this race or that game of rugby league, rubber bands, ancient marbles in excellent condition and dog clips – looking for any possible reference to this man or his dog. Grandfather would smile and laugh gently when I told him what I was doing, and what I was looking for . . . whenever he caught me hunting.

Somehow I remained satisfied with both explanations. I associated them only with two ancient people, living in their neat but Spartan Edwardian weatherboard house close to Wollongong Harbour. The one painted mustard tan, with white window frames and Indian red corrugated iron roof. The one that seemed swathed in summer with the tang of soft Pacific Ocean brine breezes.

These phrases belonged to them, mingling gently with the cooing native pigeons congregating in the trees behind their house.

My October to February at Australia Street

2007-01-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

My life changed on the evening of December 4, 1973, in the small, downstairs front living room of a student house in Australia Street, Camperdown.

I was 19.

I can pinpoint the event precisely because - unlike many others in my life, now blurred to soft, imprecise impression - I carefully recorded it in Indian ink in a small, erratic diary.

But even if I hadn’t, I can close my eyes and recall intricately my emotions, the shock of realising the enormity of what was happening, my reaction to smell, taste, touch, sound and the heat of that moment of completeness as though I experienced it all only five minutes ago.

Hilary was a slight wisp, a year older than me. A gal from Newcastle. A student too. Her wicked little smile seemed to knowingly curl the turned-up tip of her tiny nose even more when she let it run loose – which she did often. Her lips would reveal pegged but deliciously attractive small teeth.

Hilary oozed sex, and when she realised I’d noticed how she delightfully parted her legs while standing, thinking about anything from what to cook for dinner to what courses to enroll in next, she oozed even more blatantly. No matter who was watching. And especially the first time we met, in a very public place.

I’d been into Sydney city that morning, watching some street event I never bothered to record. It was a late September Sunday. Crisp, sharp, cloudless sky, and university about to start for final term in a few days. As I lept onto the back landing of the green and cream double-decker No 438 bus to Abbotsford, I immediately caught her eye and wicked wink-smile. I looked over my shoulder, believing she’d recognised someone she’d known for years. Then she turned away and made her way down the aisle in front of me, her cute bum bobbing under her public transport-green uniform skirt.

“Tickets, please! Tickets, please!”

She dispensed several tickets, left, then right, as the aging bus groaned and rolled slowly and rhythmically west up Parramatta Road, past the Footbridge Theatre, through the Forest Lodge cutting. Then, quick as a flash, her wicked smile was in front of me, with small, piercing, intelligent brown eyes looking me up and down, and wanting to know where I was going, and needing to sell me a ticket.

Hilary was a student conductor working out of an Eastern Suburbs government bus depot over holiday breaks, and this late morning she’d scored my City-to-Abbotsford run.

Our conversation was immediate and shockingly comfortable. As fresh passengers climbed on along the route, she’d float off to sell them tickets before returning to the words we’d left off. By the time we’d reached Haberfield, I knew her name, had her address and a contact number. She knew as much about me as I could impart on a broken, short-hand 40-minute trip.

Hil shared the narrow Australia Street terrace with Laurie, who loved golf and his battered yellow Mini that always seemed to be parked out front when I visited – which was as often as I could initially, when Hil wasn’t working, and later when we weren’t studying.

We’d kissed, touched and held hands on those visits. Until that December 4.

Hilary was always matter-of-fact. If she wanted something, and there was no objection, she'd easily take first, answering questions later. Laurie had gone off drinking with golfing buddies, and Hil and I were alone.

During our chat, she abruptly wanted a kiss. Then another. And another. And our conversation quickly drifted off into the still, thick, hot night air, carried on insect-punctuated pleasure wings. Hil was hot and her chest was blotched red with pleasure, her breathing exquisitely short and increasingly shallow.

Before I realised it, we had drifted into a sexual no-man’s land, a place of no return I had never entered before, but had fantasised about every time I’d indulged in the wonder of masturbation. But this was different. This was better. Oh . . . far better . . . Far more intense. Far more out of my control. At the same time, far more frightening.

Before I realised it, we were naked on the living room floor, our bodies joined at mouth and below. The heat, rolling pleasure through my body and brain, the realisation, for the first time, that I could never physically be any closer to another human being in a way the gods had designed so intimately was all simply too much.

I exploded deep inside Hilary all too quickly.

She was instantly disappointed, and I was instantly, deeply ashamed. Shortly after some more fumbled and awkward conversation, I was dressed and standing on the street outside, looking back at the front door now firmly closed.

I continued to see Hilary on campus, and soon dropped by her new apartment on the other side of the city. But we never again had sex. She had moved on, and expected me to, and became increasingly annoyed that I wasn’t doing it as fast as she.

Within two months, I had stopped seeing her altogether.

I never found out what Hil did with her life. But if I could ever wind the years back, and wipe out one intense regret, it would be that hot, still December night.

I wished I’d told Hilary I was a virgin. It may have made a difference.

From The Pictures, to transistors, to digital devices

2007-01-16T20:45:00.000-08:00

Corrimal had two cinemas – or picture theatres as we called them – before I went to school. The Strand, on Railway Street, next door to Corrimal Hotel, and the Roma in the hollow of the town centre, on Princes Highway.

Some of my earliest and vaguest memories, well before my first school year and long before we had television, was of going to the Strand with Mum and Dad for Saturday afternoon matinee sessions. We would take seats in the dress circle, above the ‘pits’. I remember cringing in fear when Indian war drums beat ominously during westerns, and my parents trying to sooth me, telling me it was only ‘the pictures’.

But I must have generally liked going to the pictures. One Saturday afternoon, I went alone. Mum and Dad had decided we wouldn’t go that day, apparently disappointing me. Momentarily.

Having vanished for several hours, my frantic parents received a call from the local policeman, who asked if they had a very young child. And if they did, the sergeant said he had me under lock and key – in his backyard, behind the police station, playing with his own kids. Seems I’d wandered along Collins Street, down to the end of Wilga Street, behind the football fields, across the small drainage creek dividing Corrimal, and up onto Railway Street. I was found on the steps of the Strand, wanting to be let in. It remained the only time I ever wandered away from home on my own.

I had several major ‘fights’ with Mum in the years after that day, and, furious, shrieked that I was leaving home. Good, Mum said, and she’d pack my small play case with a hanky and toothbrush. I sensed immediate loss and overwhelming dread, and only ever made it to the back of the shrubs in our front yard, where I hid. Mum said years later that she'd watch and smile . . .

First the Strand closed, before I was 10. Then, when I was in high school, the Roma closed. The Roma and the Vista cinema, in Woonona, remained the only two operating north of Wollongong for many years. Indifferent shopping centres now occupy the Roma and Strand spaces.

Although larger cinema chains have fought back nationwide to create overall cinema entertainment experiences, almost all independent cinemas have fallen prey to technology that eventually spawned so-called ‘home entertainment centres’. Faith Popcorn was oh-so right in her seminal Popcorn Report when she identified cocooning as a societal development that businesses would need to break through if they wished to survive into the 21st Century. Why go to crowded, expensive cinemas only to be mugged outside later when you can rent digitally mastered DVDs for a few bucks, and watch them in the comfort and security of your own home fortress?

And at home, you can drink, talk, go to the fridge, do recreational drugs, stop the action for pee breaks or sex or to pay for the home-delivered pizza, rewind if you miss anything . . . then do it all again if you think the movies are worth it. As soon as broadband internet connections are fast enough, we’ll all be squirting movies and other entertainments down the line, in real time, for even less money.

We’re already downloading music, and mobile phone subscribers in our major cities are doing it with music clips and TV over their teeny handsets. So sayonara video rental stores . . . and cinema complex experiences will need to be even richer, more erotic and far more complex.

In my own half century we've moved from a regimented, mass-entertainment world that had remained untouched almost another half a century before I was born. A world – even though rapidly fading by the early 1950s – in which my parents had regular seasons’ tickets to Saturday matinee sessions.

We shifted swiftly to a mechanical, transisterised world of six-inch and 12-inch vinyl records played by sharp needles, and black and white television. And I – along with countless millions of Baby Boomers around the world – bumped along for the ride.

Then even more swiftly, we shifted into a digital era driven by chips and stored on hard drives, and I was again on the front line. From a world of bulky valve-driven television sets that needed to dominate a corner of every living room, to full-colour memory stick devices you can slip into a top pocket, I’ve been there every inch of the way.

From crackly mono AM radio, to interference-free, crystal-clear stereo FM radio that brought music to true life. And while silicon came to rule the world by the closing years of the 20th Century, the transition seems to have been as smooth as pleasant dreaming. And as exciting as listening in to the birth of Australia’s first FM rock radio station, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Triple J, where Sykyhooks' You Only Want Me ‘Cause I’m Good In Bed catapulted us to another level technical sophistication.

Back in the mid 1960s, I could never have imagined ever owning anything as magical as a personal computer. Technology then was ordered and understandable. Despite world turmoil, things seemed calmer through regimentation, management and far less choice. Information was fed more measurably, slowly, wholesomely, through a limited number of controlled sources. Nothing much seemed to have changed since television arrived in the late 1950s, and didn’t seem as though it would change much more in my lifetime.

The excitement built rhythmically, systematically, and I loved its mesmerising effects.

In the 60s, TVs were almost always made in Australia, with valves, and housed in timber veneer cabinets astride tapered timber legs. You tuned them from behind with a screwdriver, and changed channels by twiddling the largest knob on the front. The one that clearly showed Channel numbers; 2, 7 and 9. The one above the On-Off knob. Clunk, clunk, clunk . . . The flat aerial cable disappeared into a small hole in the wall before climbing to the aerial itself, attached atop of its tall galvanised metal tube that hugged the side of seemingly every triple-fronted house in Christendom. Including ours eventually.

The Johnsons across the street had television before us, and I marveled at those early all-American cartoons. I remember, sitting crossed-legged the stipulated 6tft from the screen, on the Johnsons’ axminster carpet, glued to Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.

Television sets and their installation cost a king’s ramsom, and Dad funded our first by selling several 19th Century hand guns in their wooden cases. Ironically, the gunsmith who bought them was burgled within weeks, and both weapons disappeared forever. Equally ironically, our television set – as valuable then in dollar terms as those guns – was never the target of a home invasion.

While Mum and Dad strictly regulated TV viewing throughout our school years, they devised what we called our Friday or Saturday night TV Picnic Teas; we’d spread a blanket on the living room floor and proceed to picnic in the flickering B&W twilight, absorbing our favourite images.

We could watch cartoons in the afternoon until Dad arrived home, and we could sometimes – very occasionally – watch kids’ shows on Saturday mornings. Sydney’s naive children’s TVwas dominated by the likes of Clifford and Gus and TCN 9’s Desmond Tester operating on appallingly makeshift sets.

But we also absorbed the Vietnam War, the first major war ever beamed nightly into living rooms around the world with little propaganda panel-beating, that changed everything. Forever. Like the westerns at the Strand, I now had a box seat at every major Vietnam rice paddy battle.

Collective innocence quickly receding, we grappled with social shock after shock after shock after shock. Action horror war scenes nightly, direct from said South Vietnam. The Munich Olympics horror of Israeli athletes murdered by PLO terrorists in the prime of their lives. Then horror scenes of every major American city seemingly in flames every summer as race riots ripped at the very fabric of American culture.

No amount of sanitised Leave It To Beaver, Gomer Pyle, Car 54 Where Are You?, My Three Sons or Superman helped. Nor did the hours of canned laughter at American TV jokes I didn’t find funny.

And I can still feel the dark shadow of the Cold War and its attendant likely Nuclear Winter sending shivers down my back, despite television discreetly sidestepping, as often as necessary, that element of global reality. We all knew it was there, like death and taxes. But like death, we never discussed it too openly. And if we did, it was with the same hushed resentment our parents’ generation reserved for taxes.

Then, on the morning of July 21, 1969, on a fuzzy television set at my high school at Bellambi, I watched American astronauts Neil Armstrong, then Buzz Aldrin, taking mankind’s first steps on a planet other than our own Earth. Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was instantly and forever lasered into the back of my brain. Those who saw that instant of human touch-down know what I mean. Those who have followed since can only imagine the enormity of those first few seconds. Forget the televised bombing of Baghdad in the war against Saddam Hussein . . . Nothing – and I mean nothing – beat watching that first space boot stepping into the Moon’s super-fine dust for real Shock and Awe.

Radio was equally understandable back in the 1960s. My first transistor radio, made by National of Japan, featured the eight transistors required to make it youth-coveted in 1968. About the same time I was given a small mono cassette tape recorder that allowed me to (poorly, I might add) record songs from the radio. I bought very few expensive pre-recorded commercial tapes.

I played my first vinyl record – a six-inch disc of Scarborough Fair, by Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 – on my parents’ sturdy, portable HMV mono record player in the same year, just as radicalized university students started manning the Paris barricades and demanding an end to society as they know and loathed it. Two years later, long after the Paris barricades had been dismantled and the students ‘re-educated’, I started buying 12-inch albums, starting with King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King. The IBM PC, itself featuring countless transistors’ worth of processing power, was still another 14 years away.

When it came to music, these were also simplified years of limited technological choice. As the western world tore itself asunder under the influences of youthful rock music, an American-based political revolution spawned by an ever-growing, never-ending Vietnam War, and a snowballing social and sexual revolution spawned by The Pill, we had mono or stereo, and you could only select transmitted music from a small number of AM radio stations. You carried your AM ‘tranny’ to the beach protectively wrapped in a towel, and listened through a single, crackly ear phone. I carried my small radio everywhere, and treasured it because I knew my parents paid another king’s ransom for it. Tape recorders were either reel-to-reel (for audio aficionados with deep, deep pockets and a deeper understanding and appreciation of stereo recording) or cassette (like mine), with increasing numbers of ever-improving model ranges rolling out of Japan’s burgeoning electronics factories.

My other choice for catching music was my parents’ older HMV Bakelite radio, set up at one end of our dining room at the back of the house, on top of my mother’s venerable treadle Singer sewing machine. I set up an elaborate copper-wire aerial, attached to the back of the radio, passed through the window behind, and ran it along the length of the trellis running between the back of the house and the backyard shed. At night – usually on Friday and Saturday nights – I’d sit alone in the darkened kitchen, my ear pressed against the radio’s bassy speaker, scanning distant strengthening and weakening airwaves, monitoring exotic play lists of rural radio stations hundreds of miles away. FM transmission, capable of being pushed through the air in stereo, was another technology I could barely imagine.

I’d take notes, and compare play lists with my good friend, Paul Reilly, who always seemed to know every song, especially those recorded by Black American artists on the Stax and Tamla Motown labels. Paul also introduced me to Spooky, by Denis Yost and the Classics IV, and I’d hear its haunting riffs occasionally over the next few years, as I scanned the night skies, especially those perfectly still, crystal-clear winter skies ideally created for AM radio waves. Spooky’s brief sax solo remains a personal favourite almost 40 years later. It never worried me that Yost is white. His sax sounds amazingly Black.

I came to believe Australian country radio stations played some songs I liked and rarely heard on the major Sydney stations, 2SM, 2UW or 2UE. I also got a strangely soothing kick out of listening to late-night ad patter referring to businesses with telephone numbers on streets I’d never visited. Some kids listened to 2UE, but it was never a favourite of mine; I preferred 2SM, with arguably the strangest radio personality – Mad Mel, with his Mahatma Duck sidekick. No one knew what Mad Mel looked like; he always covered his face in public with a scarf. “Mad Mel is everywhere . . . Mad Mel is everywhere . . . “ went the station refrain. John Laws, one of Sydney’s leading disc jockey, generated a far larger army of loyal listeners, as did UW’s Ward ‘Pally’ Austen, who also generated scandal by dressing as a Confederate officer, complete with Remington revolvers, and marrying a sweetheart about half his age.

Our local Wollongong station, 2WL just never cut it – even late at night, when other regional stations came out of their shells. Like those youth who divided themselves into either the Ford or Holden car camps, kids close to Sydney would divide themselves into SM, UW or UE camps. And I would scan the night skies for musical exotica, and excitedly call Paul to discuss these discoveries.

But no stations played the album music I preferred to buy. To hear this, I’d travel into Wollongong, and venture to the lower end of Crown Street to Wilson’s record bar, opposite the old War Memorial. There I would select albums from the Progressive Rock bins and ask to hear selections of tracks. Music for me quickly became a mysterious divining art. An art of personal discovery. I would listen intently in the small ‘sound-proofed’ booths lined with perforated Masonite board. I discovered King Crimson this way. I discovered Santana this way. And I discovered Led Zeppelin this way. I was always attracted by 12-inch album covers, which today seem huge compared with today’s more restrained CD counterparts. I clearly recall the day, in the winter of 1970, that I clapped eyes on the cover of Led Zep I. I was enthralled by the reversed image of the zeppelin coming down in flames while still attached to its mooring tower. I had the locally venerated assistant, the one who seemed to know everything about every record in stock, spin a few tracks. I was hooked for life. “Yeah . . . a really great album, mate,” the assistant said as he deftly slipped the 12-inch black vinyl platter into its crisp black and white cover for me. “It’s just a pity they’ll never amount to much more than this record . . . This band isn’t getting the airplay it needs to survive . . .” With these words still in my ear, I stepped back out into the crisp Wollongong air. I figured the album would become all the more precious because of its likely rarity in years to come.

Other music I learnt from friends’ collections, and from steady visits to Wilson’s Record Bar. Hendrix, Crosby Stills Nash and Neil Young, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Pacific Gas and Electric, Chicago Transit Authority, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown . . . The revolution continued well into the 1970s, well into my university days. However, by the time I was grooving to Brazilian saxophonist Gato Barbieri, and Paul and I were sharing a humble backstreet house in inner Sydney’s Leichhardt, I was still doing so to vinyl platters spinning on crude stereo players.

The IBM PC was still 10 years away, and CDs were somewhere else again . . . .

7000 days – Essays On One Man’s Short Life

2007-01-16T20:38:00.000-08:00

When measured in days, a human life seems poorly short. If you live 75 years, you’ll breathe – and possibly be conscious – for only 27,375 days.

In this time you’ll learn to walk, talk, love, hope, regret, pine and wonder. You’ll be educated, meet the loves of your life, possibly have a family, and educate them. You’ll mould a career (maybe several), perhaps travel the world, make wonderful discoveries or create truly wondrous art. Some human monsters have been known to dispatch millions of their fellow humans in far less than 27,000 days . . .

But whatever you do, whatever you achieve, or whatever you fail to finish, rest assured you’re here for a painfully short time.

While I have already lived more than 19,000 days, I have decided to concentrate on my first 7000. And no matter how ordinary, bring them – along with the stories told to me during those days and the family history I believe helped deliver me to where I stand today – to some position of importance in the scheme of things.

Many autobiographies are by important people. Mine’s not. Many are chronological series of dried and starchy facts, figures and events. Mine’s not. Many try to tell a complete story. Mine doesn’t.

Instead, mine’s simply a series of recollections, starting with my birth and ending shortly after I lost my virginity, aged 19 . . . A series of short essays more designed to create a life quilt, o to add colour where appropriate or remembered . . .

Our first car

2006-12-20T18:44:00.000-08:00

My parents bought our first family car when I was nine. I clearly remember Dad parking it for the first time, early one evening, in front of our house. An imported 1951 Dodge Kingsway Custom, ‘Betsy’ was already 13 years old when her former owner, a Wollongong bookmaker, parted with her close to my ninth birthday. We were stunned . . . She was ours. A private thing that separated us forever from the grips of mandatory public transport. A marvel of privacy in an Australia already well down the path of embracing private family transport.

Betsy was an unabashed American. Big, all heavy steel with tanned leather bench seats. Her chrome hubcaps sported a single discreet word in equally discreet, yet confident red capital letters: DODGE. And her heavy, chrome bumper bars snarled menace rather than hinting discreet safety. Her age was underlined by a divided windscreen, steel sun visor and no seatbelts. There she stood, quietly and regally outside 71 Collins Street, Corrimal, light years away from the huge Dodge-Chrysler-DeSoto plant that spewed her out as a confident, heavy-weight statement of America’s mass-produced post-War industrial superiority.

Betsy sported a slow-beat Detroit-made six-cylinder side-valve engine that ran on Standard petrol, and guaranteed to deliver no better economy than 20 miles per gallon. But who cared about size or economy? Filling Betsy cost no more than $2-3 in these optimistic growth years, when petrol’s seeming endlessness was boldly underscored by rock-bottom prices. And Dad always had the pump attendant throw in a squirt of upper-cylinder lubricant. Betsy was green – in colour only.

Our first concession to Catholic safety on the roads was my parents’ insistence on having Betsy blessed by our parish priest, Monsignor Downey. And I can still see him circling the car in the school playground, dressed in red and white vestments, praying over this 1 ½ tons of American steel, and liberally splashing holy water across her expansive bonnet. Our second concession to Catholic safety was a St Christopher medallion my parents attached to Betsy’s dashboard. St Christopher, designated global patron saint of travelers, forever marked Betsy apart as being a transport testimonial to Catholicism.

But for all this effort, Mum only ever tolerated this car. Betsy was heavy without power steering, and wallowed from side to side around corners. She had all the handling manners of a mechanised whale, bred for a life on broad, sweeping expanses of North American freeway. A three-speed column-shift manual, with little if any synchro on first gear, Betsy was an unforgiving woman you always needed to handle with care in tight conditions and traffic. Mum would have liked a smaller car. Maybe a much lighter, Australian-made Holden. But she had no choice. The Dodge was Dad’s decision.

Yet Mum would cart us all over Wollongong in Betsy, and we’d all head off to beaches on summer weekends or picnic spots year-round. Betsy gave us unprecedented independence. We could leave for the beach when we wanted, and return when we wanted, stopping anywhere along the way we wanted. We could drive any number of different ways, too. The regimentation of public transport timetables and routes suddenly no longer applied to the ebb and flow of Heininger family life.

Dad reached an agreement with Mrs Mascord next door for us to borrow her attached garage, and cut a small gate in the adjoining timber fence. The driveway between our properties was steep and narrow, with the garage on the same steep angle. Maneuvering this heavy car up and down the drive, and parking her with just enough room to get out one side of the garage, and to close the tilt-garage door behind her was an artform in itself. Yet neither Mum nor Dad – and much later me – ever managed to scrape a side mirror, or dint a panel in the process.

Betsy really distinguished herself when it came to family holidays. Mum and Dad would still pack our suitcases the night before departure, and in the morning, usually just about dawn, they’d pack the boot, and sometimes (especially when we kids were very young) put a case on each side of the tailshaft tunnel. We’d also load in spare blankets to keep our small bodies warm (especially in winter) and pillows to make our leather-bound rear space even softer, and seemingly more luxurious. As we’d head off into the dawn, Mum and Dad would get us all involved in prayers for a safe trip. And while we never had an accident, we were almost always sure to meet mechanical trouble along the way.

On one trip to Melbourne, the rings on one piston blew just as we crossed the border into Victoria. The only way we could proceed was for the local road service mechanic to disable that cylinder and its running mate, so we could motor on four cylinders. This we did – at a leisurely 35mph – for the next 150 miles into Melbourne, where Betsy was repaired for the return trip to Wollongong.

Betsy also lost her brakes at least once. While turning into Sydney’s Broadway, off City Road, early one Saturday afternoon, Dad sternly announced he had no brakes, and had to rely, in the heavy bumper-to-bumper traffic, on Betsy’s handbrake. Again, a road service mechanic discovered the problem was a minute hole in one of the front wheel brake hoses, which he repaired by jamming a round plug of lead into the hose to isolate the hole. While this ensured no more brake fluid spurted out under pressure, it meant no braking on that wheel. Coming down Bulli Pass, one of the steepest mountain passes in Australia, later that day was an exercise in driving skill, courage and prayers all round. Dad held Betsy in first gear, dabbing gingerly and occasionally on the brakes, all the way down the mountain as we all fervently recited the Rosary repeatedly.

As she came to the end of her life, Betsy was prone to thirst on longer trips in hot weather, a fault overcome by wrapping asbestos lagging around the fuel line, between the pump and carburetor.

Betsy was part of our family for more than eight years – long enough for me to get my license. And while I passed my driving test in a Volkswagen Beetle, I was allowed to drive the Dodge when I needed to, but usually only during daylight hours. My first major solo drive, less than two days after passing my test, was out along the Coast Road to Coalcliff to visit a friend, Graham Everrett. Steering Betsy alone around the sea cliffs that late spring afternoon was exhilarating, and I knew then that I’d always love negotiating issues of the moment while driving solo. I quickly mastered the tight driveway, up and down between our fence and Mrs Mascord’s house, and the equally tight, steep garage.

And all the while, that small, plated St Christopher medallion, attached to its soft, green vinyl base, in turn attached to Betsy’s dashboard, never moved. While we were never involved in an accident, in hindsight we never had any right to attribute our good fortune to St Christopher’s protection on the road. Some years later, under a more recent Pope, he was quietly relegated from the Saintly roll, as the Church determined he’d never really existed.

Various seasons for feeling the passing of time

2006-12-06T19:56:00.000-08:00

Seasons – and my reaction to them – have always been marked. Heat, the smell of the beach, rain, summer storms, biting cold and stronger mountain winter winds are as clear today when I close my eyes as they were before I turned 11.

Each affected me differently. Some wrapped me securely against the world. Others exposed me without hesitation. And at least one – while emotionally secure – lead to acute embarrassment among my peers. As a child, I found the various seasons and weather conditions elicited radically different emotional responses, most positive . . .

Summer

Summer nearly always meant weekend bus rides to one of our favourite family beaches. Austinmer to the north, and North Beach, Wollongong, to the south (the latter because it was only a short child’s walk from Nana and Grandfather Heininger’s house in Campbell Street). Sometimes we’d only walk as far as the Continental Baths near North Beach . . . We’d cart our swimming gear, towels and Eskies on and off the Hills and Dion buses early in the morning, and keep growing enthusiasm in check until we reached our destination. I never knew it for years, but Mum would have preferred the convenience of our own car. Most other families had their own cars by the early 1960s, but Dad said he could not see the need. To him they were an expense we’d be better off without. Mum, on the other hand, always thought in terms of convenience. Public transport also dictated regimentation. We went where the buses - and trains - went, when they went.

Buses in summer always seemed to have sand on their floors. There was always this faint tang of dried kelp weed, and we kids would enjoy opening the sliding bus windows right up to feel the breezes feather out faces. Salt air mixed with a hint of diesel fumes spelt 'beach days'. We usually wore rubber flip-flops on these trips, and I enjoyed slipping them off and rubbing my bare soles softly across the tarred floor, rolling the balls of my feet accross the minute particles of rolling gold sand. As we traveled closer to, say, Austinmer, as the bus slowly laboured up Kennedy Hill between Thirroul and Austinmer Beach, I’d become acutely aware of the balmy salt aroma I always associated with a lazy beach day. The kelp aroma would hover more sharply in my nostrils as we drifted down the other side of the same hill, towards the beach.

The ritual was nearly always the same. We’d clamber off on the corner of Lawrence Hargrave Drive and Moore Street, and watch the orange or blue bus (depending on the line) slowly trundle up Moore, cutting a swathe through the thick honeysuckle and frangipani-scented late morning air roaring with cicadas and beach summer insects, to where it would terminate outside Austinmer railway station. We’d then scuttle across Hargrave, towels draped around necks, and hanging onto carry bags, swimming mats and the Esky, and find a comfortable all-day position on the grassed section above Austinmer Beach. One that gave us a panoramic view of the entire beach, the small headland at its northern end, and the two ocean baths carved from the living rock and sculpted from rough industrial concrete at its southern end. Mum and Dad would spread the beach blanket, pinning it with the Esky, towels and anything else at hand. And we kids would strip down to swimmers like lightning, and dash to the pools. If the tide was high and the swell strong – which it often seemed to be in my childhood – we’d experience the added bonus of standing at the rear wall of the longer pool, to be swamped by waves rolling across its shell encrusted and weed covered bulk. These waves, if high and strong enough, would surge relentlessly the entire length of the pool, and empty out over the low back wall. The floors of these pools, covered with sand, were always soft underfoot. And pushing through the water forced my toes through this sand in sensual surges.

If I wasn’t careful on these hot, cicada-droning days, I’d burn to a crisp. Many kids turned nut brown in Summer. I burned sore and red. I often wore a hat above a sticky zinc nose, but it never stopped my freckles growing larger and joining together in a summer sun-induced mass as December rolled into January, rolled into early February. And as the days seemed to drag longer . . .

After lunch, and obligatory 20-minute wait for food to settle, my brother, sister and I would scarper down to the sand, and smash into cool summer waves between the red and yellow bathing flags. Then we’d scarper just as quickly out after some unspecified period, to flop in the hot sand and feel the sun caress our salty backs and matted hair. Sand would cake to arms, calves, hands and toes. The only way to rid ourselves was to dive yet again into the chilled waves.

Yet no matter how hard we tried to wash the sand off our lower legs, enough of the golden grains and the microscopic bits of coal dust that exist on all Illawarra beaches would stick to the back of our legs and drift to the floor of the bus on our return to Corrimal. Our sand would combine with that of dozens of other kids traveling to and from the various beaches along the coast each summer, and would remain in place unil the last depot brooming, just before winter, removed the final grains.

Sometimes our beach trips were cut short by the appearance over the steep escarpment of huge, brilliantly white and fluffy storm clouds. I soon realised that if we spotted these Cumulus monsters surging over the mountain at, say, 3pm, we’d feel the full force of a brief summer storm within two hours.

Sometimes we’d arrive back in Collins Street with barely 30 minutes to spare. We’d open all doors and most windows in the house to allow as much of the stifling, still heat as possible to escape, then wait for the Southerly Buster to roar through. As windows and doors slammed and bashed shut throughout the house in protest to its arrival, the temperature would plummet, leaving me enveloped in the day’s thick, residual heat. The clouds would roll overhead, glooming out the sunlight. Summer thunder would roll across what was left of the afternoon. And more often than not, rain drops the size of bread-and-butter plates would slam onto our corrugated steel roof, and sizzle on the hot paths around the house. The smell of quenching summer lawns and concrete garden paths was overwhelming.

And if my sunburn lingered into the evening, the heat rising as the day cooled, Mum would liberally apply brown vinegar across by back, and shoulders, and across the top of the back of my legs. It always worked, and I would always drop into a deep, well-earned summer night’s sleep. It this was on a Saturday, we’d often back up the following day to repeat the process – often at the other end of the coast.

When Mum and Dad finally did get their first car, we ventured slightly further afield. Another favourite swimming spot became Port Kembla baths, because it had two diving boards, off which we’d delight in spending an afternoon springing into the deep, clean sea water pumped up from the beach below.

And while we traveled as far afield as Shellharbour and Kiama on the odd occasion, Austinmer remained a perennial favourite.

Rain

I’ve always enjoyed the cocooning of rainy days, despite Mum consistently embarrassing me on wet primary school day mornings. She’d insist we kids walk to school bare-footed, socks and school shoes wrapped neatly in a small towels deep in our Globite school bags.

I always felt poor when not wearing shoes to school - despite hardly ever wearing them around home in spring and summer. And I always felt naked when I arrived at school, in the steamy classrioom, and rushed to wipe my feet dry and get those socks and shoes on my feet before anyone noticed, wise cracked or laughed. But no one ever did . . . Looking back more than 40 years, I now marvel at Mum's practicality. I always had warm dry feet, while almost all my school mates almost always had wet feet, socks and shoes most of those wet days. And they’d also be cold in winter. And I can remember the cloying smell of damp shoe leather in my 1st Class demountable room, jammed hard up against the Nuns’ house.

I still clearly conjure one late summer afternoon, in 3rd Class, during which the sky turned an eerie, iridescent mauve, brightened momentarily by bright lightning strikes slamming into the escarpment bushland to the west of our classroom, itself on the first floor of the then new wing of St Columbkille’s Catholic School, high on Corrimal hill. These strikes were punctuated by loud claps and not-so-loud rolls of accompanying thunder. I can still see the chickens in the neat hand-made backyard run on the opposite side of the gravel lane behind our school flapping about urgently with each clap. Looking for solace in their equally hand-made coops. Old car tyres kept the chicken wire covering these coops in place against storms such as these. And I can still see the slow-marching sheet of heavy rain making its way from Tarrawarra in the south west to be pelting against our aluminium-framed classroom hopper windows in a matter of seconds. The lightning flashing the prematurely gloomy afternoon to near mid-day clarity, while heavy rain relentlessly moved to close the gap back to darkness.

This afternoon, we were practicing Tarantella, a poem I'd later learn was written by Hilaire Belloc, who died in 1953, the year before I was born . . .

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading of the straw for a bedding.
And the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
. . . And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any
And the hammer at the doors and the Din
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing . . .

We believed we stood an excellent chance of winning the Illawarra Catholic schools’ eisteddfod in Wollongong in several weeks, and as the lightning ripped the sky open to let through blinding nanosecond super-white light, the thin hands and wrists of my equally slight classmate conductor Marion Jordan swayed, and marked time, and maintained tempo. As the rain drummed rhythmically against the windows. The classroom air was still warm and delightfully cosy against the world outside. I can still make out the blue veins in the frail backs of Marion Jordan's hands.

Within the hour, I was walking through this swirling world, bare foot, down Wilga Street towards home, through the same driving rain. Splashing through the dozens of tiny rivulets of rain run-off from the tar strip running down the middle of the street, warm under my head-to-toe rainwear as my bare feet splashed through the rutted sharp gravel of Wilga Street's shoulders. The thunder had rolled further up the coast, but I was thrilling to the sense of secure confinement beneath my raincoat, and considering with awe the colour of clouds and sky enveloping Brokers Nose on the escarpment above Tarrawanna. The air was still electric, with the loose hairs floating against the back of my neck. And I was looking forward to the cosy warmth of home once I arrived there.

Later that same year, on the early summer Saturday closest to my 9th birthday, it pelted down again. Mum and Dad had elected to stage a party for me at home, and while I was excited about the party, I was thrilled to see the rain. My one strong memory of the day was seeing my friend, Tony Allan, holding onto a large, wet present and onto his Mum, who was struggling to hold her umbrella above them both, labouring up our side path in the drenching mess of it all. Mum and Dad remained unflapped. With the rain pounding steadily on the iron of our back verandah, Dad had assembled our O Guage Hornby tinplate wind-up train set in anticipation of us kids wanting to play.

Today, there’s nothing more secure than the sound of rain drumming on a steel roof, as I’m curled with a book or magazine, not expected to be anywhere because of the prevailing conditions . . .

Winter

I almost always associated cold as a child with winter holidays at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Initially, we travelled there by train – stainless steel electric trains being another exotic adventure treat I’d only associate with the Blue Mountains, and the cold of winter.

In later years, when we owned a car and drove, the distance between home and the mountains shrank dramatically in my mind.

Mountain cold was different from coastal cold. It bit deeper, without humidity. It never seeped. Not like the bitterly liquid pre-dawn cold I once experienced on the banks of Mullet Creek, impatiently waiting for sluggish fish to grab Dad’s baited line . . .

Our Katoomba experiences alternated between weekly stays in rambling time-beaten guest houses with fading names like Craig-ee-Lee, and weekly stays in ubiquitous holiday lettings controlled by Katoomba’s all-pervading Soper Bros Real Estate company. Street names like Lurline, Katoomba, Lovel, Lilianfels and Echo Point Road underscored the ostensibly alien mountain experience. They were mountain names only, never seen or heard of down on the coast or west on the plains. These names were first cousins of things like Mountain Devils, a particularly large native shrub seed that looked like the Devil’s head when its ‘horns’ dried and split. You’d see these heads mounted on red pipe cleaners in shop windows the length and breadth of the Blue Mountains . . .

The Blue Mountains were ours; none of my friends ever seemed to holiday there, which made them ever more special.

Bare trees, cobalt blue skies and crisp air you could carve with blunt knives were all part of any Katoomba August in my childhood. Or a Leura August. Or a Blackheath August. If it rained, the drops were liquid ice against our faces and the backs of our hands. And our small finger tips were always pink and throbbing. But it rarely rained, and even more rarely snowed during any of our childhood holidays to the Blue Mountains. Sometimes it was thick cotton wool fog, so thick and mysterious every sound was muffled. Traffic would stop, birds would silence themselves, and I could swear I could hear fog dripping against cold hard surfaces. Crossing streets was potentially lethal – if drivers were mad enough to venture out into this wet wool. Only the cross mountain trains kept to their timetables, the bright headlamps of electric locos and trainsets reduced to a golden glow visible for perhaps 100m.

More usually, though, winter in the mountains was deep, deep cobalt blue skies, with pure white clouds punching juxtaposed holes in their eternal blue depths . . .

And if we strayed into September, there were equally bitter westerly winds that combed every spindly gum tree on every cliff ridge on every valley rim. First one way. Then another. Before returning to the prevailing bowing and scraping and jostling to the east. We found it hard to walk in the wind, often bending to regain balance against nature. The wind roar would climb steadily, then subside. Then climb steadily again, deeper and more terrible and tearing than before. The stringy trees would flagellate each other in concert.

Crisp Katoomba days – and even crisper nights – were ideal for steaming, battered potato scallops wrapped in white butcher’s paper. Or equally steaming rough-cut, shop-made fried potato chips wrapped in the same paper. We’d buy these always at the fish and chip café at the bottom of Katoomba Street, before rambling up one side of the steep main street of town, past the fast-fading Carrington Hotel (once a swish between-the-Wars and post-War haven for fun lovin’ between young people staring down the barrel of pre-birth control heterosexual commitment). We’d then cross at the top, sometimes in time to see lengthy electric-hauled freight trains gliding effortlessly in or out of Katoomba station, before descending the opposite side. Usually not stopping again until we reached our guest house or top-floor holiday flat. As our fingers burrowed into these wrappers, they’d burn against the salty, deep fried potato buried deep inside.

Other days, Mum and Dad would walk us in other directions, often past playgrounds with delightful equipment, on which my sister, brother and I would indulge ourselves for seeming hours, playing out fantasies and games until the equipment steel became too cold to bare against tiny exposed fingers. Mum and Dad would sit close to each other on a nearby bench, discussing secret parent things, occasionally laughing at something they were sharing.

In those days, I had absolutely no sense of vertigo either, which meant Mum and Dad could take us on wonderfully long adventure walks, soething we only ever did in the Blue Mountains. Several times we’d descend more than 1000m deep into Jameson Valley beneath Katoomba, clinging precariously to the narrow, steep track and seemingly endless staircase carved out of the living cliff on the Three Sisters’ eastern face. The one furthest from Echo Point Lookout, named after the young Queen Elizabeth when she stared over the edge, deep into the valley below, just before I was born. We’d descend in Indian file, clinging onto the perishing steel rope hand ‘rail’, eventually finding ourselves gathered on the valley floor, far below the towering tree crowns we’d just descended through. Then we’d hike west along the Federal Pass walking track to the foot of the so-called Scenic Railway. There’d be time to explore the century-old, barred-up coal mines further to the west of Bottom Station, along a fecund, fern-studded and dripping shale ledge, before clambering onto one of the two caged-in carriages for the near vertical haul to the valley rim.

My feet by now would be throbbing, and I’d have to apply all my strength pushing against the bar in front of me as the cars ascended. By the time we'd enter the tunnel near the top, it always felt that if I let go, I’d plunge vertically over the people ahead of me, only to be trapped from falling further by the cage wrapping the front, top and one side of the cars. I never once doubted the operators’ claim that Katoomba’s Scenic Railway was the world’s steepest railway.

I remember once asking Dad, as we were being hauled backwards up the increasingly steep valley wall, as Bottom Station and more people gathering on its timber platforms quickly receded into dot form far below us, if there’d ever been an accident on the Scenic Railway. He laughed and said no. But if there ever was, we’d have nothing to worry about. If the steel ropes winding us up and down ever broke, we’d always get our money back, he said. I laughed, but wondered why. It wasn't funny.

We’d also catch local buses to further scenic spots further from Katoomba – out to Govett’s Leap Lookout at Blackheath, overlooking the equally daunting and deep Grose Valley, to Wentworth Falls further to the east, and closer to the Leura Cascades. Sometimes we’d only picnic and return. Other times we’d take our picnic and descend and ascend equally harrowing pathways and weathered out steps cut into near vertical valley cliff walls.

And on the slow, bumpy return trip to Katoomba, we’d often be the only people on the bus.

My Dad, Joe

2006-11-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

My Dad, Joe, was an only child. He was born in 1925 in a small private hospital in Campbell Street, Wollongong, less than 600m up the road, and just across Corrimal Street, from where he grew up.

He was a sickly young child – no doubt a result of his father contracting malaria in the Jordan Valley during the Great War. Nana would take Dad on a steam train once a week for quite some months to see a specialist in Sydney, in a effort to make him better. Grandfather’s malaria apparently meant Dad was rare. It may have been the reason he was an only child. Or it may have been that Nana didn't really like sex. She and Grandfather slept in separate rooms.

But Dad got better. And grew. And when he was a strapping teenager-about-town, he met my Mum, Dulcie Irene, and wanted to step out with her.

Mum’s mum said no. She said Dad should make himself scarce until Mum was older, and had a career of her own – which he did. He regularly holidayed in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney with other hormone-driven young people, until he was allowed to marry Mum in the early 1950s. Grandma Georgina Bunt, Mum's mum, took no emotional prisoners.

I always remembered the father of my childhood being a forthright man. He didn’t drink, smoke or swear (at home, anyway, around us kids or Mum), but was quick to snap if temper got the better of him. To me as a child, he was a mountain of steely sinew and muscle, to be feared as much as respected. His growing up an only child also meant he had little understanding of a functioning family – although he became better at it as the years rolled by, and my sister, brother and I ceased to be young, helpless individuals. Mum would often sheet things home to his being an only child, with a hint that somehow it had been his fault.

I look at him now, a man in his early 80s, and I remember clearly how frightened I’d be of being disciplined by this man mountain. Now he’s frailer, greyer and not so seemingly tall. He's mellower, and weathered by the years. I look into his eyes, not up at them as I did back then. Like countless other kids of our generation, I well remember the phrase Mum used often: “Just wait until your father gets home . . ." Except that unlike many kids, I genuinely feared his inflicted corporal pain.

Dad didn’t just smack once, or just with his hand on a leg or hand or arm. He’d often hit with a belt. He’d hit to inflict pain. And he’d do it repeatedly. Even his open hand carried the weight, power and pain of a moulded piece of steel. Mum, while disagreeing with his prolonging of punishment, only ever openly complained if Dad struck us around the ears. Dad said that if it was good enough for the Christian Brothers when he was growing up, it should be good enough for him. Mum always bitterly disagreed. She didn't like Christian Brothers. I always imagined them as black, silent and sinister.

When Dad snapped his temper at work, workmates automatically ducked to avoid heavy flying, potentially lethal tools. This measure was apparently well understood by those who worked with Joe. If he snapped, you ducked, for safety's sake, behind the nearest piece of shielding machinery or wall.

I remember well a sense of dread that sometimes descended when I knew Dad would soon be home from work. It wasn't often, but it was enough to bite deep. I would be enjoying Mum's warm company when I'd feel this cold seeping all about me. My heart would brace itself as I heard his purposeful steps coming up the side path to the back of the house. Some afternoons, it would take some time to become used to having Dad at home. It was as though his residual loathing of his job had sullenly followed him from Port Kembla, slouching off the afternoon workers' train at Corrimal station, and shadowing him closely to our back door, nipping at his tired heels. I didn't realise it for years, but Mum also stiffened often when he stepped throughout our back screen door.

Another thing I clearly remember about Dad was his smell. He always smelt of copper when he got home from work. His work overalls and shirts always smelt of copper soaked in lubricants and of metal shavings well past their use-by dates. The smell oozed from him, and no doubt was a result of him working at Metal Manufactures as a maintenance fitter. His leather gladstone work bag also smelt strongly of grease and old oil. But a small frayed side pocket of this bag always held a packet of sweet Juicy Fruit chewing gum. As I'd lever out a tablet of gum, and start chewing, I was instantly aware of the other, sweet smell of my father.

I could be immensely proud and frightened and protected by this man, all through my primary school years.

Everything about my father was big and strong. His hands, his fingernails, his feet, his broad back, his face . . . His teeth were big and white too. But his understanding of young children wasn’t big. Looking back, I have the distinct impression of Mum often gathering us small children under her wing, like a mother duck, any time a Brooding Dad steamed into earshot.

My father was also good with his hands. He made his own cane fishing rods and fishing tackle, and made them better and more lovingly than anything you could buy. While he was steady with his own, though, he was impatient with our hands; he never really had time or patience to show my brother and I how to master the steel tools he’d made himself. It may have been the result of him hating his own hands-on job. It may have been the result of him being alone as a child. One of his workmates told me many years later that while Dad loathed his job, he was good and respected at it. If you wanted something done properly, you always asked Joe Heininger.

But Dad really loved growing things. Vegetables, flowers and shrubs, native ferns in bark-lined wire baskets. And he mowed our lawns and clipped their edges meticulously - always in shorts and singlets. The front yard flowerbeds and back yard veggie patches were his retreat from cold steel, copper and over-used workshop oil. They were always a picture when in full bloom. And when he’d finished cutting the summer grass, and he’d filled our old steel barrow – one with a steel wheel while everyone else in the neighbourhood had rubber wheels – with pungent piles of this steaming green material, he’d gently lift me up, and pop me on top. Then he’d purposefully stride to the nearby vacant block on the corner of Collins and Cross Streets where he’d dump the clippings. I’d hang onto the sides of the barrow, my bare toes curled around the front lip, listening to the front of the barrow scraping against the wheel, Listening to Dad whistling gently behind me.

I wasn’t frightened of him then, on these warm, slow-moving Saturday afternoons, when he was at peace with everything around him. Long before any of us knew about Zen, Dad had his growing things. The smell of freshly clipped grass still equates to peace for me.

Later, when we’d bought a car for the first time, when I was in late primary school, Mum would drive us out to the end of Darcy Road, Port Kembla. We'd hang off the wind-swept, flaking steel gates at the front of Metal Manufactures waiting for Dad to knock off. In those days, when tens of thousands of men worked in Port Kembla industry, and Five Islands Road was a three-shift-every-24-hours traffic jam, it was always hard initially to make his face out in the bobbing crowd of faces heading steadily up the works roadway towards the gate. These men would stream around the side of one of the corrugated industrial buildings half way along the roadway, like blue and white and brown lava, and it was usually only when the flow was less than 100m away from us that we could pick Dad out of the faces. He nearly always smiled broadly, and beamed ‘Hello!’ at us before we all slumped into our large American sedan Mum had parked on the rutted, sandy vacant lot opposite the gates. Dad would always smell of copper . . . And Mum would almost always drive home to Corrimal, through the stop-start traffic, Dad next to her, us kids spread across the large leather back seat. We'd all banter all the way back to Corrimal.

At the end of my last primary school year, as another summer rolled into eastern Australia again, Dad was mowing our front lawn on one of his rostered days off. When I got to the front gate, he stopped to ask how I’d gone at school that day. I told him I had six A passes for my final exams for the year. I felt invincibly happy. And Dad looked so proud and pleased, standing there in his rolled khaki shorts and white singlet, this huge smile splitting his face and perspiration wetting his chest. I told him I was ready for high school.

I’m not sure when Dad stopped punishing me, but I don’t remember anything much past that day, late in 1966.

My Mum's mother, Georgina

2006-11-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

Mum’s mother, Grandma Georgina Bunt, was a working woman. I never knew Mum’s father – he died when I was only a baby – and Grandma brought up my Mother, Dulcie Irene (the eldest) and her brothers, Jimmy and Kevin. From all reports – and from evidence of dismembered cars and other boys’ detritus at the rear of Grandma’s weatherboard house in Banks Street, South Wollongong – Jimmy and Kevin could sometimes be a tear-away handful. Mum also played a part in trying to rear them, as Grandma earned hard livings as a chef in various service clubs around the city.

Grandma Bunt's life had always been hard. After travelling the country with her husband during the Great Depression - settling briefly among the night-time razor gangs in gritty, down-trodden Balmain with my mother as a very young child before moving onto Wollongong - she had to cope with his death. Grandpa died slowly, painfully, having fallen into a deep, unlit manhole on the nightshift at the Steelworks.

I distinctly remember Grandma’s smart work uniforms and her sensible, black lace-up work shoes – the ones with the chunky War-Time heels and matronly rounded toes. I also remember walking through her various commercial kitchens, in tow behind Mum, with my brother, John, and sister, Mary, when we’d visit her at work.

The heat was always intense, and you could almost cut the thick, humid, oily air with a cleaver. The red ceramic tiled floors were always slippery, no doubt the result of endless renderings of one type of meat or another, or the always steaming bins of hearty soups or vegetables. Grandma always smelt of strong commercial cleaning agents and a kaleidoscope of pungent dishes. But she was always pleased to see us kids, smiling through her gleaming perspiration

Her workmates, also hardworking, hearty types, were always happy to see different faces in their kitchens, using these interludes as perfect excuses to duck out the back screen doors for a smoke . . .

Grandma had a good friend called Elva, who (along with her daughter) took me to Sydney one fine Saturday to ride the downtown trams and to go shopping. It must have been 1959, as all I can remember is hopping on and off unfamiliar Toast-Rack trams with two women loaded down with mysterious packages.

After she retired, Grandma sold her Evans Street weatherboard, and moved into a tiny Housing Commission studio flat in Warrawong, just over the hill from the Port Kembla steelworks. The things I most remember were the unit’s small size, and the fact that Grandma insisted on keeping tomato sauce in the fridge.

Grandma was always happy. I never saw her angry. However, when it came time for her to die, she did so quickly and relatively quietly. By then I was in my mid 20s. I was shocked to look into her squirming, fear-filled eyes as she lay those last few days in Bulli Hospital. Grandma knew she was dying, easing into oblivion, but could not put none of that knowing into words. She just squeezed my hand when I visited, knowing full well who I was.

Grandma’s funeral service was held in the frugal Warrawong Catholic Church, high on the hill overlooking the steelworks. We then laid her to rest deep in the headstone forest of Wollongong cemetery, not more than 500m from where she’d reared her kids. Mum sobbed gently as Grandma’s tired body was lowered into the ground. Doubtless Mum was all too aware of her own mortality.

Grandma died not owning much. We kids – and those of our uncles, Jimmy and Kevin – were each given envelopes containing a few dollars. Giving thanks as best I could, I gave mine to the Salvation Army collector working my local pub that night . . .

Gleaming World Series future

2006-09-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

I saw my first mainline diesel locomotive standing at the head of the afternoon workers’ train at Port Kembla platform one brisk September afternoon in 1961. I was six. I’d come to Port during the school holidays to help pick Dad up from work, and to travel home to Corrimal with him on that train.

The rhythmic rumble of the gleaming, fresh-off-the-showroom-floor Goodwin-built 44 Class Alco was mesmerising, and I clearly remember wondering in awe how these new diesels could possibly affect those venerable steam locos still scuttling around the Illawarra en force.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the manifestation of the American Locomotive Co’s internal combustion swagger on the global stage – a representative of Alco’s so-called World Series. A sister to almost identical locos arriving simultaneously on railway properties throughout Europe, South America and elsewhere in Australia. She stood motionless, smug, all shining tuscan red and NSW Government Railways golden yellow, girthed by a wafer-thin red waist band, with pitch black wheel frames, fuel tanks and buffing beams.

Standing aloofly at the head her ancient train of grimy, classless wooden passenger cars – the ones with Wild West American end platforms that remained well into my early adulthood – she juxtaposed eras on that chilly Spring afternoon.

In retrospect, she was more than motive power. Her rumbling heralded a technological avalanche poised to carry us all increasingly faster through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and into a fresh, mechanically gleaming, greaseless New Millenium. And in retrospect, the sound of those familiar, elderly, venerable steam locos was really nothing more than the collective death-rattle wheeze of an industrial age fast drawing to an end. And the richly warm, oily aroma of steam would soon dissipate ahead of instant energy from brash fuel oil, and the sharp tang of graphite on new plate steel.

I can still feel that train sliding effortlessly out of Port station heading north-west into setting sun gold and smoke, threading its way through the industrial sidings between the station and the start of the Steelworks property. The 44 was barely aware of herload of hundreds of weary passengers heading homeward . . .

There was none of the slight to and fro pulling and rolling motion associated with steam locos starting from still. Her motion was smooth and effortless, without any sense of piston pause.

Falling between the rails

2006-09-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

As much as they excited me from the earliest age, trains and railways could be deadly with little or no emotional notice.

Like the time we were walking along the platform at Otford, on the far southern end of the Royal National Park, south of Sydney. We were only kids, and my sister, Mary, would have been lucky to have been five. The year was perhaps 1963. The surrounding sub-tropical rainforest of this part of the National Park smelt damp and richly rotting, of aging timbers sinking back into the landscape, constantly washed by repeated rains. The bush birds called incessantly to each other across the narrow valley in which the station is jammed, and the brilliant Spring morning sunshine struggled to break through between the trees and branches towering over the station. But the smell and sounds came to an abrupt end as Mary somehow slipped on the edge of the station platform. One second she was with us, walking and chatting as part of our family along the eastern platform. Next second, she was sprawled between the tracks. One second more and she was on her feet, looking up at us, hands reaching upwards in begging grasps, looking for salvation. The look on her terrified little face said it all without a word. I have realised down through the years that I was terrified, instantly, of losing her, knowing the expected southbound train would be here at any second.

Dad leapt over the edge, and in a single, swinging motion, lifted Mary up to us and safety. Then, with a deft side hop and a push, he was up alongside us all – just as the south-bound, Wollongong train steamed around the curve to the north and rolled confidently, almost triumphantly, into the station area, gliding around the curved platform. The gap between fall and train rolling over the same spot couldn’t have been any more than 30 seconds, but it had felt like an entire slow-moving, shuddering, freezing afternoon. It still does when it comes to mind, which, interestingly, it does often. Ironically, Mary is now near 50, and the C32 Class steam loco of the day only survived another few years before falling to the scrapper’s torch.

Five years later, in 1968, early in my second high school year, I saw the ancient two-car diesel railmotor train rocking and rolling through Corrimal station on its high-speed morning dash from Thirroul into Wollongong. As it roared alongside the tall timber fence edging the classic brick railway worker’s cottage immediately north of the Railway Street level crossing just before 8.00am, the railmotor kicked up a huge, ominous dark dust cloud, swirling with sheets of paper. I saw it clearly at an angle from the platform on which I was waiting, another 100m further south, but didn’t comprehend.

Moments later, after the railmotor had screamed through Corrimal at better than 110km/hr, terrified kids in tears pelted onto the platform, racing straight into the station master’s office without knocking. This was the first I knew that Alice DeMartin had been struck, and the same empty sensation of untimely horror swept through me. Nothing as final as death was supposed to happen to us at this early stage of our life journey. Alice, my age, attended the girls’ school adjacent to our boys’ school. I can still see the ashen-faced station master and two teenage platform assistants darting along the platform and bobbing north across and between the lines to where a group of people were milling near the level crossing’s eastern boongate. I had known Alice since kindergarten. We went to the same Catholic primary school, high on Corrimal hill. Alice, with Italian parents and a younger brother, had always been quiet. I still cannot remember ever saying more than three or four words to her the whole time I knew her. High School Alice had always walked along the side of the railway line to the level crossing, her back to Wollongong-bound trains. Why she wasn’t aware of the speeding railmotor, I’ll never know. Like almost all other mornings, it was dead on time this fateful day. It has scooped Alice up from behind, and carried her forward at lightning speed before thrusting her headlong into a steel post by the level crossing. Alice would have been terrified for a second or two before experiencing ultimate pain that, in a blink of an eye, would have helped catapult her to somewhere infinitely calm, surrounded by angels.

As our school train slowly laboured through the level crossing, someone in the crowd milling around the fatal spot had thankfully covered Alice’s tiny body with a tartan car blanket. Looking down from my carriage window, full of panic dread, I also saw her smashed school case lying close by, along with one of her empty brown school shoes. That’s the last time I ever saw anything of Alice.

And apart from almost being struck myself by an extremely quiet and potentially lethal steam locomotive gliding through a freight yard many, many years later, I have never seen another rail accident at close quarters.

Rail fascination

I have always loved railway lines themselves from the earliest age. They, sometimes more than the trains that ran on them, stirred excitement in me. Roads carried cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles, and lacked discipline. They also lacked any sense of real permanence. I saw that traffic was free to roam from one side of roads to the other, to overtake itself and maintain a soulless modernity bred of ubiquity. Their very lack of control underscored the chaos generated.

Railway lines, those not torn up, remained permanent in my mind. Rather than shift, or allow for shift, they steadfastly held their position, sinking deeper and more gracefully into the same spot for decades on end if allowed. But never disappearing completely. I noticed that first the ballast shifted back into the earth. Then the sleepers, perhaps with only their bleaching tops remaining exposed to sunlight. Sometimes even these would succumb, leaving only the thread of rails meandering through weeds. To me, every piece of railway line I came across was connected to every other piece of line throughout Australia, by sheer dent of joining fishplates.

I remember the day Dad took us up a steep escarpment track behind Corrimal, until we reached a level space between the trees. I marveled at ‘discovering’ spindly 2ft-gauge tramway tracks among the fast growing bush. These I was later to discover were part of the Corrimal Colliery tramway that had operated from pithead to the very incline we’d climbed that morning. Coal in tiny timber skips was hauled along this tramway before descending the incline to the loading staithes of Corrimal Colliery’s standard-gauge line which ran down behind Corrimal Coke Works, and joined the main government line just south of Corrimal station.

Some kids imagined fairies and dragons and knights bravely battling strange and dreadful beasts. I always imagined, in equal wonder, what trains had run on such tracks, and why . . .

Train passion

You either love or hate
The smell of railways and their things.
That medieval smell of
Steel powder,
Stones
And heavy hammers.
Ancient passenger cars ooze this essence,
Along with that of sagging upholstery and
The mingling of a million human skin oils on
Timber window ledges . . .

I didn’t need to catch the train to high school – from one stop at Corrimal to the next stop further north at Bellambi. If I had walked the whole way to high school, I would have perhaps covered only an additional 400-500m beyond my walk to Corrimal station, and from Bellambi station, across the playing fields, to school. I was to later ride the distance, in my final high school years, on an old, colourless push bike I built and maintained myself.

Traveling by train was novel. A rite of passage. I still remember, as clear as yesterday, that bright, warm, cloudless January day in 1967 I strode towards Corrimal station, cutting down Harbinger Street to Railway Street, full of hope for a future I could barely imagine through my intense excitement. Resplendent in new long serge school trousers, looking down at new black shoes, I was proudly heading off to my first day at high school. My first day as a youth. My first day on the clear road to becoming an adult. I had been impatiently waiting for this day all through the Summer break. I was joining a much bigger group of youths-in-waiting, the majority of whom I’d never met, feeding in from any number of Catholic and other schools throughout the Illawarra district. And all wending their way to Bellambi in ancient end-platform timber passenger cars, painted in flaking tuscan red, hauled by over-taxed, equally tuscan 48 Class diesels. Several trains from the south, several from the north, and all converging on Bellambi, near our school by the sea, in good time before class.

These were the days before electrification. When the Illawarra line was still a Cinderella Way, populated by the rest of the NSW Government Railways’ rolling stock hand-me-downs and powered by what the Government brazenly described as ‘branchline locomotives’. The diesels were relatively new, but many of the passenger cars had been working the Illawarra for more than 50 years. And we rarely saw motive power bigger than 48s.

Nothing had changed on Corrimal station for more than half a century, the original timber buildings on both platforms dating back to the line’s duplication in the 20th Century’s teens. The backs of both platforms were lined by equally ancient slip-rail timber fences, and the side road between the western platform and Corrimal Coke Works was an undulating way of gravel acne, pock-marked with holes and ruts. It required deft hopping from end to end on rainy days. The platform buildings – waiting room, ticket office, ancient signal cabin and toilets – bore the hallmarks of more than 70 years’ grime and grit. A patina I was to find only appeared on or around railways and their equipment.

Bellambi station was of an equal vintage. Its main timber building, positioned at the extreme northern end of the island platform served as ticket office, station master’s office and signal cabin. Many years before, the private coal line from South Bulli Colliery had cut across the Illawarra line at right angles immediately north of the Bellambi Lane level crossing, itself at the northern foot of the platform, lending this building a far more important controlling influence.

With this as a backdrop, I can’t be certain exactly when I became Jennifer’s first boyfriend. Or she became my first girlfriend. We’d gone to primary school together, but only spoke matter-of-factly pre-hormones. But our delicious afternoon meetings, midway along Bellambi platform, followed by dreamy hand-holding all the way over the hill south to Corrimal was recognised, understood and accepted by our peers. I cherished those innocent days throughout my third and fourth high school years of 1969 and 1970. The couplings between the old wooden carriages had clunked and ground in unison as the ancient wooden passenger cars groaned with the diesels’ distinctive Alco exhaust beat. We held hands and stared into each others’ eyes, equally astonished by feelings we shared for each other – well ahead of experiencing anything like it for those life’s loves to come.

I still see myself, wishing against the clock, hoping the train would go even more slowly than its crawling reality, wanting to stay holding Jen’s hand as long as possible. Wanting to capture her sweet smell for as long as possible. Wanting to watch Jen’s excited, quivering, blushing smile for as long as possible.

When Jen left for boarding school at the end of Year 10, I happily took to my push bike for the ride down to Bellambi. There was no need for the circuitous train trips, my ride taking no more than 15 minutes each way. Jen and I stayed a pair until the end of our school days, but never again shared innocent hand-holding on trains. We shared kissing and exciting exploration at increasingly erotic teenage parties and dinners at home with my family in the months before university, but our train romance had ended forever . . .

My father's mother, Liz

2006-09-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

Nana Elizabeth Heininger, nee Sandon, gave every impression of always being frail. She was tall, and had always been slim, and complained obliquely of this or that ailment, and about how she simply didn’t enjoy the best of overall health. Yet I remember clearly a day when Dad and I tried catching up with her as we all walked east down the main shopping area of Crown Street Wollongong. When we finally caught up with her, Nana complained she couldn’t take another step, and – after thanking God that we’d turned up in the nick of time – asked matter-of-factly if we could hail her a cab. Dad muttered something about being as fit as a fiddle, the old coot.

I always found it strange that Nana and Grandfather had separate rooms, both with large, austere iron double beds. Her room had a large metal trunk set under the bay window, and I always assumed it was filled with Nana treasures. Grandfather’s room was as Spartan as an aesthete’s – a bed and single wardrobe.

All floors in the house, including the main drawing room that was set up with a formal table setting we never used, were covered in ancient, dark and shining linoleum which all added to the aging aroma. The centerpiece of this long dining table was a green-grey ceramic bower birds' nest with several small ceramic eggs securely positioned deep inside. It became one of my rituals to always peer inside, and run my small fingers over these small, smooth, cold eggs, while the small pair of frozen ceramic birds watched down eternally from the top of their nest.

In my father’s old room, off this formal room, I found more treasures from another era. Several Boys’ Own annuals from the 1920s and very early 1930s, and an oval tin filled with Dad’s childhood marbles. I’d pour over the crude line drawings of these musty books, while marveling at the beauty of some of the marbles, already well past being found in Japanese marbles sold by the bag-full by our local newsagent.

Nana also had a distinctive smell, of finely scented women's toilet soap, and I would always love washing my hands with it in the bathroom attached to the back of the house. It was always Grandfather who stood behind me, guiding my dirty hands through this pre-lunch washing ceremony, using a not-so-soft cotton face cloth. Nana was as gently stern as Grandfather was gently pleased to be with us children. I’m not sure she was ever pleased to see us kids.

Nana’s history is even sketchier than Grandfather’s. I remember a story that as a very young child herself, she’d gotten into serious parental trouble for playing with the Aboriginal kids living beside Tom Thumb Lagoon and the southern edge of Wollongong. This playground of marshy swamp flats now forms part of Port Kembla’s inner harbour. Lizzie hadn’t been roused on for playing with the Aboriginals – but for failing to tell her parents where she’d disappeared to for the better part of a lazy Summer's afternoon, long before electric light arrived in Wollongong.

When it came time for Nana to die, she passed quickly, in a low-sluing nursing home at the foot of Mt Ousley Road, North Wollongong. Dad burried her at Lakeside Memorial Lawn Cemetry, near Dapto on September 1, 1973. I was 18, and remember the day because I entered it in my diary

My father's father, Ted

2006-09-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

My Grandfather, Ted, my father’s father, was something of a formal man, a quiet individual from another era. He didn’t drive a car, relying, instead, on a dark, gearless pushbike with racing handlebars turned upwards to effortlessly and slowly peddle around Wollongong. He pinned his cuffed trouser legs backwith metal clips to avoid the greasy chain, and always wore an old Akubra hat that may have – at one time in the past 30 years – have been a dress hat.

Grandfather wore collarless white shirts and braces, his laced-up ankle-high boots were always a shiny black, and he smelt richly of plain soap and a lifetime’s experience. He died when I was young, and I valguely remember whispy white hair, a kind face and wrinkled, blotched softness of the back of his hands.

The only word I remember his saying was ‘Lizzie’ the name he gave his wife, Elizabeth Sandon – my father’s mother and our Nana. Grandfather would say ‘Lizzie’ richly and affectionately.

I was constantly fascinated by Grandfather’s small hall table hugging the wall of the narrow sunroom tacked on the back of the house in which my father grew up in the years before the Second War, and which he now shared with our Nana. In the drawer I could always find short lengths of sharp pencils I later realised Grandfather used to write down winners in whatever horse or dog races he was listening to on the wireless. In this drawer he also kept an old hair brush, scraps of form guides, ancient cigarette and tobacco tins, erasers, small notebooks filled with scribblings, boot laces and marbles. These contents always smelt musty, and genteelly old, like him. The walls above the table were lined with several familiar black and white frames pictures – several of prize-winning chickens Grandfather had reared and exhibited many years before, one of an anonymous race horse bedecked with show ribbons, and another frame containing pictures of two steam ships I was to discover had transported him to and from his War.

Grandfather had been a butcher, and had played rugby league for the Illawarra Diggers, the local team of returned servicemen, in the early 20s. While his football exploits earned him praise in the badly yellowed Illawarra Mercury articles I still retain, he’d gone on to play somewhat mysterious roles as an alderman on Wollongong Council and as a steward at Wollongong Dogs. He’d also been active in local rugby league circles. As a local government representative, he worked alongside Francis Xavier ‘Rex’ Connor, himself destined to become a Labour Minister in the ill-fated Whitlam Labor Government of the early 1970s. The lead-lettered names of Ted Heininger and Rex Connor still beam down from the white marble plaque affixed to the North Wollongong Beach changing rooms, as they have every day since the days before World War II.

One story has it that Grandfather and another butcher had built a thriving business before the Great Depression struck at the very vitals of the Illawarra. While Grandfather continued to give meat to those he knew would go hungry if he didn’t, his partner begged him to sell his half of the business before they both went under. In one of life’s strange ironies, Grandfather sold out, never having to work again, leaving my father – an only child – to grow in circumstances far less grinding than those of many around him.

Grandfather Ted had an older brother, Cyril Patrick, who was registered as a grocer from Woonona when he enlisted in 1916 to play his small part in the Great War. Ironically, having survived years of harrowing trench warfare in France and Belgium, Cyril was to die cruelly young – the victim of a collapsed drainage trench somewhere near Helensburgh – in 1923. He may not have been the same, apparently having seen too many things half way round the world to talk about.

Grandfather, on the other hand, joined the 12th Light Horse Regiment of the Illawarra, and steamed off to Egypt by 1917 to encounter the Turks in the Middle East. His war exploits are sketchy, as he spoke very little of them – especially to us children. All I knew was that he’d missed going to Gallipoli, but instead found himself doing time and patrols in the so-called Holy Land (Palestine, he always called it). Grandfather’s one great wish had been to reach Damascus, but never did. The war ended abruptly before his regiment could get there. Instead, he picked up a dose of Malaria in the Jordan Valley, something that took his years to fully recover from, and may have contributed to my father’s sickly young years.

I can only imagine how Grandfather and his fellow Australians viewed the exotic Middle East pre-oil wealth, pre-Israel and pre-routine international travel. They must have imagined at times that they were riding across the surface of another dusty alien planet. Grandfather always a softly spoken man, quietly and dispassionately described the Arabs as the dirtiest people he'd ever seen. But never to us children. He must have already realised that he didn’t want any prejudices rubbing off.

His crowning war regret - along with thousands of other yound Australian troopers - was that he had to kill his faithful horse before steaming back to civilian life. Having carried him from one end of the Hold Land to the other, there was no room for the horse in the New Australia.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Grandfather never went to Mass again, calmly saying there couldn’t possibly be a God after the things he and Cyril and thousands of other unworldly Australian youth had witnessed in warfare. But as a young child in a strictly Catholic family I forgave him this because of the superb baked lunches – beef or lamb and an assortment of plump, juicy vegetables and scratch-made gravy – he produced from the small Kookaburra gas stove and oven in the kitchen of the house he and Nana shared. Sunday traditional baked lunches in this neat, but Spartan, weatherboard house in Campbell Street became as ritualised as the Mass we always attended earlier that morning in Corrimal. We’d alight the orange and cream Hills Bus Service bus on the corner of Flinders and walk down Campbell Street, towards the boat harbour. We’d pass the Salvation Army Citadel on the corner of Campbell and Keira – always to the strains of strange hymns these people in dark military uniforms sang. I never saw them coming or going, but always felt sad that they’d never get to heaven like us real Catholics. And what always made me feel sadder was they always sang so well – and fervently. I had reached these conclusions independently, aided by side comments from the pig-ignorant, bog-paddy Irish nuns who taught us in primary school. I never discussed this with my parents.

As lunch was baking, Grandfather would whisk us small kids down to the park at the end of the street, or to the sheltered Brighton Beach on Wollongong Harbour on the other side of Cliff Road, and keep us there – all to his gentle self – until lunch could wait no longer. And after lunch we’d almost always retreat with him to the top yard, near the sheds with their secret photo albums, and rake leave into eucalyptus reeking bonfires. It was the very early 1960s. Another, simpler era that required bonding and the sharing of family pleasures, and generated no neighbourly complaints about smoky fires.

School Boys

2006-08-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

From one generation

to the next

they're grubby cuffs,
loose shirt tails
and stone-cut shoe leather toes.

Scraping and scrapping along,
pushing and shoving
- 14 or 15 years or so -
in unison
with mouldy oranges
in dark recesses.

School boys
never change.

- PH, 1990

Devils, Dragons And Trains Rolling West

2006-08-27T23:44:00.000-07:00

Standing on one of Sydney's busy far western, multi-platform suburban railway stations, in the heat of a dry Summer setting sun back in 1990, made me think, for a moment, of how Columbus - arguably the world's greatest dead-reckoning navigator - and his crews battled their way through sunsets and superstitions - towards the New World . . .

*******

We form three crews
in this
reddening anywhere railway place
near the world's western edge.

Our platforms blister and paints flake as
dust swirls in dry-heat dancing.

Ochre teeth in crumpled mouths scuttle
up and by
crackling, cackling,
cracking
at the west,
uncaring of long-past Columbus passions,
coercion
and dead reckoning

And boisterous trains slide by,
between our standing crews,
one
after the other
after the other
after the other
with silent souls they’ll inject again,
out there, further west.

We feel no green-blue salt spray or swell.
No cool water-logged, rolling timber decks.
No mission for a silent god.

Yet rust-red trains
roll on, relentless.

Roaring headless towards setting sun blood.
Towards dragons,
devils
and lost salvation
only lust-filled ancestors dreaded.

Railways And Their Things

2006-08-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

You either love
or hate
the smell of railways
and their things.

That musty, medieval smell of
steel powder,
stones
and heavy hammers.

Old passenger carriages,
in particular,
ooze this essence,
along with the smell-in-waiting
of aging timber,
sagging, dusty upholstery
and the mingling of a million human skin oils
on their window ledges.

PH - 1990

How the Internet is shaping Personal Relations - while shaping fresh commercial realities

2006-08-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

While I wrote this article back in October 2002, I believe it still stands true. I'd love to hear your comments!

********

IT’S BECOMING increasingly difficult to tell where online relationships end and online commerce begins. Where genuine ‘marketplace’ conversation ends, and the buying and selling of products and services start.

Or where traditional public relations end and what I now call personal relations kick in.

Having long been a public relations consultancy, ZoomBuzz Online Communications (my previous ciorporate communications business - PH) is remodelling its day-to-day business activities for our clients around this new personal relations model, a mode of business communication that’s quietly becoming commercial reality for many smaller organisations and communities around the world.

Personal relations dictate that for organisations to thrive, they must open up genuine personal dialogue with all audiences critical to their ongoing success. They must become truly involved with their audiences – on as many levels as possible.

It’s what Donald Alexander, of the School of Contemporary Communication at Central Queensland University refers to as the process of ‘demassification’ in his recent paper: New Information & Communication Technologies & the ‘Demassification’ of Public Relations (2002).

Alexander says: “The development of new information and communication technologies such as the Internet . . . have created opportunities . . . for organisations and active publics to communicate interactively with each other.

“The term ‘demassification’ is given to this process which . . . allows communicators such as public relations professionals to interact directly with selected publics.”

In the real world, personal relations works like this . . .

I belong to an esoteric, online community of narrow-gauge tramway modellers operating in a particular scale and track gauge. The group – with members throughout North America, the UK, the Continent, Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand – consists of hobbyist modellers and commercial kit makers who also model.

The lines between pure hobby and commercialism have been blurred because of the personal relationships that have developed in the online ‘bazaar’ in which the group gathers and communes.

The three prominent commercial members offer advice on their own products, praise other manufacturers for the quality of theirs (!) and engage with the rest of us (and each other) in day-to-day hobby banter.

On September 9, Michael, a Dutch member, posted an image of an unusual, home- brewed, self-propelled tramway “dumper” wagon he’d developed on his modelling bench. Michael had cobbled the model together from plastic scraps, a bucket from a mass-produced commercial skip wagon and a readily available mechanism (to power it). He’d also added a driver figure (also marketed by a large European modelling company).

Interest across the group, which currently numbers about 30-40 was instant.
Steve, a UK-based commercial member – who supplies many of the loco and rolling stock kits we buy, assemble and model with – weighed into the chat. He posted a message that there had been several real-life prototypes similar to Michael’s model.

Steve praised Michael’s modelling efforts, and for sharing his images with us.
Eleven days later, on September 20, after continuous, enthusiastic discussion within the group – including at least one rather cheeky inquiry (from Don, in the US) as to when we could all expect Steve “to make a product announcement” – Steve chimed in to say he’d been listening to us, and had developed masters for a similar motorised tipper car model!

Identical inquiries came in almost simultaneously from Tim, also in the US, and from me here in Australia.

Once posted, images of these masters proved an instant hit within the group. Michael chimed back in, saying Steve’s proposed motorised tipper was “a great looking thing!”

I also posted an inquiry as to what kind of mechanism would power the finished model, clearing up the issue for myself and a number of other members.

On September 21, Steve announced he was producing a commercial kit based closely on Michael’s original model. “Many thanks to you all for your positive feedback,” appeared at the foot of his announcement.

Four days later, Steve posted images of not one – but two – variants of the same self-propelled vehicle – one a flat car for carrying tools, sacks, drums, etc., and one a tipper designed for carrying gravel, sand, clay, etc.

These images appeared as “a world first” on a site dedicated to promoting our particular modelling scale and narrow track gauge.

Steve subsequently informed the group the kit would be commercially available on October 26. And, in typical Steve style, he openly praised the quality of the scale figure of the driver he’d recommended – despite the fact “Jon” was developed and is marketed by another organisation!

Now let’s just hold it here . . . Let’s look carefully at what happened . . .

In just 46 days, we’d gone from a single member posting his lone model for discussion to the commercial release of two kits (both called Midge) that are likely to sell well – not only to members of the consortium, but possibly to hundreds of other modellers around the world within the next 12 months.

And during this time, discussion on a wide range of issues – from micro layout development and painting figures, to mechanisms for other locos, and rolling stock development – continued unabated in our usual free-range free-for-all.

All the while Steve had been engaging in personal relations with a group he does business with and models with, and we’d all been delighted to be involved in the multi-way communication that led to the development of modelling products we were all pleased with. Steve had not only benefited professionally, but he’d blurred the lines by praising other manufacturers’ products while exchanging general comments and advice with the rest of us.

The top-down, rigid control of communication normally associated with public relations was nowhere to be seen!

Personal relations had enabled all us to engage on a level field of true global friendship laced with personal trust and commercial reality.

The Net is a wondrous beast! In our case, it has allowed commercial development to meld with general discussion of mutual modelling interests – and beyond.

To be part of a global product development cycle, and to see this cycle – courtesy of the Net’s inherent communications qualities – shrunk to less than 50 days is remarkable! Something I would never have dreamt of pre-1995!

There’s a lesson here for larger organisations as they grapple to harness the Internet’s communications power.

Unless they form genuine communities of interest around their products and services, and unless they engage with their customers and business partners, and build relationships on more meaningful, genuine levels, they’ll miss the communications sea change happening around us.
It’s easy to benefit from – and measure the success of – this new personal relations form of communication when you belong to a small group, or when there’s genuine shared interest. And when you talk openly with each other, in your own voice.

One challenge larger organisations face will be balancing the shift from staid, staged and centralised public relations – which aim highly manicured messages at a narrow base of mass media – to this free-form personal relations model.

Another challenge – arguably the greater – will be to simulate this level of personalised good will with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of customers with nothing more than software that allows these organisations to track click- throughs and buying habits, and yet more software that allows them to ‘personalise’ bulk email messages, newsletters, etc. I marvel at the technology Amazon uses to track my buying habits, and attempts to build a “relationship” with me.

But at the end of the day, I prefer chatting to Steve and Mike and Don and Carl and Jim in my own voice, and having them chat to me in theirs . . .

The commercial side of these relationships then comes easily.

Never forget your roots

2006-08-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

I had a major-league problem with my home city of Wollongong by the time I had finished high school and was starting at university, in Sydney.

I ranted this terrible alliteration back in December 1973. Needless to say, the bitterness has long rubbed off - as has Wollongong's heavy-duty industrial persona . . .

Wollongong's a three-shift steel mill town, a sad string of souless suburbs, staggering down the coastline in search of a city. Where haute cuisine is an Hawaiian pizza on a Friday night - and you can find it after the bars shut, and it isn't cold . . .

It's the same ol' place . . .

2006-08-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

Couldn't resist adding this snippet fron Earth Opera's seminal album of '69 - The Great American Eagle Tradegy . . .

Call out the Border Guards.
The kingdom is crumbling.
The King is in his counting house
Laughing and stumbling.
His armies are extended
Way beyond his shores . . .
And he sends all his lonely boys to die
In his foreign jungle wars.

Like I say, when you look at the Middle East today - some 37 years down the track since this was written - nothing much seems to have changed . . .

The Warmth In Knowing

2006-08-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote this short story some time ago, and think it fits well with my other ramblings. Enjoy!

*******

Regicide . . .

The word’s still causing the hammers to murmur against my head’s fragile anvils. Other noises are waving over and through me, too, but none protrude to make a shape sharper in this warm marble chamber than that one word. Regicide.

The crimson Panel Judges – some looking across at me impassively, others talking quietly and sideways to one another while folding away notes on this, their final case for the morning – have passed sentence on my crime they say had almost been committed within the past six hours.

Other people remain seated on the chamber’s stepped terraces, staring up at me from their distance. Others thread their way through the rich cream and pink openness, as if moving from one space designed for their lives to another. Victual sellers to the sides of the throng have learnt through practiced eons their art of providing sustenance to those witnessing the sentencing of others for capital matters. Today, their reverence is reserved for me. Reverence and the reflection of unknown fears show in faces staring back at me.

I’m touched by those hundreds who show me regard, and understand those other hundreds moving gently on queue to the next phases of their lives. None, I know, are without consideration.

The hammers still murmur my sentence, to be carried out in a public place when least expected sometime (strictly) within the next 20 hours. And while I accept without qualm the Panel Judges’ ruling, I know the King still lives. His visage beams down at every major walk-avenue intersection, as it has throughout what I now realise has been my relatively short life. But that’s not the point . . . I must have, as the Judges conceded, known in my heart’s darkest shaft that I wished my King dead. Why else would I have been arrested, charged and sentenced for this crime of crimes, next only to the wanton smashing of gods?

My guards, who stood silently at my side throughout the 80-second trial, walk forward now through the chamber, with me between them. I see people I have known for years, some almost for the whole time, and realise they will know me to the end. Most stare blankly, with eyes not sure of what to say. At the chamber’s doorspace, where it merges into the Walk-Avenue of Laws, these guards turn to me, smile and shake my hand gently before merging into the crowds.
I’m to make best the Time For Farewells.

I’ve always been told that death, The Silence, while shaping collective determination, remains a profoundly lonely experience. Knowing when I entered life, and now when I’ll exit, automatically weighs my existence in calm balance.

Threading my way long the Walk-Avenue of Laws, I can no longer feel the dread of pulpits. I try. But it only makes me smile to now realise the savage myths of religious childhood help form our darkness – that part that marks us apart, punctuating our damage. I realise I simply can’t comprehend the enormity of the void ahead – one I will enter before another day dawns.

Nor can I fight the sentence. It will be administered by prick – by whom the Panel Judges didn’t say. On balance, I calmly accept that I'm in no position to fear The Silence with what consciousness I have left.

The hours lick by like all the others I have known. Friends who have heard of the trial and sentence melt out of the crowd, become concrete before me and shake my hands. While they say they fear for me, I ask, over the hours, for their reasons. However, as their times have not yet come, the myth veils remain tightly in place. I continue watching people and families continuing with life as I would have done in their circumstances.

A woman I have been aware of for years, but only from a distance, approaches. As she smiles I feel a sharp jab. That very instant I understand that The Door has been opened, and I must step through it as bravely or as cowardly as I care. Beyond, all is bottomless black. I stare long at my arm, shocked to see a small smudge of blood well through the sleeve of my tunic. I then look up at the woman, whose smile never fades. And then I realise she, too, has her hand extended to shake mine.

The smashing wave of airlessness passes as this woman backs away into the swirling throngs, still smiling. I look at my arm, at the blood and what it means, and notice for the first time the delicate patterns of feldspar in the ancient granite pathway.

I’m increasingly aware of the most reverent adventure I’ll ever face, and feel warmly humbled as the wave recedes back to my previous calm. I take in everything I can, noticing now the latticework dripping between the columns and framing their capitals. The feldspar glints as I close my eyes slowly, suddenly deliciously tired. I open them again. Slowly. The feldspar . . . The lattice . . . The beaming orbs of faces gliding in and out of vision . . .

I remember my grandmother’s words when I asked her questions she didn’t really want to answer: “It’s a wigwam for a goose’s bridle,” she'd say softly.

I feel my eyes closing again, and while I try to fight their action, I’m yearning the sleep one craves after a day’s hard, hard work. The faces melt together. The feldspar lashes all colours around me. The latticework recedes to the ceiling . . . Way up there . . .

I notice for the first time that the heel of my left boot is slightly run down, and coming away from the soul. I’m a child again, and my mother’s face is smiling down at me. I'm reaching up and up and up towards her. And the higher I reach, the lighter I feel.

Her words comfort me as she passes her soft hand across the heels of my school moccasins. “A good soldier never looks behind . . .”

oOo

Measuring life in trains

2006-08-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

Thomas Stearns Eliot, in his seminal Prufrock, bleakly spoke of measuring out a life in coffee spoons. For reasons that have never been absolutely clear, I have measured much of my in trains and railways. For outsiders, almost as trivial as coffee spoons – but never for me.

While I’ve come to love trains and railways over the years, I can’t say it was always the case. Pre-teens, I just remember them. As the years rolled on, and the fixation deepened, they have continued to punctuate elements of my childhood, youth and adult years.

There’s something about steel wheels on steel rails, and especially about decrepit rails disappearing into long grass, or being swallowed by encroaching bush. It has thrilled me to discover a line I never knew existed. Or one I knew of only vaguely, via hear-say. And if the gauge is narrow, say 2ft or slightly more, the thrill, for some odd reason, is all the greater.

I particularly love rickety, narrow-gauge tramways, the unsung underdogs of steel-wheel transport.

I remember clear events and sensations, many stretching back more than 40 years, all relating to trains. And rippling out from these still points are formalised elements of life, like memory tree rings – many in no way connected to trains.

The more sense I try to make of it all, the more I seem to become lost in it. I now simply accepted.

My Mum and Dad were a typical energetic post-war Australian couple, keen to buy a house, grow a family and somehow create a pastoral-like pleasantness that had eluded them to date. Initially damaged by the Great Depression, they continued growing, shell-shocked, in the shadows of fascism, Japanese military aggression and a World War that killed tens of millions and tore Europe a second, fresh, 20th Century asshole.

My parents, along with just about everyone else their age, were engaged in a collective head down-bum up charge into the 1950s. Their mission was to make life better all round, and to come to terms with neon lights, advertising, home appliances and brighter, more peaceful sunshine than they had ever known. To buy cars and mow grass more evenly with powered mowers. Joni Mitchell was to call it the hissing of summer lawns, but Her Generation was yet to arrive. Along with fast food, drive-thru convenience, espresso coffee and on line bill payment.

Dad, a fitter all his working life, really wanted to be a butcher. His dad, Ted, a Great War veteran, had said no, so that was that – a factory life as sullen consolation prize. Mum was a school teacher, and loved it all except for her stint in a dusty, racist two-street town west of Dubbo, before moving to full-time motherhood, as expected. My parents were, seemingly, tea-totallers, although Mum liked her occasional Secret Cigarette, especially when she burnt household rubbish in the backyard incinerator at night.

I landed as a mid-Baby Boomer on the last day in November,1954, while Mum and Dad were renting a flat behind a house in a place called Fairy Meadow. Mum swore I arrived on the 29th, but Dad in his confusion registered me as a 30th drop. Brother, John, followed two years later, then sister, Mary. There had been one still born before me, but never discussed.

And all the while, I recalled the trains. Punching through at critical points, marking territory in which I grew up. In the beginning, all were steam.

*****

Sudden hernia

More than half a century ago, I was being bathed on the kitchen table. The evening was dark and chilly, and Mum’s face was alarmed at my hugely swollen groin. I remember crying – perhaps as much a reaction to her shocked eyes and flurry, as to her panic fingers rubbing my swollen hernia. I can’t remember it feeling like pain, although I still sense, after all those years, the enormous bulge. The rest of that evening was a blur, possibly cream ambulance interior.

My next snapshot is of bright sunshine, of hauling myself up to stare out the window at a flock of pigeons wheeling high in the sky. I watched them disappear from sight, and reappear just as quickly, not realising it was a trick of light on their wings and bodies. An illusion I still find takes me back to the dawn of memory.

The white of the steel hospital cot was covered with its fair share of paint chips, exposing its bare, almost black bones at strategic eye height. I was unaware of adding any chips himself.

I knew my parents visited regularly, but this day they brought me a small, bright, multi-coloured plastic train string toy. They were very well dressed, and smelt wonderfully familiar. I can see himself sitting on my haunches, playing with it, running it over my tiny legs. And can still remember the gut-tearing pain of being suddenly separated again from them, and not understanding why. Of Mum and Dad disappearing again, and of me wanting so badly to be with them and away from this place, and away from this strange steel cage. It was an horrific pain I still feel sharply, despite knowing for years that the best thing about physical pain is you can’t really remember it.

But I remember this pain. Of being alone in the middle of this chipped, cold cot, in this large, airy room. With only my small, cheap plastic toy train as company. I was 18 months old.

*****

Our home

My next clear memories are of my Corrimal home. Mum and Dad had scraped together the deposit for an older weatherboard and fibro box with corrugated iron roof that boomed roundly when it rained. It needed work, side drainage and new fences. My bed was a night-n-day divan with a hard-as-nails, stuffed backboard that somehow swung down. How, though, I wasn’t quite sure. I remember being too frightening of jamming fingers to learn its mystery.

I’d lay awake at night, especially in Winter when the air was stillest, listening to crickets outside. Then I’d hear ancient steam locos pounding steadily up the hill towards Towradgi, heading south towards Wollongong and Port Kembla. The main Illawarra government line was a mile to the east. I could still hear the rhythmic clack-clack-clack-clack-clack of four-wheel goods wagons, specially when the locos shut off for the drift towards Wollongong, some three miles further south. It was always the same. Steam locos labouring loudly up the hill, then shutting off in silence. I always knew exactly when they’d do it, seeming to disappear as Towradgi cutting and the curved, brick single-lane Towradgi Road over-bridge muffled their noisy march south. But I knew they were still there, moving steadily forward, because of clack-clacking goods wagons obediently following. When the last wagons and guard’s van passed under the bridge and into the cutting, the silence was immediate – framed only by the incessant crickets.

I knew some were coal trains from nearby mines, because I could hear the distinctive clonking of ancient coupling links slackening up for the drift south. And while I never thought steam would end, the rolling clank-clonk-clank-clonk of worn, banging connecting rods carried forever on crisp nights, tolling the inevitable. It was around 1959. The following year, Mum took me to school for the first time.

Corrimal nights were quiet back then. There wasn’t much traffic after dark along my Collins Street, down nearby Cross Street or along Railway Street, heading towards the railway station and the cokeworks immediately behind it. Corrimal was country in 1960, and cars came out only in sunlight. Or so it seemed in my early childhood. Cars also interested me at the time because Mum and Dad didn’t have one. Life was measured by public transport movements, or occasional late-night trips in the back of cold Holden taxi cabs, holding onto the chrome hand rails bolted to the backs of the front bench seat.

I also remember two street lights down on Railway Street. From my room at the front of the house, they threw light like stars on traditional Christmas cards. Whether it was the light sharding on my window glass, or the imagined activities of fairies among trees along Railway Street, or the notion that a Modern Jesus lay quietly in a manger not far from my humble bedroom, it was a memory I knew then would stay with me all my days.

The night air bore no other mechanical sounds. The light was still and steady. The calm punctuated the wait for the next train south, and gave the crickets all the confidence they needed to carry on full-tilt.

I knew from this early age that Corrimal was framed on all sides by railways. There was the main line, the one that delivered night trains, to our east. On the southern edge of the suburb was the ramshackle Corrimal Coal and Coke Co line that ran from behind the cokeworks due west to Corrimal Colliery on the Illawarra escarpment. Running about a mile along the escarpment, boring its way through thick bushland at about 400ft, was a 2ft-gauge tramway carrying coal from the colliery to the old 2ft-gauge incline. This incline delivered coal in quarter-ton dollops to the standard-gauge loading screens nestled in the folds of Tarrawanna, a mile west of our house. And on the northern edge of Corrimal, another line reached for South Bulli Colliery, also half way up the escarpment. Everything was steam. And ancient.

I often saw fluffy billows of pure white CCC steam cloud south of our street’s intersection with the Princes Highway, near Hall & Gibson’s Grocery Store and the old Co-Op building. From the hill to the north, near our Catholic Church and school, I also saw similar SB steam and white smoke clouds. I knew I could only see this as trains stepped gingerly across the highway, through their respective level crossings. And every now and then, as I peered from our back yard into the distant escarpment bush, I could see round puffs of white shredding themselves in bush branches. All these trains were largely mysteries.

I remember only once seeing a CCC loco propelling four-wheel wooden coal wagons over the highway, trying to gain strength for the up-grade push to the Tarrawanna screens. A crossing guardsman with a filthy patch of red cloth flag tacked to a stick was the only protection for highway traffic. While SB trains run until the early 60s, I can’t recall seeing any in action.

But rows of ancient, brooding wooden coal wagons of different shapes, sizes and condition – reddish brown for Corrimal, fading grey for South Bulli – stood on side tracks along their respective lines, and in the nest of South Bulli sidings running down to the mainline just opposite Bellambi Pub. I can also remember seeing them standing on sidings at the coke works at North Wollongong. Never moving. Always sullen, full of coal – or empty – and never giving any hint of their fragile future. Coal framed Corrimal, in delicate, 10-ton weathered-timber-encased loads.
I far more clearly remember two brothers, both old men, one with what I believed was half a bottom jaw, trudging down the highway hill from Corrimal, and turning west along the CCC line. I can still see them walking in Indian file, the taller one always about 15ft ahead of his slightly shorter brother, both with their hands clasped behind their backs. Every time I came near the CCC line, adjacent the original Street’s Icecream factory on the highway’s intersection with Tarrawanna Road and the Highway, I seemed to see them trudging up the middle of the line. They were always deep in thought, but I could never read their minds. The brothers were the railway’s flesh and blood, tramping between well-worn rails whose ancient sleepers had sunk into the right-of-way earth, and covered evenly by soft coal dust that had been accumulating for the better part of 60 years by then.

To the north, along seemingly endless Bellambi Lane, long lines of similar wooden wagons stood silently between the laneside split-rail fence and the backs of houses butting up to the railway property. Clumps of grass sprouted battleship-grey fence posts, and coal dust trickled from between twisting wagon boards. It’s a Saturday. I am young, as it’s before my mid-primary school foray into weekend football.

*****

Saturday afternoon walks

My parents liked walking when I was young. We didn't have a car, and walked all over Corrimal, usually later on autumn and winter Saturday afternoons. Sometimes into the balmy Spring. Looking at houses we passed and gardens Mum and Dad admired. They took it in turns pushing the stroller with one or both of the younger kids onboard. I walked alongside, hanging on to cold chrome.

I remember these as pleasant, lazy sojourns, nearly always ending near the bushline, often in late afternoon gloom beneath the steep escarpment, when Dad disappeared into the undergrowth to retrieve yet another delicate fern for his fernery baskets. Mum and Dad liked each other then, and seemed to share dreams and stories we kids couldn't fathom. They'd talk, reasonably gently, of nothing in particular and everything in general. I smelt the rich bush earth, and wondered about the coal line we walked alongside as we headed west towards the Tarrawanna foothills. Dad told me what happened - how ti all worked - but without experience it meant little for many years. In fact, until long after the trains stopped rolling to and from the foot of the escarpment.

Then I'd see the brothers again. They were always dressed the same. And they were always walking west, towards Tarrawanna. Into the sunset.

Whispering ancestors

2006-08-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

One version of our Family History has it that my ancestors arrived in Australia from Germany in the mid 19th Century, Catholic escapees from Bismarck’s dark religious and political intolerance. It had been a large family, with Mum, Dad and a brace of strapping sons, all keen to make it safely to the other side of the world to practice Catholicism and - eventually - animal husbandry in peace.

For reasons never made clear, Mum had died during the voyage, and was buried at sea. Dad and the lads eventually landed in Brisbane. They immediately struck southwards, towards Sydney Town, no doubt trying to escape the heat. There’s no record of what they thought of Brisbane, but I’m convinced they would have understood the rough town’s conservative parochialism – having hailed from deeply conservative Bavaria . One fragment of the story has it that these people were dairy farmers, craving the familiar. Another fragment has it that they were bakers, standing at the end of a long, respected line of craftspeople and traders in that field of food.

Unitl recently, my understanding of this family saga was that Dad and the boys pushed down the NSW coast, passing Sydney in their quest for dairy land. They apparently found it just south of the then small coastal town of Wollongong, tucked into the lush, shadow-filled folds of the Illawarra range. Once in place, they carved out farmland from the temperate rainforest, and tried settling down to farming.

For whatever reason, though, it all become too much, and Dad decided that life under Bismarck’s heel was likely to far easier long-term than life in a rude hut on a tree stump-studded Illawarra dairy. He soon left again for Germany, this time with all bar a 16-year-old son, Conrad. Conrad said he wasn’t leaving what he considered God’s Own Land, and his eventual resting place.

Conrad worked the land for several years, pretty well single-handed, taking time out at night, by candlelight, to write to his brothers, begging them to return. Not because he needed help. But because he was convinced Germany had nothing left for strapping young men but more of Bismark’s Blood and Iron, and graves to be dug during and after future, bleaker skirmishes in Europe’s seemingly never-ending civil war.

Apparently Conrad’s tactic worked, as his brothers – but not their Dad – returned to settle in New South Wales, and to continue clearing pockets of sub-tropical rainforest land in the fecund escarpment range. They would have made money from felling beautiful red cedars, but the ultimately family gain was to come from dairy cattle.

Conrad and those who followed - including a son called Gus - become involved in local government and civic issues.

Theirs would have been a much quieter and a much more measured world. By the time the railway arrived from Sydney in the 1880s, they would still have been more than two hours from Australia’s largest city. Before then, it would have been a solid, hard-day’s travel by stage coach or sea. Longer if they walked.

These ancestors would have made their own entertainment, read by tallow light and lived by the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons and the ringing of axes among the trees – in so far as warmer or cooler weather would have affected their growing dairy herds.

The sad, sad irony of Gus' life and quest revolved around guns. While he and a brother-in-law were hunting rabbits in the hills behind Dapto, his shotgun discharged, accidentally killing the brother-in-law instantly while climbing through a fence.

Before the arrival on the scene of my father’s father, Ted, and his brother, Cyril, this hunting accident that must have rocked the family to the core.

Gus, who had been a keen bunny bagger, never picked up a gun again.

Then there's the alternative saga . . . The one in which only Conrad Jnr and his father arrived in Australia without Conrad's mother. She'd elected to stay (for whatever reason) behind in Germany. Conrad was perhaps nine when he and his father landed in Australia, and headed directly to the south of Wollongong, prehaps having been lured there by preceding Germans.

There were no other brothers. As the story goes, Conrad's mother never did come out to Australia, and his father decided to head back to Germany to either bring her out or tend to her in sickness. Conrad was 14 when he saw his father off to Germany, and he never saw either parent again. Conrad had been left in the care of his father's local friend, a gentleman known as German Jack.

Conrad was a hard worker, according to this version of the truth, but one considered somewhat strange by prevailing local standards. When key Illawarra industries were timber-getting and rudimentary coal mining, Conrad opted to buy cheap land in and around Dapto, clear it of cedar, and acquire dairy and beef cattle. He did this in the company of sdeveral other settlers.

When he came of age, Conrad married an emanicpated convict girl, Mary House, and together they settled down to create and raise six sons and a daughter. And by the time Conrad died, zat a ripe old age for the time, he'd accumulated enough Illawarra land to leave each son a reasonable farm, and his daughter enough money to be independently comfortable.

One of those sons went on to have my Grandfather Ted as his child, and Ted went on to have my Father Joe as his child.

They say there's never such a thing as absolute truth, only versions of the truth. The way we remember things may not be the way others remember the same things. As versions go, and in the absense of a formal, written family tradition, either one of these stories will do . . . And one, in time, will become sufficiently heroic to smother the other. Its repeated telling will ensure its elevation to absolute truth.

An introduction

2006-08-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

I remember, as a very young kid, rummaging through a back shed at Dad’s parents’ place near the old boat harbour, looking at all the pictures of starchy strangers from another century, not knowing who any of them were. They stared back at me, expressionless, sitting and standing in their very, very old Sunday Best, in rooms from a long-lost, dusty era.

I’d found them in bulging, stiff-paged ornate old photo albums, stuffed into the bottom of two old iron trunks shoved into a corner of the shed. They smelt as dusty and mouldy and old as they looked. And once discovered, I kept returning to them, usually after Sunday lunch with Nana and Granddad, and before Granddad’s ritual raking of gum leaves into two bonfires for a late afternoon burn-off far up in the back yard, near the shed.

Now in my own middle years, I understand they represent long-dead life fragments, snap frozen on photographers’ glass plates. Just as I remember fragments of my own life as it hurtles towards completion. And the faster life hurtles, the more I scramble to remember, sweeping the fragments together, like those long-past gum leaf piles, before they scattered to the winds of time coming.

I think I know and understood my parents – to the extent they’ve been prepared to let me in, and I’ve been prepared to understand. But I knew and understood their parents – my grandparents – far less. They were from another era, another steam-driven century, born before radio, cars, TV and aeroplanes. My mother’s Dad had died as a result of an industrial accident when I was a baby, and my father’s Dad had died, suddenly, when I was seven, leaving only kindly fragments, smells and sounds to remember him by. But my grandparents’ parents and living relatives are, at very best, nothing but names on registers and flaking cemetery headstones. Or the nameless, mysterious strangers that stared back at me from the pages of these ancient photo albums.

Yet all these people had lives worth living. Loves worth exploring, Sadness they’d have rather avoided at all cost. Kids that grew into families, who had families of their own. They had friends, and lovers, and business associates, and workmates, and comrades, and foes. Now, starting back at me The Kid, they only had their humourless, unblinking stares, and Sunday Best. Their stories had disappeared.

The older I’ve grown, the less of a nameless mystery I’ve wanted to be to the generations that will follow me. I realise may not have had all the fragments down accurately, or their timing quite right, but who’ll care so long as the gist is right, and the intention more or less honourable?

I know mine has been an ordinarily extraordinary life. One worth recording, if only for its wonderful uniqueness. If only for the times I’ve bridged – from slide rule and wind-up watch to computer and digital, on-demand TV. Jesus! My Granddad only ever learnt to ride a bicycle and a shaggy cavalry pony in the Great War. And his father – by all reports – had been terrified the first time he traveled faster than 60 miles/hour in a steam train! Yet I drive to work without a blink, in a car that runs on battery and petrol power, already in the looming shadow of a world running out of oil.

I’ve just never wanted to be a nameless, humourless stranger, lasting well beyond my real days in the bottom of some iron trunk deep in some forgotten backyard. Or worse still, fading from all records, courtesy of what one academic friend describes as the New White Century – a digital era in which images are never going to be as hard and fast as those recorded onto glass photographic plate.

Philip Adams once told me that history should more rightly be called myth-tory. Or should that be myth-story? Either way, when it comes to extremely well-recorded events, historians argue interminably about what really happened. And why. So what hope have we mere mortals, with our seemingly unimportant and ill-recorded lives – so far as the greater world is concerned, anyway – of ever fathoming the ‘truth’ around us.

I’m increasingly comfortable with the idea of swinging through a Gonzo Family Tree. I’ll tell you lots. Some fragments will be bigger than others. Some will be truer than others. (To me, they’ve all become true through the constant re-telling in my own head.) The bottom-line reality, though, is that it’s my tree – right or wrong – and it’s up to you to swig along beside me, determining what you’ll accept or reject.

Anyway, Dad has told me many more times than I believe I can remember that life isn’t a dress rehearsal; we only come on stage once.

Taking stock . . .

2006-08-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

Many of us believe our lives are ordinary. That they lack explosive excitment we've come to expect of those we believe should have their deeds recorded for posterity.

But each of us, no matter how seemingly humble, travels an extraordinary road - one never before walked, and one that will never be repeated.

I have slowly realised in recent years that elements of my life - and the family myths and legends surrounding my life - are worth recording. In short, mine has been an extraordinary - albeit ordinary - life.

I will add elements - including poetry, journalism, short stories and other literary bits-n-pieces - to the story as I have time, and as I remember things.

I hope you enjoy this ramble through one man's half century . . .