All the Eights Pt 2

This is the second in the series of snapshots of my life. The first was last month. (Any suggestions for a better title?)


1963

In 1963, I turned eighteen but in some ways still felt like a kid. As for most teenagers, there had been conflictions (because I knew better and it was about me), but I didn't take life too seriously and was in no hurry to grow up. Perhaps my main fear was that I didn't have full control, but to be honest, Mum and Dad gave me plenty of scope to do my own thing.

I was the oldest kid at home in 1963 because John had moved to the military college at Duntroon in Canberra. Despite this, there were still five siblings at home—four boys had been joined by our sister, Janette, who was born in 1961. (She arrived overnight, because I was ironing my hockey shirt on a Saturday morning in May, prior to playing in a match for Brighton High School, when Dad came out bleary-eyed from a sleep-in to tell me we had a baby sister).

We moved from Woodville North to Glengowrie, near Glenelg, in the middle of 1959, after Mum and Dad had been sixteen years in the little fibro house. They'd been saving during that time to build their own home, bought the block of land at 26 Kipling Avenue, and then built a beaut modern brick house which was home to me until the end of 1964.

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In 1963 I was enrolled as a student at the Wattle Park Teachers' College in Kensington, after completing high school and being granted a scholarship to train as a primary teacher. The scholarship also paid for my enrolment at Adelaide University as a part-time student and the Teachers' College allowed me time to do a couple of university subjects per year towards an Arts degree.

I lived at home during the College years—apart from course costs the scholarship was not much more than loose pocket money paid fortnightly and Mum and Dad agreed that I needn't pay them board, for which I was grateful.  At that time I was able to have various half-days at home because of my time-table, and with the other boys at school and Jan perhaps having a nap, Mum and I were able to have chats about everything under the sun, including stuff I was studying like child psychology, and this is something I've never forgotten.

To get to Wattle Park, I used to walk across to catch a bus which went up Anzac Highway to the city, switch to a second bus that went up Kensington Road to the end of the line, and then a short walk to the college. Occasionally I caught the tram into the city but there was more walking involved.

After a few months of commuting from the coast to the foothills via the city, I bought a second-hand Vespa scooter for a few pounds and used that to commute to College, saving money in fares and about an hour each way in time. The year before I did some driving lessons in the family car with Mum as my instructor and then got a driving licence, but I don't remember ever borrowing the car—I don't think it would have been allowed. Anyway, the Vespa made me independent.

The Vespa was a two-stroke 150cc Gran Sport, which meant it had four gears instead of three and more power than the 125cc standard model, as well as rider and pillion seating in one piece instead of separate seats. I had it less than two years but had a lot of fun and only crashed it three times.

The third time was the worst, when I ran into the back of a delivery van that pulled up suddenly in front of me. I know! It was my fault! Unluckily, I wasn't wearing my helmet (not compulsory at the time). Luckily, my head hit one of the small windows in the rear barn doors and broke it, which meant that instead of being dead from hitting the metal (testimony of ambo), I spent one night in hospital with concussion.

I learnt fairly quickly how to strip the Vespa down and perform maintenance tasks. The cylinder head was always coking up with black soot. The early warning was that the motor would splutter and lose power. I would shift down through the gears using engine compression to coax the scooter past parked cars enough to get out of the traffic stream. The immediate road-side solution was to remove the spark plug and extract the sliver of soot that closed the spark plug gap, a twenty-minute job. The longer-term solution, a Sunday afternoon job, was to remove the cylinder head and de-coke it, and this would be good for a month or so. From being ultra-careful, soaking the cylinder head in petrol and gently brushing with a toothbrush, I progressed over the months to scraping ruthlessly and unsympathetically with a large screwdriver!

One morning, I was on my way to a University English exam in the city when the Vespa refused to perform according to requirements and I had to remove coke from the spark plug not once but twice. I was greasy, hot and bothered, and an hour late for the three hour exam which I had no hope of passing. One exam question asked for an exposition of "braggadocio" in literature; I was in such a mood that I seized on this and wrote extensively in the time available about Tony Braggadocio, a fish and chips shop owner, not so much a short story as incoherent rambling. I didn't pass the exam.

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When we moved to Glengowrie in 1959 I was in my second year at Woodville High School and knew many of my classmates from primary school. The new start I had to make at Brighton High School was traumatic to some extent, in a new environment, knowing no-one. This was exacerbated by the fact that the subjects I was studying did not transfer fully to the new school. In the academic stream I was in, I studied both Latin and History, but at Brighton these were alternatives; in another time-slot two subjects were offered, but I wasn't doing either of those. The solution was that I would study History on my own in the library in that latter time-slot, and seek assistance when required—I was fourteen at the time—not a recipe for making new friends and fitting in, but I survived it.

I know now that I should have given up Latin. I loved it for the Roman history, and translations were like jigsaws or word puzzles, always a challenge. But I didn't apply myself to the rigour of learning the intricacies involved. I failed the fourth year exam and had to sit a supplementary exam in the summer holidays in order to matriculate. My marks were just good enough to give me a second chance. I vividly remember sitting in the backyard shed with its corrugated iron roof, sweltering in a heatwave, the table-tennis table strewn with my Latin books and notes, and the sweat pouring off me as I laboriously translated Ovid and tried to make my translation sound poetic. I did pass the supplementary exam, though.

But to top off the story, when I started at University I enrolled in Latin, convinced that it was an essential foundation of a well-rounded education! Of course, I failed the exam.

*     *     *     *     *

Settling into Brighton High School and the new neighbourhood was made amazingly easier by the fact that our street was full of teenaged boys, with ages spanning a couple of years similar to Peter and me. Chris lived across the street and was in my home class at school. We became friends. Jock lived next door to Chris, was slightly younger and didn't go to our school, but over time he became a closer friend because we had many interests in common.

In those days we still had no television in our house and had to keep occupied in other ways. It's not possible to describe how teenage boys think and dream up weird activities, but we did have a camaraderie exemplified by the fact that the "Kipling Kids" from our street pushed a bath on wheels from the Glenelg beachfront to the Adelaide CBD to raise funds for the Children's Hospital annual appeal.

 

 The photo shows that we were all fashionable in board shorts despite the lack of surf (or surfboards) anywhere near where we lived. Jock is on the left, Peter sitting down in the bath on the left and me standing on the right.

In the last couple of years of high school my interests were largely non-academic. I played tennis and hockey, and was interested in cars and bikes, music and the beach.

I had a bicycle while still in primary school and rode to school for a couple of years even though it was only about 700 metres.  Woodville High was about 1.2km south and an easy ride. My bike was a hand-me-down from John, with no gears and no hand-brakes, just a coaster hub brake. Before we left Woodville, we made trips by bike to Henley Beach for swimming, about 10 km, and east to Windsor Gardens to visit a friend of John, roughly 12km uphill. At the time, these were like epic journeys to unexplored country even though the distances were not great.

In the summer holidays at Glengowrie, probably in 1961, I worked in a casual job as an assistant to a truck driver delivering blocks of ice to caravan parks and customers who had no refrigerator but only an icebox. With some of my pay I bought a brand-new, two-tone blue Healing bike. It had a three-speed Sturmey Archer rear hub and handbrakes, quite unfamiliar to me. I loved it and apart from spending a lot of time cleaning and maintaining it, I would race as fast as possible to and from school, about 2.5km. The bike meant that the whole district, from Jetty Road, Glenelg to the Brighton Jetty and beyond, was accessible to an exploring teenager.

But I was also interested in cars and kept abreast of all new developments. For several years I used much of my pocket money to buy Wheels and Sports Car World magazines every month. I had a predilection for small exotic cars such as the Goggomobil Dart and NSU Printz. For a long time my favourite car was the Fiat 500 Bambino (I took a photo of a pale-blue one near the Patawalonga Creek) and I was impressed by the Volkswagen wins in round-Australia rallies against bigger, more powerful competitors. During boring lessons at school my doodling was often futuristic car designs.

In 1963 I bought my first car for a few pounds. It was a 1932 Austin Seven tourer. I also bought a second car with an aluminium racing body for spare parts. The plan was to restore the Austin to its former glory, with help from Dad. The body was formed over a wooden frame, some of which was rotten, and I remember that Dad meticulously shaped hardwood replacement pieces for the curved leading door-frame edges so that the door hinges had something solid to be fixed into. We sprayed the body British racing green and the mudguards black. It looked magnificent. However, when I left Adelaide at the end of 1964 it was still not finished and I gave it to Lester—I never did get to drive it.

While that was happening, my friend Jock from across the street bought a huge limousine, an Austin Twelve from around 1929 with leather upholstery and tons of interior space, and I helped him work on that to restore it (I said earlier we had similar interests!). I can remember spending Sunday afternoons in the shed of Jock's grandfather where the car was stored, lounging in the huge rear tan-leather seat, listening to pop music while refurbishing brass-work like the massive headlights.

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I began playing hockey at Woodville High School, where the coach was Gerry Phillips, my Latin teacher. He was an excellent mentor who knew how to nurture players and went on to become the state men's coach. He taught me the value of being left-handed on the left side of the field.

Being left-handed, I played left half-back, the theory being that as the opposing right-winger rampaged down the right flank against the boundary line, protecting the ball with his body, I could lean across, while running alongside with the extended stick in my left hand, and steal the ball with a neat flick of my dominant wrist. Sometimes it worked.

The interest in hockey was not so great when I moved to Brighton High and I think we coached ourselves. Most weeks we were thrashed by the other schools. However, I think I was able to pull off the left-handed steal just sufficiently for my team-mates to think I wasn't such a bad player. (I forgot to mention that hockey sticks are all right-handed and no-one can tell if you are left-handed—it's like a secret weapon—in my mind anyway).

 I'm second from the left in this photo, playing for Brighton High at West Beach.

At the Teachers' College there were enough of us to form a hockey team and we played in the district competition. Again we had no coach and had little time to practise together. We were often short a player and couldn't take matches too seriously, so we never won. I enjoyed playing in bare feet which was unconventional, to say the least. It made me feel more nimble and alert, but was obviously fraught with danger and not viable if the grass was wet and slippery.

Peter and I began playing tennis while still at Woodville. There was a tennis club in Thirteenth Avenue, less than three hundred metres from home and we often went to play after school. After we moved to Glengowrie we joined the Holdfast Tennis Club, on the eastern side of the Glenelg Oval, and played matches on Saturday afternoon. I also played some Saturday morning matches for Brighton High but suspect I was only a fill-in. I like to think that I had a hard, flat serve, and being left-handed could surprise my opponent. Unfortunately, my most consistent play was the double fault. It wasn't long before Peter could beat me all the time and I stopped playing once I left high school.

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For the last year or so of high school I had a girl friend, Liz. The peer group I was part of began to pair off for social occasions—everything from school dances to afternoons lounging around on the beach—and it was important to not be the odd one out. Being the odd one out was untenable, given the condescension involved in feigning attention to the odd one out's riveting conversation while kissing one's girlfriend.

Liz's mother, a single mum, worked on the weekends as a dancing instructor and sometimes we went into the city to indulge in ball-room dancing. I learnt the rudiments of the military three-step and the Canadian barn-dance to the dulcet tones of the twin saxophones of the Billy Vaughn orchestra, but I never became either adept or enthusiastic.

Without female siblings (until I was sixteen) as role models, I understood that girls were on a completely different wave-length and I wouldn't have been the first boy to feel gauche in dealing with the opposite sex. I can remember the agony of deciding what to buy Liz for a Christmas or birthday present!

The naughty bits were mostly confined to standing in the shadows against the huge stone gateposts at Liz's place, after an evening at the pictures or similar, pressing close and fondling until Liz's Mum, realising we must be home by now, would call out from the front of the house, end of story.

While at Wattle Park, I did fall in love once (and she rode pillion on my Vespa once!) but didn't have a "steady" girlfriend, and I was involved in groups that didn't necessitate having a partner, so that I only occasionally dated a girl to go to the pictures or a dance.

In 1963 I joined the college Bushwalking Club, and the Tea and Damper Club, which was interested in traditional bush music. The membership of the two groups was intertwined. Activities included meetings where we made music and had sing-alongs, went on picnics to do the same thing, and went bushwalking, from day trips to long weekends.

The longest walk I did was a ten-day excursion in the Flinders Ranges. About a dozen of us drove in a truck to Wilpena Pound. We carried all our supplies for that period in backpacks and walked west and north of the Pound to such places as Edeowie Creek and Aroona Valley in a long circular walk. We relied on finding water on the way, usually at stock watering points, and once, when one of these was dry, we walked in the dark to find the next one, rather than walk in the heat of the next day without water. I suppose we felt like early explorers.

A photo taken on our big walk. Notice the complete lack of any sleeping mats or pillows, only groundsheets.

I started playing harmonica at this time and could play enough "by ear" to provide some accompaniment to the singing around the campfire. Incidentally, the Tea and Damper Club (named from a song title) was started by Graham Jenkin, my senior by a couple of years and teaching at Coober Pedy in 1963. He wrote some wonderful ballads of his own and did much to collect old folk songs.

As an aside, in April 1964 a group of us were dropped off at dusk on Sunday evening in the city after a weekend of bushwalking, weary, smelly, and covered in dust. On our way to public transport and home, packs on our backs, we walked past a row of people, extending more than a block, preparing to camp on the footpath like destitute homeless folk. It transpired that they were making an early queue to buy tickets to the Adelaide Beatles concerts!

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At the College I was taught what was considered necessary to become a primary school teacher—everything from how to teach multiplication and division to stages in the life cycle of a frog. As well as methodology we were also given the essential background knowledge. While we were taught the basics of music theory and notation, we also had to learn a musical instrument. The default instrument was the recorder—class tuition was provided, and there's nothing more calculated to turn anyone against music than the sound of twenty recorders in unison trying to play the same notes.

In my case, I soon enjoyed the thrill of being able to translate what was in my head to audible music and I was soon attempting (on the recorder!) jazz standards that I'd been listening to, usually on my back in my bedroom, but at least once in the College music classroom, to general incredulity.

Colin Thiele, the well-known author of childrens' books like Storm Boy, was a lecturer at Wattle Park. I joined his elective sessions in creative writing. A handful of us met once a week in his office and discussed work which we had submitted for his criticism. I was writing poetry at the time, some of which was made available for his comment, and I still appreciate the advice I received (much of which involved metaphor and similes, which I don't seem to have adopted very well, but mostly he said to write what you know). He went on to become vice-Principal and then Principal of the College after I left.

In the second year of my training, I joined the specialist group in the Rural Course, learning how to cope with teaching in a one-teacher school with all grades from one to seven. (I'm proud to say that in my career I possibly taught in more one-teacher schools than almost any teachers). There were practice sessions at Netley Primary where several classes were set up as model one-teacher schools, including lots of sets of siblings as is found in the bush in a one-roomed school. It took hours to prepare lessons! I worked for a fortnight at Inman Valley school and boarded on a dairy farm, my first taste of country living.

We Ruralies saw ourselves as a breed apart, willing to do the tough stuff, and were usually the same group that were bushwalking and enjoyed shearing songs. In my case, I couldn't wait to get out of the city. (In fact I was offered another year at Wattle Park to complete my uni degree, but rejected it in favour of getting out of Adelaide).

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At the end of 1960 I drove with Mum and Dad to Perth (the other boys went under John's care on the train). The road from Port Augusta to Norseman was hundreds of kilometres of corrugated gravel and bull-dust, my first proper taste of the outback. I loved it and have never forgotten that introduction. I got my first camera, a Kodak Brownie 127, shortly before this and I still have a couple of photos from the trip, including one of a rabbiter's truck filled to overflowing with hundreds of rabbit carcases, taken at Balladonia.

In the summer of 1962-3, Jock and I drove his Ford "100E" on a coming-of age trip into Victoria. We spent Christmas Eve in Lorne and New Year's Eve in Lakes Entrance, camping in a tiny tent just big enough for four with a bit of stacking, if it became necessary (usually not). Then we travelled north on the Omeo road, a primitive dirt track—Jock scraped the cliff face once, and further on hit a wallaby—and after a day or so in Bright we had run out of money, spending more than planned on hangovers, and we made a beeline for home.

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Up until 1963, my musical interests were almost limited to pop music. This meant following the "hit parade" or "Top 40" by listening to commercial radio and clipping the "chart" from the newspaper once a week.

Perversely, I didn't like the mass of pop music—normally my favourites never reached the top ten. I liked 'proper' rock 'n' roll (my term), some instrumentals, and the odd song whose lyrics, gimmick or sound made it stand out from the crowd.

"Proper" rock 'n' roll was always up-tempo with plenty of heavy rhythm and mongrel vocal, with or without angst. No ballads, no tin pan alley written for profit. There was She's My Baby (Johnny O'Keefe), Hippy Hippy Shake (Chan Romero) and Let's Have a Party (Wanda Jackson). I used to be an Elvis fan in the 1950s but can't think of anything decent he did in the 1960s.

There were some songs I enjoyed for their quirkiness or clever lyrics. Multiplication (Bobby Darin) and Does Your Chewing Gum (Lonnie Donegan) spring to mind.

I was very much into instrumental music (possibly not having to listen to banal pop lyrics), especially with a bit of panache. Joey's Song (Bill Haley) probably put me on this track a few years earlier. I can think of Wabash Blues (The Viscounts), Wonderland by Night (Louis Prima) or Mexico (Bob Moore), from that time. Surf music soon became the big craze (taking over from the Shadows). I often rode the Vespa to Somerton or Seacliff Lifesavers on the beach for the Saturday night dance, stomping the night away in board shorts. Pipeline (the Chantays) would have been played every week (along with Apache).

Instrumental music, which included Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk and Dave Brubeck's Take Five, led to my interest in jazz. By 1963 I was listening to an eclectic mix of jazz, both live and recorded, from New Orleans traditional and big band all the way to bebop. I can remember sitting in Jock's loungeroom, watching his latest LP rotate on the turntable and listening to the piano of Thelonius Monk. At one point Monk calls out "Quarter tone! Quarter tone!" Not only did Jock and I discuss at length how this could be done on the piano but Jock went around for weeks injecting the phrase into any conversation with suitable American accent.

In 1963 and '64 I loved frequenting the jazz clubs in Hindley Street and Grenfell Street, downstairs in a tiny setting where you could almost touch the clarinet player and the sounds were all in and around your head. I still have a unique compilation LP record pressed on vinyl with the tracks selected by me from tape recordings of one of the clubs, featuring bands like the Adelaide Allstars.

My record collection soon included albums by Duke Ellington, Chris Barber and Zoot Sims; my grandmother, Mum Mort, even gave me a Gerry Mulligan album for my birthday.

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The joke among Wattle Park Ruralies was that if you applied to teach in the South-East you would be appointed to the Far North or anywhere except the South-East (in order to toughen us up). At the end of the course, in our appointment applications, we were required to nominate three districts in order of preference. I knew of the Muloorina sheep station from meeting my predecessor when he came back to visit Wattle Park, and also from Donald Campbell's presence there when he broke the land speed record on Lake Eyre. On my application I wrote no district name but wrote "Muloorina", with no second or third choice.

 I think the Education Department got the message that I was serious. At the end of 1964, with an appointment slip in my hand, I rushed into the Norwood Hotel, where the Ruralies were gathered to compare appointments, and screamed that I'd got Muloorina.  Much rejoicing and celebration.

Thus I turned my back on the city. I left home and began a long teaching career while I was still nineteen. I spent two happy years at Muloorina in 1964-5.

This was an attempted self-portrait of the fully-fledged teacher in the flat at Muloorina Station, complete with record player and treble recorder.

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Coming next . . . 1973

Ommel 2005

   I've been sorting through digital photos so that one day I might actually find what I'm looking for. Anyway, I revisited a set of photos that I took in 2005 and decided that they are the makings of a good photo essay.  

   The subject is Ommel, the farm at Pearsondale near Sale in Victoria, that Doortje's parents acquired in the late 1960s. This photo is part of the introduction, showing the lady of the manor and her daughter looking out over the property.

   The photos were all taken in an hour or so and my aim was to preserve some of the sights that had become so familiar over the years that we ignored them. This shot featuring the old hay cart was taken in the implement shed.

   A favourite place for me was the edge of the swamp where this carcase of a 1940s sedan rested for the forty years that I knew the place. I thought it was photogenic and took lots of shots.

   As the sun got lower and the light got better, I took more and more shots of the late summer grass.  This shows the decommissioned dairy.

   All I did to complete the set was to choose forty photos that could be cropped to 16:9 without detracting from the composition. You can see the results at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rob_james/sets/

   I recommend that you click on the first photo in the set and when you see the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner, click on this and choose "view Slideshow". (Flickr is hopeless to work out). There are no descriptions for the photos.

Op Shop Selections

This post is about the LP records you find, usually in plastic milk crates or torn, scuffed cardboard cartons, in charity op shops and second-hand shops.  There are some records you will never find in such shops, and some you will always be able to find.  This is about the latter, also known generally as easy-listening or middle of the road albums.

The main criterion for selection is the chance of finding the record in an op shop (nothing to do with musical excellence). I'm proud to present my Top 12 of op shop records.

1. The clear winner is Mitch Miller (and the Gang).  There will be several albums in the shop containing Meet Me in St Louis, Louis, (and several Mitch Miller albums) but this one could not be beaten. A large proportion of the op shop collection will be "sing along" records, or homogenised, generic house-band compilations that will make you sing along to avoid listening to the production.

2. Singalonga Max - Max Bygraves.  Max was the English equivalent of the American, Mitch Miller, so now all bases are covered. Volumes 1 - 10 will also be available at different times, but how could you go past the cover of Vol 4?

3. The highest ranked of the various musicals from the 1960s and 1970s (the era we are essentially dealing with here) is undoubtedly South Pacific. Besides the genuine soundtrack album there may also be several homogenised, generic house-band versions with no indication of who does what.

4. You will never find an Elvis album, or a Beatles album, but you will always find a Gene Pitney album. Don't ask me why. And the Gene Pitney album will have a cover like this. Or it will be a Tom Jones album. In which case there will be a girl on the cover.

5. Winifred Atwell was a honky-tonk pianist who played ragtime like Scott Joplin. Unlike Joplin, enough people bought her records to keep the op shops well-supplied. Her records were all an inch thick and as heavy as a door-stop. I'm not really sure why she didn't use her normal piano or if we would have known the difference. She was a good pianist but not for a whole record.

6. Both Bing Crosby and Christmas records are well-represented in op shops, usually with White Christmas in the title or among the tracks, and this easily canters into the Top 12.

7. Three factors, none of which may be sufficient on its own, form a winning combination when present together. I refer, of course, to movie themes, an easy-listening orchestra, and nudity on the record cover.  The first two of these are found in abundance in the op shop, the third may be limited in some religious establishments known for their wowsery.

8. Is there such a thing as easy-listening, middle of the road classical music? Of course there is, and you'll find it in abundance in your nearest op shop. There could be no better example than the James Last big band playing Fur Elise in the manner of Trumpet A' Go Go without the piano. James Last sold thousands of records in the UK and Australia, and they are now in Frankston op shops.

9. Lots of op shop records are on such labels as Music for Pleasure, Fontana, Reader's Digest and World Record Club.  This example, of "hits" such as American Pie played by an anonymous band and chorus, so that all tracks sound the same despite their diversity in original form, is typical of the compilation genre. There is in fact nothing better about the whole package than the cover art, and that is just silly.

10. Mantovani was one of dozens of bandleaders making records in the 1960s and 70s. Names such as Victor Sylvester, Andre Kostelanetz, Nelson Riddle, Les Baxter were all pioneers of easy listening music and can be found in the op shop.  Mantovani was popular - think of Take the 'A' Train played by saccharine strings - and is always available.

11. I have no idea why Frankie Laine was popular in Australia, but the fact is you'll never find a Slim Dusty album in an op shop, whereas Hell Bent for Leather comes in at no 11. Heaven forbid that marketing might have played a part. Other artists who are similarly well represented include Johnny Mathis, Kamahl, John Denver and Doris Day.

12. I attribute the proliferation of Nana Mouskouri records to the success of her TV shows, or some unknown factor. Most of her popular records were like this one - a collection of French songs including Guantanamera.  Interestingly, the good records she made, of Greek songs, accompanied by the Athenians, cannot be found in op shops.

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Some honourable mentions (Ones I couldn't bear to leave out):

Presumably no-one bought this to hear the Glen Miller Orchestra (they would have been disappointed), but perhaps for the Louis Armstrong bonus tracks!

This is as close as the op shop gets to real classical music, from an obscure label with no known orchestra or conductor, a strange bloke on the cover who looks like Governor Bligh, and "AS SEEN ON TV".

Bert Kaempfert, Billy Vaughn, and Acker Bilk, are three musicians I can think of who subsumed their talent in easy-listening music for profit and are well-represented in the op shop.  This record was half good and my Mum had a copy.

Liberace (Libber-archie) was a flamboyant effeminate piano player apparently loved by all. There are dozens of Liberace records, so you'll always find one, and if you're tempted, one is all you'll need. I can't imagine that this record was made to give anyone pleasure except Liberace and his bank manager.

The Hammond organ, after being the accompaniment in picture theatres for silent movies, made only a brief comeback as the preferred accompaniment for the sing along, but there is still always one record featuring Hammond in every op shop. (I admit the album shown would be a rare find - most Klaus Wunderlich records feature pictures of girls, the preferred accompaniment to 1960s easy listening).

 Helmut Zacharias was another band leader we often heard on our radios, with orchestra of mostly strings to make the sound "easy" and require no response from the listener.  There is a recording of Strauss waltzes in every op shop, mostly made by session musicians called the Reader's Digest Light Orchestra or something similar.

There are records of My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I, Pyjama Game, Oklahoma and Calamity Jane available periodically so that you'll be able to find at least one of them. Of course, you can always find South Pacific (see above). I imagine because they are not middle of the road enough, West Side Story or Carmen Jones are never available.

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If you can see any anomalies or glaring omissions, please let me know in the comments below.

Gippsland Sojourn

 

The title above comes from an album on cassette released by the Briagolong Bush Band in the 1980s, but I'll use it here to refer to our recent trip to Lakes Entrance and other places in Gippsland.

We set off last Monday and spent the night with Helmy and Gavin in Maffra. Gavin looks good—among other things we talked about the plans for his eightieth birthday in January. Needless to say, Helmy had baked a cake, at which Doortje pointed her camera!

It was a coincidence that I'd been looking to buy an album by the folk/jazz/blues singer Margret RoadKnight, recorded in 1987 and now re-issued on CD, and discovered that she lives in Kalimna West on the outskirts of Lakes Entrance. On Tuesday when we got to Lakes, I phoned her and we went to visit. (To reminisce a bit, Doortje had seen her perform in Melbourne in the late 1960s and we saw her in Bairnsdale in about 1990 and have an autographed LP record from then).

Anyway, we now have a couple of autographed CDs as well, and had a nice chat with her at her rural property.

On Wednesday we drove to Marlo to see the Snowy River and the Cape Conran coastal park. Saw some great coastal scenery, some beaut birds including blue wrens, and Doortje fossicked on the beach, as is her wont.  We had lunch at the Marlo pub and watched a rainstorm, the only one for the day, pass by while we ate. It was windy on the beach, though.

Next day we went to Nyerimilang homestead, a National Trust site at Nungurner. In our Bairnsdale days, I spent time doing a painting course, and a couple of times we visited Nyerimilang to paint the scenery, which is magnificent. The homestead is on a cliff overlooking the lakes.

The homestead had many period artifacts on display, including this clock, which we were both impressed by.

We visited our friend, Marion Pearce, Doortje's long-time work colleague, at Sarsfield. Marion's husband, Jumbo, died in April, and now she, too, has been diagnosed with bowel cancer with complications. Despite the sadness involved, it was great to see the family again—three daughters, May, Michelle and Linda, were all there, and it was difficult to know which one was Marion! And of course, James, Marion's foster son we knew as a little tacker, very proudly showed us his bungalow, with lots of Holden posters and massive audiovisual system.

More by fluke than management, we stopped at the Bruthen market, where we met Perran's sister, Liz, and her two boys. The previous day, we called in to see Perran's Dad, Rob, at Metung, after having lunch at the Metung pub and being entertained by the pelicans on the wharf outside the window. Rob's newest enterprise is probably best described as computer-controlled woodworking, except that in his case the whole shebang is designed by him from scratch, from computer software to router machine and computerised product design.

We were incredibly pleased (and grateful) that Rob gave us an example of his work, this "funky fiddle dish" carved out of a single piece of camphor laurel and beautifully finished. He (as Sea Eagle Designs) now has them available in retail outlets such as in Yarragon, and we saw the local sea eagle continually circling while we enjoyed a cuppa.

Before we left Lakes, and went back to spend one more night with Helmy and Gavin, we visited Lake Tyers and walked on the sandhill and beach there. This photo shows the entrance and the work of the waves in eroding the headland.

On the way back to Maffra, we had lunch in Sale and called in to see Terry and Roger, very old friends at Longford, and met one of their grandkids. 

We were almost a week away, and I must say that, if we have to have localities without desert sand, the East Gippsland coast and hinterland is a part of the world I'm very fond of, with lots of good friends. 

*     *     *     *     *

There's a set of photos from the trip at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rob_james/sets/72157635235016587/

All the Eights Pt 1

I'm hoping to do a series of seven pieces about my life, with a snapshot of the situation every decade.  Here's the first instalment :

1953

In 1953, sixty years ago as I write, I was eight years old. My youngest brother, Alan, was twelve months old.  Lester would turn three during the year, Peter seven, and my older brother John would turn ten.

We lived at 97 Owen Street in Woodville North, a north-western suburb of Adelaide. My Mum and Dad, Connie and Ron, had lived there for ten years since the house (in fact, the whole suburb) was built during World War II.

Our house was on the south-eastern corner of Owen Street and Thirteenth Avenue.  Google Maps and Streetview demonstrate (2013) that the house still exists, as do quite a few of the fibro-clad and tile-roofed clones that were its neighbours. The houses were built for people employed in the munitions factory at nearby Finsbury, where Dad worked as an engineer.

In 1953, the yard of our house had a chook run, fruit trees and a vegetable garden. Obviously, my desire to produce eggs, vegetables and fruit in my backyard stems from this period and I like to think that Dad picked up the motivation from his own childhood in Kalgoorlie, WA.

We had large lemon and fig trees along the side fence, and in the back yard there were apple, peach and apricot that I remember. A large stand of bamboo stood next to a garden shed by the chookyard fence.

Perhaps when I was a year or so older than this, we boys adopted the pastime of climbing onto the shed roof, reaching high to grab a couple of bamboos and then swinging out to the ground using the bending bamboo poles as a "parachute" to come back to earth.  We probably would have argued about who was playing the roles of Biggles, Algy and Ginger, the famous flying police from the kids' radio serial, as we leapt from our burning plane just before it broke up. Dad would not have been impressed by the wanton damage to bamboos which could be used for bean or tomato trellises.

We had jobs to do, of course, and both parents were strict about them, but we could find entertainment in obscure places. In the garden shed, Dad built wooden bins to hold the chook feed, one for wheat and one for bran and pollard, each similar in volume to, but not as tall as, 200 litre drums.  One of my jobs was to mix bran and pollard (look it up!) with water and feed it to the chooks each morning, along with some wheat; in the afternoons, change their water, another dose of wheat, and collect the eggs. It was also fun, during games of "hidey", to dive into the wheat bin as if the grains of wheat were water and hide with just my head exposed above the wheat and the lid closed over me! It was probably also scary, and this the reason I remember it!

I can't remember if we had a rooster but we certainly had chickens at least once. One day I stayed home from school because one of our chickens, a few days old, was sick, and I wanted to look after it. The chick must have been almost dead, looking for a bucket to kick, when Mum, as a last resort, got a teaspoon of brandy and held it so the chicken had no choice but to immerse its beak in the brandy. Upon which, the poor thing flopped over and died—it looked to me as if the brandy had killed it, and Mum must have done some fast, soothing talking to comfort me.

Believe it or not, another job, on the weekend when Dad was home, was to sit on the back lawn and pull out onion weed. Dad had a thing about lawn perfection and ours had a long way to go. The lawn mower pushed the tops of onion weed over rather than slice them off, so we had to sit there and pull out the weeds one by one, being careful not to leave behind the bulbs which would only proliferate. On a sunny day, with the desire to be leaping about and otherwise playing boisterously, sitting on a patch of onion weed for an hour was like being locked in a cell. I'm not complaining, just saying!

Talking about jobs and strict parents, I was drying the dishes once and complaining bitterly and at great length, possibly because it was John's turn and he was doing homework; when Mum had heard enough of my nonsense she wacked me on the head with a handful of sudsy spoons—the injustice as much as the pain made me howl. Dad entered the fray, disturbed from reading his paper in the lounge room, and I expected him to support the aggrieved party, but of course he gave me a verbal lashing and I had to just keep drying.

Our playground extended way beyond the backyard as we got older.  There was really no traffic and we could wander freely. There was a park on Thirteenth Avenue with a playground about a hundred metres from our house.  In the playground was what I would call a plank swing (I haven't seen or heard of one since). It isn't easy to describe so here's a picture of one from the internet (proving that they did exist!)

The one in Thirteenth Avenue was smaller but essentially the same design, the main features being the swinging plank and the safety rails around it.  You can see why they no longer exist.  It was easy for young kids on the ground to lose concentration and be belted in the back, or back of the head, by the plank. Accidents were common.

We played for hours at a time on the plank swing. Often it was a ship with the ground being the sea; we were sailors or pirates, having great fun climbing the rigging, walking the plank and running around the decks (on the safety rails!) to avoid being caught by the enemy. Leaping from the safety rails or dropping from the superstructure onto the wildly swinging plank were especially daring moves and often ended in tears!

There were another ten or so kids living in the immediate surroundings and often many of us would get together. We had several places away from parents' eyes. Across Owen Street, further down, there was a vacant paddock (possibly a buffer zone between the houses and the factories) with the remains of a cellar in it, all that was left of a house from earlier times. The cellar, about the size of a large room with no roof, was too deep to jump into, but we cut steps into the vertical clay sides to gain access and then spent long periods, unseen by any adults passing by on the nearby footpath, digging nooks and cupboards in the walls to hide our treasures, helping ourselves to the stacks of packing cases that were abandoned in the long grass of the urban paddock, and constructing elaborate games about gangs of diamond thieves and other scenarios with plenty of scope for drama.

Across the road from our house, the Nesbitts had a large block with a huge shed from which they ran a trucking business. We sometimes played in the grease and oil of the shed and its maintenance pit. But the best feature was a mezzanine floor filled with stacks of tyres, a great place to play hidey—up there under the roof, with towers and cubbies of tyres, it was mysterious and dark, a challenge just to get up there, and I have a vague recollection of rats or mice. The aftermath was usually big trouble for coming home with black clothes, hands and faces, looking like mechanics after a twelve-hour shift.

Another of our pastimes (at least for a brief period) was to play practical jokes. I suspect now that Dad told us about doing these things when he was a kid and we had to try them. We had a rosemary hedge along the low, side fence of the front yard—the hedge was cover enough to hide us from passers-by on the footpath. We'd hide in the hedge with a brick until someone came past. As the unsuspecting victim passed our hiding place, we'd drop a coin on the brick. The perplexed pedestrian then spent time searching for the coin and wondering how it could have been dropped, until our giggles revealed us and we were yelled at, as invariably happened.

Another time we filled one of Dad's used tobacco pouches with grass and left it in the middle of the road while we hid behind the hedge to await developments. We missed the denouement, however, because a car driver passed it, slammed on the brakes, backed up, slammed on the brakes again, picked up the "tobacco" by leaning out without getting out of the car, and then drove off! We were left wondering how the driver would react to the disappointment, after expending all that effort, and decided against repeating the experiment.

*    *    *    *    *

Sixty years ago, we made our own fun—there were no televisions or computers. (Our house had a wood stove, wood heater for warmth, hot water in the laundry and bathroom, and a wringer and copper.) The only electrical goods were a refrigerator and radios.

We had a console radio in the lounge, with a large speaker I could put my ear against, sitting on the floor in front of it. During the week, we listened every afternoon to the ABC children's session, which included the Argonauts' Club (although we were passive participants), and to various serials, including "Biggles", my favourite, with its introduction of the old rotary aero engine starting up, the engine rising to full throttle, and then the voice-over "The air adventures of Biggles…".

But we must have had a mantle radio in the kitchen as well, because I can remember listening to music there. We had no dining room. The dining table was in the kitchen, along the wall separating it from the lounge room and entrance. The sink was on the opposite, outside wall, and the wood stove with its chimney, and fridge, were on the end, front wall. It was a small room and I have no idea how seven of us, one in a high chair, could have enjoyed meals there in 1953, but we did.

I think the table was pushed against the wall between meals. At any rate, I can remember sitting at the table, facing the wall, while shelling peas for the Sunday roast, and listening to that mantle radio. It was the music, I am sure, which is the main character in this memory. There were no frozen peas then and it was a regular Sunday job to sit at the table with a colander of pea pods, a saucepan for the finished product and newspaper sheets to collect the empty pods. I became adept at splitting the pods with my fingernail and then shovelling the peas out of the pod with my thumb into the saucepan.

As an aside, the Sunday roast was often a leg of lamb, which in those days included the lower leg with the wonderfully crisp bits on the bone, and of course the "knucklebone" which I suppose was part of the knee joint and collected by us kids to use in the game of knucklebones, before you could buy plastic "knuckles" in the shops. When we had roast beef we also had Yorkshire pudding, a delicacy which I haven't tasted since those days (it also made the meat go further and becomes redundant in times of plenty), and it was during this time that I learnt to make proper gravy, and this became my job from an early age.

The process of shelling peas was made enjoyable by the accompaniment of mid-day Sunday radio. My recollection is that the ABC had a program of listener requests and the fare was eclectic by ABC standards. The music ranged from light classical (not exceeding four minutes?) to country music. I'm guessing a little bit but I imagine the Blue Danube Waltz or Flight of the Bumblebee interspersed with Mario Lanza, Bing Crosby and Frankie Laine.

An unwavering memory is that I heard Slim Dusty's Rusty It's Goodbye at this time, and Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, presumably sung by Hank Williams. There was also Tex Morton, and another song that we heard over and over (every week?) was Bing Crosby's When the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day). I have a vague feeling that Rusty It's Goodbye ("By a lonely railway station…") gave me my first intimation of the ramifications of death.

I think when I was eight that I was taken in by novelty songs or lyrics with a gimmick, easy to remember and join in. Songs that date from this time, of which I still know every word of the lyrics, include (How much is that) Doggie in the Window, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo, Heart of My Heart and so on.

*    *    *    *    *

At school, I was in grade three, my final year in the infant section of the school before moving into the primary school in grade four. School subjects had a simplicity that reflected our uncomplicated life. We did arithmetic, not maths; English was compartmentalised into composition, spelling, dictation and  writing (hand-writing was a subject!); other subjects were nature study, music, art and craft.

In grade three spelling we learnt homophones like there and their; then in dictation the teacher would dictate a sentence containing a homophone and we had to write it correctly using the context to correctly spell the homophone.  I was reasonably good at exercises that relied mostly on memory such as dictation and times tables.

In nature study, I remember keeping silkworms in a box in the classroom. They were fed exclusively on mulberry leaves, and after hatching from black eggs the size of pinheads, they grew into black-headed light-grey caterpillars the size of a grade three kid's little finger; they then spun yellow cocoons of silk around themselves. We later had our own silkworms at home and we unravelled the cocoons after soaking them in water and produced little skeins of yellow silk. I can remember some of these pressed between the pages of the dictionary for some time after.

We learnt, in art/craft, how to do "tomboy" stitch, or french knitting, using a wooden cotton reel with four nails fixed in one end around the hole. This produced four stitches in a circle, creating a long tube of knitting which could be glued in a spiral onto a cardboard circle to make a table mat!

In those days, children were supplied with milk at morning recess, and it was a coup to be chosen as milk monitor—to be trusted, to assume importance, and to get out of the last stages of the lesson—to collect the crate of milk bottles and distribute them in the porch. The bottles were miniature milk bottles, one third of a pint, with an aluminium foil cap. We had a game of removing the cap without damaging it (not easy) and then making it fly by holding the cap by the edge against the palm with the other forefinger—with a flick of the forefinger, the bottle cap could be made to spin and glide away like a flying saucer. Contests for longevity and distance of flight were held—one of the few physical activities where I didn't feel inferior.

Music in grade three was provided by the ABC schools' broadcasts and the loudspeaker above the blackboard. Let's Join In started about this time and I can still remember how we were taught to sing songs by imitation and repetition. One of the earliest songs I have a memory of learning is O Susannah ("I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee…"). In the next few years, I went on to sing in the school choir—we practised at lunch time and then sang in a massed schools' choir of maybe a thousand voices at the Woodville Town Hall—and play in the fife band. I learnt to play Men of Harlech on the fife, a tune that means nothing otherwise, but every note is still in the brain.

Every Monday morning we had a school assembly at which we saluted the flag and promised to obey our queen, and then marched inside to the sounds of the fifes and drums of the school band. As an aside, it turns out that our current national flag only became official in 1953, not a long tradition! And speaking of our queen, she was crowned (coronated?) in 1953 and we students were presented at a school assembly with a medallion about the size of a twenty cent piece and a ribbon, to mark the occasion. Special Australian stamps were printed, which I remember, but I had to look it up to find that the common red one was worth 3½d (pronounced "thruppence haypenny"), about two cents.

The "television" of 1953 was provided at school by "strip films". Sometimes we would be ushered into a darkened classroom to watch what was basically a slide show. It might be a geography lesson about the Egyptian pyramids, shown as black and white stills on a portable screen. However, the photos were on a continuous roll of 35mm film which could be rolled through a projector. The rolls of film, about the size of cotton reels, were kept in little metal canisters and the school had scores of them.

*    *    *    *    *

1953 was a big year for us because Mum and Dad bought a car, the first car they'd owned. It was a brand-new pale-green Ford Consul, made in England. Dad had been working for APAC at Finsbury, which evolved from the munitions factory, but in 1953 he became production engineer, and later production manager, of the white-goods manufacturer Kelvinator in Keswick. The car came with the new status.

 Family photo, me on the left, taken in 1955 at Belair National Park

 

We all loved the fact that the whole family could get out and do things.  I'm sure Mum loved to get out of the house. In those days, the car was liberating. We went for many "Sunday drives" and picnics to places like Golden Grove, Ti Tree Gully and Chain of Ponds. (Many of these places are now wall-to-wall suburbs). Often we would just pull off a deserted back road under a couple of gum trees and have a picnic—Mum and Dad on the rug, while five boys went silly playing hidey, chasey, end-to-end footy or cricket on the road and round the trees. Sometimes we would climb a fence and collect mushrooms.

Once I tore a strip of bark off a tree at Golden Grove and was bitten on the finger by a spider. Of course we kids knew enough to know that I was about to die, but Dad came to the rescue by nicking my finger with his pocket knife and sucking out the "poison".

We started going to the drive-in movies, the five boys all in our pyjamas. There was a drive-in on Grand Junction Road, on the south side just east of Hanson Road. We saw Alan Ladd in Shane, and another western hero was Rory Calhoun with his black, curly hair.

We also went to the Kilkenny and Croydon cinemas, also in pyjamas, but it may have been a couple of years later—I can distinctly remember the sleeping Lester and Alan being bundled back into the car with dew on the windows and lots of shivering. I have no idea if the movies were worth it!

For a time, we went to the Central Market (or East End?), where Mum and Dad would do a week's shopping on a Friday evening, while five boys in pyjamas played "I Spy" in the car, on our best behaviour, waiting for an ice-cream or chocolates (or did we already have sweets to last us an hour, like contented lambs with tails swinging?).

*    *    *    *    *

I went to Ridley Grove school until the end of 1957. I think in the final exams I finished in the top three in the school, and then went on to spend two years at Woodville High School. At the end of the decade we moved to Glenelg.

*    *    *    *    *

Coming next... 1963. 

Federal Election

   It would be wrong of me not to get involved in politics with a Federal election looming, even though the usual tendency would be not to advertise my thinking in case of alienating some readers.

   I mean, is it worth the effort?  George Monbiot said recently, "The purpose of today’s technocratic politics is to make democracy safe for corporations: to go through the motions of democratic consent while reshaping the nation at their behest".

   In a similar vein (?), W.C Fields apparently said "Start every day off with a smile and get it over with", so let's go with that.  I've finished smiling.

   This post has been prompted by a couple of graphs, which are sourced from the Federal Treasury department and are therefore presumably and eminently non-partisan.  They both show that Tony Abbott, Alan Jones and his shock-jock mates, the Australian, and many other "commentators" are simply telling lies when they allude to the economic credentials of the Labor government (or the ability of any Labor government to do as well as the Liberals).

 

   The first graph shows Federal revenue as a percentage of GDP, the amount of tax that the government collected as a per cent of the total economy.  It shows that in the Howard years the tax average came close to 26% of GDP.  When Labor took control the tax percentage reached a low of 22%.  We're asked to believe that Labor taxes us to the hilt to finance its spending!!

 The other myth is that Labor spends taxpayers' money as if it was going out of style!  The second graph shows spending as a percentage of GDP.  This graph shows that the aberration of high Labor spending in 2008-9 was due entirely to trying to mitigate the effects of the GFC and for other years it has been little different from the Howard years.  Ask not about profligate Labor spending, but about the middle-class welfare that accounts for much of the Howard spending, or that Howard spending was boosted by selling off Commonwealth assets.

And that's enough guff on the election from me.  I don't like people propagating lies to the extent that they are believed as fact.  On the other hand, I have no hesitation in further broadcasting the views of this person, from an online news forum, the origin of which I've now lost (apologies to the author for lack of attribution) :

"I cannot believe how incredibly stupid Abbott is . I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. He is Trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. He emits more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. . Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on.

Anf finally---------------Aboat you swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, and a big suck on a sour lemon. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, and a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? END OF RANT"

Army poncho

   This is the story which I wrote to present at John's 70th birthday party last Saturday night at the Belair hotel in Adelaide:

   "At the time of John's 70th birthday, I would have liked to write a song for the occasion but I hope you will enjoy this story instead.  There are many people, family and friends, who know John as a 70-year old, but how many were around or remember when he was seventeen?  I'll tell you a story of when John was seventeen.

   In 1960, when John was seventeen, he was very passionate about the army and his participation in the activities of the high school army cadets.  He had lots of paraphernalia which made him proud.  He had a slouch hat with the rising sun badge holding up the brim on the left side.  Other prized badges included one that proclaimed he was proficient in dismantling a light machine gun (LMG) and putting it together again without having any pieces left over; another badge, of crossed rifles, declared that he could hit a target with a .303 rifle while keeping quiet about the bruises developing on his right shoulder.

   Amongst the equipment which made up his uniform were a webbing belt and gaiters, both with brass buckles.  The webbing was lovingly cleaned with blanco and the brass polished with brasso.  There was hell to pay if brasso happened where only blanco should prevail.  His black boots were spit and polished with kiwi boot polish and… spit!  The polish was loosely applied and then spat upon; the mixture was spread around with brush and rag until the boots were like a mirror.  I seem to remember the claim that the boots could be used when in conversation with a girl by thrusting one foot forward such that the mirror-surface of the boot gave a perfect view up… to the end of the street!

   John had uniform trousers, braces, shirts and winter tunic.  For inclement weather, he had a waterproof poncho.  In fact, for some reason he had two (unless one was mine - I was in the cadets, too, for a while).

   He called us all out onto the back lawn one day to show us how, on an army bivouac, one could make a tent out of two army ponchos.  Pete and I might have been a bit dubious, but Alan and Lester, and Mickey the dog, were surely impressed.

   Anyway, John demonstrated (showing early skills as a teacher) how the two ponchos, instead of each being buttoned to itself with the buttons at the neck and front, could be buttoned to each other, making a double poncho!  Furthermore, with a couple of sticks and some string, a rudimentary tent could be constructed.

   While Pete and I were scoffing, we were challenged.  If we would go camping overnight, John would prove the efficacy of army methodology by providing our accommodation.

   Remember that in 1960, John was seventeen, I was fifteen and Peter was thirteen- plenty old enough to fend for ourselves, but we were still kids!

   On Saturday morning we set off on our bikes, fully equipped for camping.  It was the middle of winter and it was all too obvious that the weather forecast was predicting drizzle.  The plan was that from Glengowrie we would ride up to Brown Hill Creek, set up camp in the afternoon, and cook a meal of sausages in an old frypan before retiring for the night.  In the morning we would break camp and return home.      

   We travelled light as it was uphill nearly all the way.  I think we had strapped on our bikes some sausages, a frypan and a couple of army ponchos.

   When we arrived, there appeared to be nowhere to camp except an open grassed area.  The creek was over yonder among shrubbery and some trees, but the best camping would be in this grassed area.

   We trampled some grass down, buttoned the ponchos together, found a couple of saplings, and built the tent.  The tent ridge was less than a metre from the ground!  You had to lie on the ground to see into the tent.  This was supposed to accommodate two grown men!  I saw how it could definitely be used as a tunnel for commando training.  We spent a large amount of time in friendly discussion to determine sleeping arrangements for the coming night.

   We soldiered on!  The next item on the agenda was tea, dinner or supper, something to eat.  Everything was damp and the collection of twigs and leaves that we scrounged in the surrounding area really needed newspaper or something more flammable, of which we had none.  After a lot of trial and error, we got the bottom of the frypan lukewarm but the sausages were never cooked, and if memory serves me correctly they were abandoned, although I've always been a bit partial to raw sausage meat so perhaps this is wrong.

   Nevertheless, it had become too dark to do anything else except crawl into our "bivouac" and enjoy a good night's rest.  I can't recall for certain but I imagine Pete and I crawled on our elbows one after the other under the ponchos and then rolled, under instruction, to the sides, leaving room for John to crawl into the centre like a blackfella with his dogs, snug as a bug, etc.  Again, I can't recall for certain but I reckon Pete and I at least had some poncho as a blanket, while either John's feet or head would have been poking out at one end.

   You can't be woken up unless you are asleep, so we obviously had some sleep.  We were woken by an incredible disturbance.  Ghosts or robbers or monsters were thumping, stomping, vibrating the ground, all around us.  There were snorts, harrumphs and evil sighs, right next to our heads and directly into our ears.  In those few seconds of waking when we were each on his own, we were scared stiff.  When three of us began to communicate, we were still scared stiff.

   We were being attacked on all sides by a much superior force, at least a full platoon.  Under the ponchos it was dark, and we had no illumination except for the remaining matches.  After much anguish and effort, there were no more matches, being too damp and soft to survive frantic striking on the box.

   The disturbance outside kept on;  it was only after a lot of frightened to-ing and fro-ing between us that we ventured to poke our heads out to find out what was scaring us.  A herd of black and white Friesian cows were standing around the tent, snorting billows of vapour in the cold pre-dawn, jostling and stamping their feet.  In retrospect, they were upset by this unprecedented apparition in the middle of their paddock!  Our tent only reached up to their knees and we continued to be frightened, of being trampled!

   It took us no time at all to undo the buttons, pack the frypan, and get on our bikes, headed back to safety and home.  As I might have said to John at the time, an LMG or .303 rifle would be much better protection against ghosts, robbers and monsters, or even a rampaging herd of cows; a pair of ponchos that reached to the cattle's knees was no protection at all!

   But John would have replied with something to the effect that the Army, and a bit of hardship, can make a man out of us!  I have to agree, because John has turned out very well!"

 This photo from 1960 shows our Mum, in the centre, with her mother, Mum Mort, John on the left, me with gun, Peter on the right, with Alan and Lester in front.  (Mickey the dog is mostly hidden by Mum's side).