Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
By Graham Lees
Dedication:
For Steve
Foreword
Before you start reading these stories, it might be a good idea if I tell you that this is a work of
fiction. Most of the things that are recorded here are very loosely based on events that really did
happen, but not necessarily in the way I have depicted or to the characters involved, except me.
Before you get hot under the collar and accuse me of telling spare ribs, remember this! After all,
Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying “What is history but a fable agreed upon?”
You will note that I seldom come out of it smelling of anything less than roses! Naturally this
wasn’t really the case but when I did something stupid or made an arse of myself, I have
attributed it to one of the other characters. Let’s face it, I am hardly likely to go out of my way to
make myself look silly, am I?
Some of the characters are completely figments of my imagination. Some have been given
different names. I do have a brother and a sister who are very unlike me in nearly every way and
did not necessarily behave in the way I have depicted. Sometimes they did, though!
One or two of the events are completely made up and I don’t know that they ever happened to
anyone, anywhere, ever.
Albany, however, does exist, so do all the geographical features mentioned.
And I really did have a Ford Anglia . . .
Albany
First, let’s get one thing straight! The town’s name is Albany!
Not Orlbany like the Poms say, or Arlbany, as North Americans call it. In fact, if you were trying to
pass yourself off as a local, you would pronounce it Owl-bany. But even a trained actor have to do
a lot of homework to succeed!
Albany is in Western Australia, right down the bottom on that little rounded bit that other
Sandgropers call “The Buttock of Australia”. Yeah, that bit!
The town nestles between two small hills, grandly called Mount Clarence and Mount Melville.
They’re not really mountains at all, though. Albany is too insignificant to have real mountains so it
got Clarence and Melville instead. These are often referred to as the “Pimples on the Buttock of
Australia”.
Immediately to the south is what looks at first like a big lake until you see that it has a wharf with
ocean-going vessels tied up to it. Then you realise there is a passage at the eastern end that
leads out into King George Sound.
This large inlet is called Princess Royal Harbour and its main use, other than to house the wharf,
is that it is the finish line for the Perth to Albany Yacht Race, which is where yachts race from
Perth to Albany. Albany people don’t suffer bullshit very easily and call a spade a spade and they
call the Perth to Albany yacht race the Perth to Albany Yacht Race!
It is also the start line for the Albany to Perth Yacht Race for reasons similar to the above!
In years gone by, Albany was also home to a small fleet of whaling boats that tied up at the
Albany Town Jetty, a jetty that was at the foot of the main street of the town. Creative
nomenclature decreed that this would be known as the Albany Town Jetty, and despite a lot of
initial confusion, the name stuck.
Anyway, in the late nineteen seventies it was becoming increasingly difficult to get crews for these
boats as Norwegians became a bit thin on the ground and the Japanese had still not been
completely forgiven for the War in the Pacific. Nobody else was interested in a career in whaling.
For years the industry had stubbornly resisted protests that it was cruel, barbaric and inhuman.
Enormous pressure was being brought to bear to close down the practice and this was the death
knell for whaling in Albany.
The boats were converted into floating restaurants and the whaling station was converted into
Albany Whale World, a museum and funfair where all the rides are built to look like whales. The
name of this institution was agonised over by the people of Albany, unsure of whether visitors
would see the name and connect it with a history involved in whaling. Nobody ever visited the
museum, but the funfair attracted large crowds during the summer fortnight.
Although it was the first British Settlement in the state, Albany always seems to be the end of
something. Not content with just being on the Buttock of Australia, it has always served as the
terminal station for one thing or another, such as the aforementioned Perth to Albany Yacht Race.
In 1826, Major Edmund Lockyer colonised a hamlet on King George Sound and named it
Frederickstown after some mate of his in the British Royal family. The idea was to plant a flag on
the western half of the country before the French could claim it. As a honour to the founder, they
named a slum after him and to this day, when people think of the dashing major, they think of the
scruffy asbestos and iron shacks which house the lower socio-economic demographic of the
northern suburb.
The explorer John Eyre, who crossed the Nullarbor westwards from Adelaide some time later,
finished his journey in Fredrickstown and sat down and wrote a long dissertation on why they
should name everything along the southern coast of Australia after him.
Then, when the first telegraph lines where strung across the Nullarbor, they finished in
Frederickstown. It was of little or no consequence that nearly all the people these telegrams were
addressed to lived in Perth or Kalgoorlie, hundreds of miles away. Frederickstown was a good
place to finish things, so the telegraph finished in Frederickstown. Messages that had been wired
from Sydney, San Francisco and Shanghai in the twinkling of an eye were put into an envelope
and carried by horse and buggy to Perth, a trip that took two weeks on a good day and up to a
month when the pubs were open.
Or they went by steamer, which took slightly longer and only stopped at the pubs in Augusta,
Bunbury and Mandurah.
So Frederickstown became the cutting edge of communications technology.
But in those days, handwriting was large and flowery and the word Frederickstown was too big to
fit onto the small envelopes of the paper-scarce colony. Especially the swashy way they wrote
their “F”s. So they changed the town’s name to Albany and pronounced it that way just to
confound the Poms and Yanks. There are hundreds of Albanys scattered throughout the English
speaking world but these Western Australian people had the good sense to distinguish theirs from
the rest!
The Bibbulmun Track is an overgrown pathway through the coalmines and burnt out remains of
logging camps that make up the landmass known as the Great Southern Region. It was named
after a tribe of indigenous people known as aborigines who lived in the region and who,
anthropologists tell us, never lived anywhere near Albany. If they had, these anthropologists say,
they would not have called themselves Bibbulmun, preferring a more obscure name such as the
Albany Tribe. Anyway, these Bibbulmun people used to love to go for a good hike with their little
woolly hats, their anoraks and their butane stoves, so they made the Bibbulmun Track to walk
along, singing tramping songs and stopping occasionally to brew up a cup of tea.
Anyway, this track was the main pedestrian route between Kalamunda in the Darling Ranges and
Northcliffe in the Karri forest near Pemberton. This is where it finished.
But the people of Albany got really jealous when it was discovered that something finished
somewhere other than in Albany. They demanded that it be extended a hundred miles to the east
in their own town, right near the railway station, which is, co-incidentally, the final stop on the
Perth to Albany line.
I lived in Albany until 1971 but my heart will forever remain there. It is undoubtedly the most
picturesque place in the world.
Put it another way, it can be quite pleasant on a sunny day!
In Albany it rains for an average of eighteen hours every day, three hundred and sixty five days of
the year. For the rest of the time the weather is perfect with only a bit of constant drizzle. This
gives the place the beautiful green vegetation that captured the attention of the early pioneers
who noticed the similarity to their native England, with its rainswept beauty and its torrential
grandeur.
This is why everyone who visits Albany is held captive. They cannot leave their hotel rooms
because it is too miserable to venture out!
On a beautiful, warm, sunny day the people of Albany walk around looking all confused,
wondering what has gone wrong with their weather.
Townsfolk call themselves Albanians, after the inhabitants of the poorest, harshest, most
uninteresting and politically unstable bit of Europe. For some reason they believe this identifies
them as coming from Albany, as opposed to Albania.
But not all Albanians were born in the town. In fact, probably a larger proportion of migrants live
here than anywhere outside Melbourne and Darwin. The original pioneers were free settlers from
England and Scotland along with Irish and Welsh convicts. Oh, and Scandinavians who were only
after the whales.
After World War Two, a lot of Dutch, Poles and Italian people came here to live. More recently a
tiny trickle of people from the Middle East moved in although they remain unobtrusive and almost
no-one knows they are there. Or if they do, they never mention it. Okay, no more sarcasm!
In the nineteen fifties when we first moved in, there were very few folk who were not immigrants.
On the day I started school at Albany Junior Primary School, a boy from the Nyoonga Tribe
started as well. The Nyoonga Tribe was the name given to the aboriginal people of the area
before the Europeans came. Nyoonga means Albany in Nyoonga, so Nyoonga Tribe literally
means Albany Tribe.
Anyway, the other kids in my class asked us where we were from. I replied in my charming little
Cockney lilt that I was from England, and no-one seemed particularly interested. They knew
hundreds of people from England and that was quite frankly, old hat. Then they asked Billy
Colbung where he was from.
“Mt Barker!” he replied.
“No!” the other kids chorused. “What country are you from?”
“Australia!” declared Billy.
“Don’t be a dumbarse. This IS Australia!”
“That’s where I’m from!” said Billy, shaking his head in perplexity.
“Piss orf!” the other kids said.
Later that day I heard a bunch of them taunting him with the chant: “Dutchy, Dutchy, Pom, Pom!
You don’t know where you come from!”
But they are not particularly racist. They are probably the most cosmopolitan people in the world.
Fatima and Rosa are best friends who do each other’s hair, while Otto and Nguyen go fishing
together every Saturday. Mr Watenabe’s daughter Gretel is engaged to Antonio, whose sister
Clodagh works for Dr M’bele.
Unfortunately, I can’t go on telling you about all the racial interfacing for very long because Albany
is such a small place there simply are not enough people.
Location, Location
I mentioned an Albany landmark called Dog Rock. This is a huge lump of rock near the centre of
town. For some mysterious reason only a town planner could explain, they built Middleton Road
really close to it. So close, in fact, that the damned thing actually stuck about three feet out into
the tarmac! Even though they painted a collar on it in white emulsion, cars used to scrape it
almost every Friday and Saturday as their drivers went to the Stomp or home from the Regent
Cinema.
Dog Rock was one of the good things about showing a visitor around Albany.
“It really does look like a dog’s head!” they would exclaim, then ask you to drive around again so
they could ascertain which breed it belonged to.
“It isn’t any breed,” locals would say. “It’s a bit of rock!”
People who work in the tourist industry do not refer to places as beaches, towns, mountain
ranges or national parks. They are “destinations”. All of them! Hotels, resorts, harbours,
everything! Even shell museums and caravan parks! This really pisses off Albany people. Theirs
is not a “premier tourist destination” at all. It is a nice place where Perth people like to go for a
holiday to escape the heat of their dreadful summers.
My mother, though, refused to admit that Albany was a cold, damp, miserable place and would
argue with anyone who said it was. She got quite adamant and would glower at them, arms
akimbo as she stood in her front garden, laying down the law.
“We didn’t have to wear our overcoats at all last week,” she would insist. “Except in the evenings
and sometimes really early in the morning!”
“But Mum,” I would say. “It’s February! The middle of summer! You shouldn’t need a coat at this
time of year!”
“Stop arguing and come inside before you catch your death of cold!”
You already know that the two hills in Albany are called Clarence and Melville but there is also a
third one important to the town’s natural beauty. This is called Mt Adelaide and is joined to
Clarence by a short ridge upon which is a memorial drive. This came about because the Desert
Mounted Corp statue was built there in the nineteen sixties to commemorate all those young men
who lied about their age to enlist in the Great War of 1914-1918. Their troop ships assembled in
King George Sound before departing for Egypt to start the ANZAC tradition, so the last place they
saw was the hills of Albany. This is something that takes pride of place in every Albanian’s
thoughts every day since it happened. Particularly as it involves Albany being the last place.
Nobody seems to know who Clarence and Melville were. Some say they ran a florist shop in York
Street and others say they were a vaudeville act in the Empire Theatre before the days of moving
pictures but I am sure the hills were really named after some Field Marshals or Dukes who lied
about their ages to get into the Crimean War or something. However the naming of the third hill is
known to have been in honour of the capital city of South Australia, fifteen hundred or so miles to
the east. One day, the story goes, a scholar was looking at his atlas and realised that if you drew
a straight line in a certain direction from the centre of the hill, the first large town it would pass
through was Adelaide on the Torrens River. He was so excited about this that he suggested the
hill be named Mt Adelaide and this was duly gazetted.
If he had moved his straight-edge around, he would have noticed it also ran through
Johannesburg, Calcutta, Singapore, Jakarta, Manilla and Darwin, but fortunately lateral thinking is
not an attribute Albany people aspire to.
Another nearby feature also has a very interesting name. The tiny hamlet of Denmark, on the
Denmark River thirty miles to the west of Albany, was not named after the Scandinavian country.
In fact it was named after a person whose nickname was Mr Denmark.
When he turned up for his first day at Albany Junior Primary School back in the nineteenth
century sometime, the kids gathered around and asked him where he was from.
“Copenhagen!” he announced.
“That’s not a country! What country are you from?”
“Dansk!”
“Piss orf! That’s not a country, either. What country are you really from?”
The kid was really quite upset and tearfully faced the chanted taunts of “Dutchy, Dutchy, Pom,
Pom” until the geography teacher came down to find out why the new kid was crying. When she
was told, she informed the children that Dansk was the country we know as Denmark. From that
day on, the kids called the new boy Denmark and when he grew to be a couple of feet taller and
ten stone heavier than they were, he made them call him Mister Denmark.
Actually, it was discovered some time later that he did not really come from Copenhagen but a
village nearby called Bornholm, so they named another town and a beach just that to keep him
happy.
True tale. Most of it!
Albany folk, particularly menfolk, love a yarn. Even if it has no point, they love to listen to
someone else’s story. And then, what is even better is if it reminds them of a story of their own.
In fact they love this nearly as much as they love drinking Emu Export Lager from a stubby.
The bloke who used to beat the little dings and dents out of my 1962 Ford Anglia really loved a
yarn. Bull sessions, he called them and he could always top the story you told or else he would
simply revise it, changing one or two details and tell it back to you.
One day I told him I had been in the Weld Hotel and saw old Barney Adams having a quiet
schooner before dinner.
“I haven’t seen you for a few weeks, Barney,” I said.
“Been in Perth havin’ me back seen to, haven’t I?” he replied.
“Oh,” I said. “Did you go on the bus or did you catch the train?”
“Dunno. Me brother bought the tickets.”
Jack laughed uproariously at this and then said “That reminds me of one I heard. Seems there
was this old gal who was coming out of church and the vicar said to her, I notice you haven’t been
in church for the past few weeks. Is everything alright?’
“I’ve been in Melbourne visiting my sister, Padre, the old gal said.
“That’s nice, did you fly or get the Indian Pacific? asked the preacher.
“I really don’t know, Vicar, the old gal said. My sister sent me the tickets.“
I stared at him in disbelief for a moment then blurted out “But that’s the same joke I just told you!”
“No it’s not! Yours was about a bloke in the pub. Mine was about some old woman coming out of
church!”
Another time I went in to collect my car and he said “You’re looking a bit fragile! Been burning
both ends? I say, you’re looking a bit fragile! Been burning both ends, hey?”
He often said the same thing twice if he wasn’t repeating someone else.
“No! I didn’t sleep very well. I’ve got a tooth ache.”
“You should see a dentist. I say, you should see a dentist.”
“I’ve got an appointment this afternoon,” I told him.
A curious look came into his eyes and he turned them towards the ceiling.
“Really funny you should say that,” he said. “I say, really funny you should say that. Just
yesterday I saw old Ted Penter down the street. I said How’s business Ted? and he said Not too
bad. It’s been better, Jack, but I mustn’t grumble, he said. How’s that boy of yours? I said. Is he
still playing cricket? I said. Yeah, he said. Knocked a ton against Rocky Gully last Sunday. Took
three wickets too, he said. That’s nice to hear, Ted, I said. Matter of fact I was just saying to
Dorothy that when the weather gets a bit better we’ll have to have you over for another barbecue.
How is Nita, by the way? I said. Aw, not too good, he said. She had all her upper set out last
Monday, he said. Now isn’t that a coincidence? I say, now isn’t that a coincidence?”
My kids tell me off for telling pointless stories but who can blame me when I had a mentor like
Jack Hadley?
Their favourite pointless story of mine concerns my Ford Anglia. You will notice all my best
pointless stories involve that Anglia. It was my first car and shared quite a few first experiences
with me that I don’t intend going into right now.
But the best one was about the time I was driving down Campbell Road and saw two young
ladies who worked at the nursing home behind my parent’s house. I stopped and offered them a
lift and noticed one of them was carrying a very small kitten.
As soon as we peeled out of there the kitten got loose and ran under my feet, where it crawled
between the pedals and the floor. I couldn’t brake or disengage the clutch without crushing it, so I
had to knock the four-on-the-floor gearshift into neutral and apply the handbrake in order to stop
and get the kitten out.
Now I regard that as a really good, interesting story but my kids groan every time I relate it.
Albany is chock full of stories! Some are of the pointless type, many more have a sort of point, but
most are just stories of the struggles the common man faces every day just to keep his head
above water and to retain his identity in an ever more impersonal world. One such man was Ken
Ferrall.
Sugarbag
During the Great Depression, Ken and his brother Wal applied to migrate to Australia under the
Group Settlement Scheme. They were town boys from one of the cities in the west of England –
Bristol or Taunton or Weston-Super-Mare or somewhere where they speak with that delicious,
rich accent and curious turn of phrase.
Ken had a particular idiosyncrasy that resulted in him getting a typical Albany nickname. He never
wore a raincoat or cape nor carried an umbrella, which is a curiosity itself in Albany’s inclement
weather. Instead, he always had a few old empty sugar bags in the covered tray of his Holden
Utility. If it was raining when he wanted to leave his car, and it invariably was, he would simply
pick up one of the bags and wear that.
As the bags had been slit along one end to pour out the sugar, he used to turn it upside down and
then push one of the closed corners into the other so that it formed a large hood that he put over
his head. He was only a relatively short man, maybe five feet five or so and the trailing sugar bag
kept quite a bit of his body dry.
The old sacks, still with the CSR stencil fading away with each drenching, gave rise to his
nickname and “Sugarbag” Ferrall was one of the most easily recognised figures around town.
But Sugarbag was feral by nature as well as by name. The only bit of England he retained other
than the “Ooh arrrgh” of his Somerset burr was his other sartorial habit of tying a bit of twine
around each ankle to stop insects crawling up the legs of his grey corduroy trousers!
As I said, Sugarbag and Wal had arrived in Australia during the nineteen thirties and were taken
by bullock dray out past Denmark to the Kent River, where they were left to fend for themselves.
The immigration people tossed them a bit of seed and a few tools, along with some dry supplies –
flour, tea, beans, tins of corned beef and of course, bags of sugar.
Working in the driving winter rain and the short hot summers, these two lads carved a meagre
living out of the dense karri and tingle forests of the Buttock of Australia. With an axe they would
cut a ring of bark away from the tallest, straightest trees so that within a few months they died.
This was a process Sugarbag called “rungbarking”. When the tree was suitably deceased, they
would dig a long trench outward from the base then carefully fell the tree over it with a saw and
axe.
Wal was bigger and heavier than Sugarbag so he jumped down into the trench while his brother
perched on the end of the sawn-off tree and dropped one handle of a huge rip saw into the hole.
With the smaller brother pulling upwards on the saw and then relaxing while his larger sibling
below hauled down, getting covered in sawdust in the process, these two young men cut dozens
of planks. After using what they needed to build a shack, they sold the rest in Denmark for a few
shillings to buy what they could not produce for themselves.
At the same time they taught themselves how to live in an environment totally alien to everything
they had grown up in until they became master bushmen, more at home in the undergrowth of the
Kent River than they were in town. As I said, Ferrall by name and feral by nature.
As a boy I learned a lot from Sugarbag. Every year on Good Friday, Dad would pack Mum and
my brother and me into the old Austin A40 and head out through Denmark down a red gravel road
until we came to a gap in the fence. We’d drive along a sandtrack until we found Sugarbag cutting
away some tree that had toppled across the track. Then we’d help him haul the branches away
and off he’d go in the old ute, us following, until we came to where he’d erected the tents. His
wife, Ida, would have the billy on, complete with a gumleaf to add flavour. She’d pour us hot,
strong tea to wash down the rabbit and bush pumpkin stew she would ladle from a gigantic iron
cauldron then garnish with a sprig of wild parsley.
By the time we returned to Albany on Easter Monday we would be filthy dirty, covered in cuts,
bruises and kangaroo ticks and looking forward to the following Easter.
I think Sugarbag was a street sweeper in Albany but his real love was photography. Not just thirty
five millimetre slides that he took at a rate of around fifty exposures a day, but also sixteen
millimetre movies. There must be rolls and rolls of footage of my brother and me setting rabbit
snares, learning to “rungbark” trees and imitating bird-calls. Everything that moved within a
hundred mile radius of Albany had been captured for posterity on thin strips of celluloid by
Sugarbag. And his daughter Nola was even more eager than he was!
Other than Mr Crisp at the cinemas, Sugarbag had the only movie projector in town – a Bell and
Howell that used to inexplicably stop ten minutes into every movie. He would fiddle around in the
dark and get it going again, while giving my dad a running commentary about what happened and
how he was fixing it.
One night in the Albany Town Hall, about fifteen minutes into one of those Discover Australia With
Shell travelogues, Sugarbag stopped the projector and started peering into it with a battery torch.
He was strangely silent so Dad leaned over and asked him what was the matter.
“Nuthin’!” grunted Sugarbag. “But she normally packs up around this time so I stopped her to find
out why she hasn’t!”
Capsicum
Neither Howard nor Cliffy ever smoked, which was quite unusual in Albany in the sixties. Most
people, men and women alike, used to smoke at least twenty a day and they never changed
brands. The new varieties like Winfield and Escort never took off because Rothmans, Craven A
and Capstan were the only smoke any self-respecting Albanian would been seen with in his
mouth.
I didn’t know much about smoking as my Dad had given it up years before we arrived in town and
my mother, God bless her, always had more sense.
The previous year I had had experimented with cigarettes on two occasions, the first simply
blowing the smoke out as soon as it got into my mouth and the second time it made me quite ill.
Soon after I began my employment at the newspaper, the manager gave me ten bob and asked
me to get him some Red Capstan.
I thought he said a red capsicum and went up to Anderson’s Greengrocers, came back and
handed Mr Cruttenden nine shillings and eight pence and a brown paper bag. When he opened it
he laughed so hard he wet himself and went around and told all the compositors and printers,
then went upstairs and told the reporters and sub-editors and finally went and sat on the toilet for
ten minutes to calm himself down. For years after that he called me the Capsicum Kid.
But I didn’t mind going up to Anderson’s Greengrocers because the girl who used to live next
door to me worked there. Although she was a year older than I was, we used to play tennis
together on the courts behind St John’s Church of England. In fact she taught me how to keep
score! Up until then I had just played against my mates and we scored like you do in table tennis.
First one to twenty one was the winner! She was quite refined and knew really useful stuff like
that.
At the time we were living down near the Parade Street soccer ground and one day we were
kicking a ball around and I noticed a forty four gallon oil drum lying on its side. It was empty and
had obviously been abandoned and pushed down the bank from Vancouver Street until it wound
up in the ditch.
I hauled it out and, never passing up the chance to show off in front of a girl, stood up on it and
started rolling it along the pitch by walking and making the thing turn under me. This went well for
a while so I started to make it go faster and faster but it got away from me and I went flying off
backwards and landed right on the base of my spine where it brings a tear to your eye when you
land on it.
I sat on the ground with wet cheeks, almost unable to breath from the blow to my back, while
Mavis ran over and got my Mum to make sure I was all right.
It took quite a while to live that one down!
It comes, I think, from a combination of being a smartarse, hyperactive and a bit of a natural
showman. That and being unbelievably clumsy. It is a family trait and all of us seem to do dumb
things from time to time.
Ted Loveridge
Once upon a time, between the two World Wars, Albany had a flourishing underworld. The era is
officially known as the Great Depression, but in Albany it is known as “When Ted The Toilet Was
Here”. After the second war, there was a time of economic prosperity, known in the rest of the
world as the nineteen fifties, but in Albany it was referred to as “Just After Ted The Toilet Went To
Gaol.”
The underworld sort of dissolved after that, when the top crime bosses went inside and everyone
else was just too plain lazy to organise the easy pickings in a slack town like Albany.
Ted The Toilet was christened Edward Thomas Toynbee but got his nickname for two reasons,
mainly because of the smell of his flatulence. The other was for his use of profanity, which was
nearly as foul as the methane he produced down the other end.
The chap who used to come in and clean the newspaper offices in the evening and carry out
many other of his business activities at the same time was The Toilet’s greatest admirer. Ted
Loveridge, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a lubra from the local aboriginal reserve, used
to tell many a pointless story about his hero, most of which are so forgettable that very few fell
into Albany Folklore.
When he was fifteen, Ted Loveridge parted company with the straight life. The following week he
parted company with all his front teeth.
Ted had a large handbarrow that he found abandoned in one of the bays at the Albany Markets
while its owner went for a pickle sandwich and a middy at the London Hotel.
He made a few structural alterations to it, painted it a really sissy pink colour with some enamel
that had been left out the back of the illicit brothel after it had been decorated, and in a very
wonky cursive, lettered the words “Loveridge Haullege” along the tailgate. If calligraphy was not
his strong suit, neither was spelling.
He hid the barrow in a vacant storeroom under the Post Office for a few weeks until the former
owner had forgotten he had lost it, then went into business for himself.
His first client was Mr Toynbee.
“Ted, I want you to take this satchel down to the Albany Races at Centennial Oval and give it to
my employee, Ted Tugwell. You don’t need to know what’s in there, just go straight there and
don’t open it. That shouldn’t be too difficult, even for you!”
But it was too difficult! Ted’s natural curiosity was enhanced by the educated guess that the
satchel contained money. Besides which, it clinked when you shook it! Ted found it far too hard to
go more than one block before he succumbed to the temptation to have a look inside.
There was nearly fifty pounds! It was Ted “The Book” Tugwell’s cash float for the day. In 1939,
that was a lot of money. There were mostly pounds and ten-shilling notes, but there were also
quite a few florins and about twenty “deenas” or shilling pieces.
Ted Loveridge always had a few pence of his own in his pocket so on the way up York Street, he
ducked into the Albany Hotel, which was the only one which would serve anyone who was six
years under the legal drinking age. The thought of swaggering in with nearly fifty quid in a satchel
was just too much of a temptation for the young reprobate.
Within minutes his wildest dreams came true and one of the blokes at the bar said:
“So, Ted. What ya got in the satchel?”
“Oh!” Ted bragged. “About ’alf a century! Business was quite kind to me this week!”
It wasn’t a lie, he told himself. He had nearly fifty quid in the bag and now that he was in The
Toilet’s employ, business WAS good.
He didn’t notice a thickset man in a green fedora approach him from a dark corner.
“Twenty seven of that’ll be mine then!” Ted Balcomb told him. “Remember? Ten for the crates of
whisky, five you borrowed and twelve you put on that lame nag at Belmont Park!”
He unbuttoned the flap on the leather satchel and extracted twenty one of the pound notes and
twelve of the ten bobs.
Ted Loveridge got on his knees and begged. “Please, Mr Balcomb! Give us another coupla days.
I gotta deliver this to someone. It aint mine.”
“You said business was kind to you this week! It won’t take long to make it up then, will it, Ted?”
He pocketed the wad of notes and strode out the door with his two henchmen, Ted Duckett and
Ted Woolmer.
At this point it would probably be a good idea to point out that in the early years of the twentieth
century in Albany, a lot of boys were christened Edward. There were quite a few Edwards of note
at the time – members of the Royal Family, politicians, sportsmen, explorers and music hall acts.
Most mothers had high aspirations for their sons and believed by giving him a distinguished name
like Edward would automatically lead to a successful life of wealth and importance. Also, most of
their fathers and fathers-in-law were named Edward, too, so it was quite an easy option.
So poor old Ted Loveridge went around to everyone in the bar and tried to beg twenty seven quid
to take down to The Book. It was Thursday and everyone got paid on Friday, so other than the
few pence they were wasting on the Albany’s watered down lager, they were all skint.
Ted went into hiding. For five days he lay in a chicken coop behind Widow Barnsley’s house,
eating corn and raw eggs until, bewildered why her hens had apparently stopped laying, she
crawled into the galvanised iron shelter and confronted Ted. She was a big woman and she
dragged him out by the hair.
He was covered with chook manure and bits of straw so she turned on the hosepipe she used for
sluicing out the chook run and squirted some of the filth from Ted’s person. Then she marched
him, soaking wet, down to the Police Station.
There was nothing to charge Ted with. It is not an offence to lie in a poultry house, other than
maybe trespassing, but even then, the intent to commit a felony needs to be present. So the
sergeant let Ted go.
However, over the road, sitting in his Hudson taxicab, Ted “The Taxi” Turnbull saw young Ted
enter the cop shop then emerge two minutes later. He ran up Stirling Terrace and told Ted The
Toilet.
Six minutes after that, Ted Loveridge had his front teeth extracted without any anaesthetic. Two
days on again, he put his age up three years and enlisted in the Australian Army.
Putting his age up three years had the curious effect of making him only ten years younger than
his mother.
In his second week at Bindoon Training Camp, Ted was picked up by the Regimental Police for
wheeling twenty four bottles of rum, fifty cartons of Craven A and two sides of bacon from the
Officer’s Mess along Great Northern Highway on a wood-barrow at two thirty in the morning.
As it was only his first offence (that they knew about) he received a year in the stockade. A month
after he was released, but still confined to barracks, four houses in Bindoon were broken into and
Ted was again arrested on Great Northern Highway in the early hours of the morning with thirty
bob, three engagement rings and a bottle of port in his greatcoat pocket.
This time the RP handed him over to the civilian Police and the Magistrate put him away for
eighteen months. Then the Army decided they could probably do without this puny bit of
manpower, despite the Second World War needing all the gun fodder it could get, and sent him
back to Albany.
The next eighteen or so years were spent in much of the same fashion and when he headed back
from Fremantle Gaol in 1961, he decided he was going to make a success of his life.
He got a job cleaning the offices of the newspaper, the radio station, a car dealership and a
couple of shops. The money he earned from these went to buy a Holden FX utility which he did
up with parts he found abandoned on the Spare Parts shelves of the car dealership. The ute
came in handy for transporting all the things people had carelessly left lying around in the offices.
There were others who could put them to good use and who would thank Ted very warmly for his
thoughtfulness in passing them on.
One evening while I was working overtime, Ted came up to me and leaned on his broom. This
was something he did really well, having got lots of practice at it.
“I say, Son,” he started. “Could you do a small job for me, d’ya reckon?”
It was common practice to do little print jobs for other members of the staff – wedding and party
invites, business cards for some extra-curricular sideline, raffle books for sporting clubs, even
office stationery for a spouse’s business. Old Cruttenden turned a blind eye to it. He sort of had to
because when he was on the machines himself, he was the worst offender of them all! The
owners knew it went on, as do the owners of nearly every printing firm in the world. It is regarded
as a perk.
“What is it, Ted?” I asked and he produced a battered envelope from his pocket. Inside was a
Gordon’s Gin label with one corner a bit torn.
“Oh come on, Ted! I could get into real trouble if I forged them. And you could go down again if
you sold bootleg. Especially passing it off as a major brand!”
I probably didn’t say exactly those words as I was a bit wet behind the ears and didn’t know
terminology like that in those days, but the sentiment was there.
Ted shrugged and never mentioned it again. However, about two months later I was around at
Old Boongul’s house and he poured me a gin and tonic. The tonic water was just the usual Kirk’s
but what he poured out of the gin bottle nearly took the skin off my tongue! It was Chateau
Loveridge, for sure.
When the moonshine caper was put to an end by the local constabulary without actually laying
charges, Ted supplemented his wages and other odd pound notes he came by when he started
organising chook raffles in the pubs on Friday nights. Chooks were easy to come by because one
of the shops he cleaned specialised in poultry and smallgoods and were not particularly careful
with their inventory.
Eventually the police sergeant informed Ted that, in order to run any sort of raffle, he needed to
be licensed and hold a current permit from the Lotteries Commission. Due to his unfortunate habit
of getting caught doing unlawful things, Ted was ineligible for these formalities and resorted to
cooking the chooks and trying to sell them from the back of his ute in the car park at the Stomp.
He finished up his days in poverty, suffering hardships when the good people of Albany started to
become suspicious and distrustful and began locking their doors and windows.
The last thing Ted said before the nurse pulled his eyelids down and drew a sheet up over his
face was: “I think I might have a couple of brand new hospital thermometers still in their wrappers
in my lockup!”
Ted’s Boy
Ted’s boy, known throughout Albany as Ted’s Boy or sometimes just Ted, was really named
Warren. Ted was not his father, although they shared the same surname. In fact, Ted and Ted’s
Boy had the same father. When Ted’s mother had outlived her usefulness to Reverend Loveridge,
he simply swapped her for a younger model in the same way people upgrade their computers
nowadays. Then, when she was no longer able to meet his demands, he moved on to an even
younger lubra.
Old Ted was, as you found out earlier, officially ten years younger than his mother, so it was not
unnatural that he made friends with one of the subsequent lubras when the good pastor had
finished with her. (It may have been the fourth or fifth, for all we know.) She was about the same
age as Ted and had a small child. Between visits to gaol, Ted lived with her, initially in an old
humpy on the back of Mt Clarence, then in a galvanised iron shack with a dirt floor in Marbellup
and finally in a State Housing Commission bungalow.
Ted’s Boy, or rather his half brother as it turned out, emulated Ted in his earlier years but while the
older chap had a bit of character, Ted’s Boy was always a nasty, vicious little tyke.
No one liked him, not even Ted. Old Loveridge probably never even met him, because pregnancy
was one of the reasons he used to trade in his old models, but it is doubtful that he would have
liked him, either.
As a child, he bullied other children and stole their toys, bikes and whatever pocket money they
had. As an adolescent he started mugging women and taking their purses, bashing old people for
the few shillings he might find in their kitchen drawers and indecently assaulting some of them as
well. At least three unsolved murders all had the Warren Loveridge hallmark although nobody
could prove anything.
In the late nineteen sixties, Ted’s Boy began hanging around the wharf. He would befriend the
sailors as they came off the cargo vessels for shore leave and introduce them to the town. For
this they would often buy his meals and alcohol and even pay him to drive them to the Esplanade
or Stomp to look for girls. He ran errands and relied heavily on their poor understanding of
Australian currency, exchange rates and local prices. Many was the time there was only a few
cents change out of a twenty dollar note after Ted’s Boy bought them a carton of Rothmans, a
pizza or a six-pack of stubbies.
Then he discovered that his new acquaintances had an even bigger source of profit. And there
was a growing demand for that source as hippies and junkies started flocking to the town to get
away from the cities where prices were too high or they had become too well known.
Ted’s Boy used to buy from the sailors and sell to the locals. There were no effective customs
checks on the sailors in those days and they were free to come and go as they pleased with only
their superiors on board to carry out searches if they so desired.
Lots of these sailors were quite trusting and naive when it came to making friends. Warren would
quickly learn how to win them over, then offer to sell their contraband which was mostly narcotics,
for a very small commission “to cover my costs: petrol, incidentals, stuff like that!”
Every now and again, ensuring the sailor friend had a few grams of whatever was their particular
poison on their person, he would shop them to the local police.
The police would then round up the suspect, frisk him and find the evidence then lock him up until
his boat was about to sail. They would drive him in the paddy wagon down to the wharf and hand
him over to the ship’s officers, still in handcuffs.
Ted’s Boy would then be free to flog off the dope and keep all the proceeds.
Many of the captains would ban that particular sailor from further shore leave until arriving back at
their home port, where their services would no longer be required with the shipping line again.
Because the other sailors had benefited from their dealings with Ted’s Boy, they would vouch for
him and recommend to their mates on other freighters that they seek him out to sell their stuff, so
his victims usually didn’t suspect he had grassed them.
But then a new officer came to work for the Albany police and she took an even greater dislike to
Ted’s Boy than her colleagues had. She was of a new breed of well-educated, suspicious cops,
so the first time he rang up to dob a sailor, she traced the call and went straight around and
arrested him. He had a whole sackful of stuff on him and she handcuffed him to the paddy wagon
while she searched his flat. There she found the fruits of many burglaries, mugging and
fraudulent transactions. She hauled him back to the station and charged him.
Meanwhile, the unsuspecting sailor was rounded up by a couple of the other cops and was
already locked away in the watch house. The duty officer made a point of feeding a new prisoner
straight away, regardless of the time of day, so when Ted’s Boy was thrown in the cell with him,
the incumbent was eating fish and chips with a fork.
The officer turned the key and went to buy another serve for his newest prisoner but when he
came back, the prisoner was in no condition to enjoy them.
The police canteen dinner plate had been broken in half and the jagged edge was sticking out of
Ted’s Boy’s throat and the fork, which had so recently been piercing a lump of snapper, was now
embedded between his ribs with the prongs penetrating his pericardium. The heart ruptured
within seconds and Ted’s Boy dropped dead on the floor of the cell.
The sailor claimed to have never met Ted’s Boy before and swore that after the officer left the cell,
his new cellmate had demanded the meal and grabbed at it, braking the plate in the process. The
momentum created by his pulling motion caused the shard of china to fly back and lodge in his
neck.
Then as he lurched forward, the sailor, in an act of charity, had reached forward to stop the young
man doing any more damage in the fall. Unfortunately he still held the fork which amazingly found
its way into Ted’s Boy’s ribcage and subsequently his heart.
The duty officer testified that some of the dinner plates were indeed cracked and could have
broken in half with a very small amount of pressure.
The coroner found it “accidental death” and the sailor was only charged with possession of drugs
for which he was subsequently found guilty.
This sailor, despite his accent, was a naturalised Australian, so after his release he headed north
and became a shire council employee in some wheatbelt town until it was discovered he had a
criminal record and given the sack. He moved back to Albany and stayed there until the late
nineteen eighties when he just disappeared.
Ted’s Boy had outlived Ted by thirteen days and with no one to provide for her any more, his
mother was found dead by the rent collector in their little asbestos fibro home a couple of months
later.
Proof Reading
During one hockey season, our goalkeeper went through a rough spin in his life when his car
blew up, his parents both died and his beloved cat disappeared. He quite often used to miss
training and on more than one occasion he turned up late for a match. As I played in defence, I
wore larger shin pads in my stockings so I would drop back as “kicking defender” until he arrived
with his big cricket-type pads and full protective gear.
One afternoon when we were playing in Mt Barker I dashed out of the goal to reduce the angle.
The attacking forward swung at the ball, sent it out of play, then with his follow-through struck me
a beauty on the unprotected bit just below my right knee.
Fortunately Johnny McQuaid turned up just then and took over in goal while I was subbed off,
barely able to walk. We played out a nil-all draw, which was disappointing because if memory
serves me well, a win would have left us too far ahead on the table for anyone else to threaten
us. But at the time I was more concerned about my throbbing leg.
Cliffy drove my car home for me and I sat in the back with a packet of frozen carrots the
ambulance officer strapped to my shin. The coach was pissed off because when he sent Boongul
to get frozen peas, he had to buy carrots, which cost five cents more. Initially he returned with a
pack of split peas as that was all they had of that vegetable. We made him go back and change
them for something out of the freezer.
Anyway my leg swelled up like a pumpkin and I had to go to the doctor’s on Monday in
considerable agony. The skin was a livid purple and was red hot to the touch. In addition, I had a
really rotten headache and didn’t feel like eating, which surprised my Mum, or drinking, which
surprised my team-mates even more!
The doctor prescribed something called ichthammol to be applied to the skin and gave me some
penicillin tablets. He also gave me a medical certificate to say I must be given a sit-down job or
not attend work for a week until it was better.
It was, he said, cellulitis: an inflammation of the tissue, probably caused by the fungal infection on
my feet spreading to the bruised area. In those days it was very common to have athletes foot,
tinea and other nasties chewing away at the skin of the feet inside warm, damp shoes and socks.
This was especially so among athletes who raced through public showers and never dried
between their toes and even more particularly in Albany where nothing ever got a chance to dry
out.
Fortunately, the proof-reader was on holidays that week and old Jack Wheeler, the linotype
foreman who normally stood in for him, was sent grumbling and moaning back to his machine. I
took my place in the little glass cubicle with a hatch for galley-proofs and copy to be passed
through for my perusal.
This was great, I thought. It was hockey season, which means winter. In Albany winter means that
the weather is not only the usual windy, overcast, rainy, miserable condition it is in for the entire
year, but it gets icy cold as well. Alan, the regular reader, had brought in a two-bar heater and
plugged it in under his desk so it was nice and toasty five minutes after we turned it on in the
morning. It got a bit hot on my inflamed shin so I moved it over to the left-hand side and settled in
a for a week or so of cosy comfort.
But, unlike Alan and Jack, I was familiar with the English language and this really upset the sub-
editor and the journos who were only familiar with football, how to get paper into their Office
Remingtons and the barstools at the Premier.
So not only did I mark the words which were misspelt or commas which were left off, I also did
what sub-editors do in the real world. I corrected grammar and the misuse of words as well.
The first galley I read was about a visit by a Perth soccer team which had beaten our local boys
by a cricket-type score – 35-nil or something. Apparently the Albany coach had recommended:
“We had better forget about this fiasco and fast!”
I went to the sports reporter and asked if this was a bit drastic and wouldn’t a simple overhaul of
their diet be a safer alternative?
He looked at me blankly and asked me what the unprintable I was talking about.
I shook my head in wonder and changed the phrase to “quickly forget about this fiasco, ” which
was what the coach obviously meant.
Then I read an article by the social writer about a wedding that had taken place about the same
time the Mt Barker team was mutilating my leg.
One paragraph described the bridesmaids as wearing Dutch caps. I blinked at it a couple of times
and changed it to “Dutchgirl-type hats.” Their contraception devices may be pertinent in one of
Billy Thripp’s prayers, but certainly not in the “Around Albany” column.
Two paragraphs down, it said “a small intimate get-together took place after the wedding.” I would
have been most sorry for the groom if it hadn’t, so I substituted the word “intimate” for “family”. I
had to re-read the entire article as I had a sudden afterthought that perhaps this was why the
bridesmaids had been protected in such a manner.
The next item was headed “Bach played at church”. I didn’t study music history at high school,
but I was pretty sure that old J.S. had shuffled his mortal coil quite a long time ago and as I didn’t
believe in ghosts, I was sure that they really meant “Bach music in church.”
Then in the news, a headline made my stomach churn. “Blood runs out after serious car accident”
headed a story about the Red Cross being acutely short of blood because of a spate of traffic
injuries and surgical procedures. They were requesting that donors contact the blood service as
soon as possible, so “Blood stocks low after serious accidents” seemed more palatable.
This went on all morning and I wasn’t even trying to be picky! If I had, I would have run out of
room in the margins to make those little marks that sadly seem to have disappeared these days.
Since the advent of highlighter pens, the offending word has a stroke drawn through it and it is up
to the typesetter to either check the copy or take a guess!
But in those days, little squiggly lines, rows of dot underscores, weirdly drawn symbols and
peculiar words such as “stet” and “trs” meant the same thing to everyone involved in the setting
and composition of printed matter.
I had a liberal sprinkling of these on the galley proofs, but there were also a lot of cross-outs and
corrected words which meant that often a whole paragraph needed to be reset.
I limped happily off to the lunchroom at twelve o’clock, feeling I had done a satisfying, productive
morning’s work.
But when I returned to the cosy little glass room, there was a note on the desk next to the jars of
red, blue and green pens.
The only place you are ever certain of finding a pen in a newspaper house is in the proof-reader’s
office. But never look or ask for black as they simply don’t exist. As proofing ink is always that
colour, marks in black are hard to see and can be missed, so depending on his mood, his
favourite football club’s strip or personal choice, a proof-reader will always mark in something
different. However I never saw a proof marked in pink in those days, if that means anything to
you. Proof-readers were a manly lot!
By the way, black is a colour to a printer, despite popular misconception.
This note, written in green ink, was from Mr Cruttenden, demanding that I go immediately to his
office.
That was no problem despite my sore leg as it was just on the other side of the toilets from where
I was sitting.
“Afternoon, Guv’nor, ” I chirped. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes. Sit down.”
I did as bade and he pretended to be writing on his production planner with a forbidden black biro.
Eventually he looked up and frowned.
“How’s your leg?”
“Good. I’m resting it!”
“Yes, I see.” This wasn’t easy for him.
“Um . . . Jack tells me you have been a bit, shall we say, over-enthusiastic with your proof-reading
this morning.”
It was a statement but it seemed to me that he wanted an answer.
“I’ll show you.” I volunteered, and went and got a bundle of second pulls from the box. “Look!”
Old Cruttenden read in silence for a few minutes. He was formerly a press operator so reading
was naturally difficult for him. He shifted his spectacles up onto his forehead in a position we used
to refer to “glasses on full beam” and placed the long sheets of paper on his blotter.
“Why can’t you ever do anything like a normal person?” he asked, with no emotion whatsoever in
his voice. No malice, no exasperation, no disdain, no condescension! Nothing! Just a flat,
deadpan statement!
“Do you mean like a normal Albany person, or like a normal “normal” person?” I asked, cheekily.
“Look, Capsicum, I came here from the Hobart Mercury, and I thought Tasmanians were strange!
But since then I have learned to live by this motto. That’s all I am going to say.”
He handed me an octavo sized card with the words “When in Rome, do as the Romans” printed
on it. I went back to my glass cubby and stuck the card up where everyone could see it.
Thereafter, I reverted to allowing the quaint turns of phrase, the often-startling misuse of everyday
words and the mental images that the weird syntax conjured up.
Haute Cuisine
Generally unrecognised in the world of haute cuisine, Albany is the home to many sumptuous
gourmet dishes. Honestly! Because of its isolation for much of its history and being surrounded by
fertile farmland, swampy vegetable plots and an ocean teeming with life, a distinctive style of
cooking has evolved.
Best known are the seafood dishes. For many years restaurants served up what they described
on their menus as Moreton Bay Bugs, but which had never been anywhere near Brisbane. They
were hauled straight out of Princess Royal Harbour and other inlets along the Rainbow Coast by
scruffy looking families of Albanians who referred to themselves as crayfishermen.
The Albany bug is considerably larger than its Queensland cousin and because it enjoys cleaner,
colder water, is much tastier. Now that it is in vogue many get exported to Perth and interstate,
but the best recipes are a carefully guarded Albany secret which, if I were to divulge it, I would
have to come out and kill everyone who reads this narrative.
Needless to say, it contains parsley.
Every dish ever cooked in Albany contains parsley, unless it is lamb, in which case it will contain
mint. This law is as irrefutable as any in the land and is totally uncontested in any competition or
cookery dispute. In fact when recipes are swapped after church or, these days, on the internet,
Albany cooks don’t even bother to mention parsley as without it, the dish would not exist so it
goes without saying! There are even a few sweet desserts that require a sprig of parsley as
garnish!
Fish pies adorn many a plate in many a restaurant and dining room in the old town. Coming from
a seafaring population, one would expect this but the favourite version is made from the ugliest
creature ever known to man. Even uglier than Old Boongul whom I must admit it strongly
resembles, the Albany catfish makes a most delicious meal when stewed up with parsley, leeks,
onions and garlic, a couple of thinly sliced nadine potatoes. It is then placed in a casserole dish
with cheese sauce poured over it, then topped with thick, savoury crumble. This is all popped into
the oven until the crust goes golden brown, then sprinkled generously with grated Mt Barker Fully
Matured Cheddar for the final two or three minutes.
Because this fish, which is speared with a gidgee rather than caught with a hook and line, has
viciously sharp spines on its back, it is called a “cobbler”. The early pioneers used to make their
own shoes and clothes from animal skins and leather so used one of the tough, pointed spines as
an awl to poke holes in the material to help the needle when stitching it together. This sort of work
is the job of a cobbler, hence the name.
Therefore, with typical Albany humour, some witty chef decided that this fish crumble should be
called “Cobbler Cobbler”.
Albany fishermen catch huge salmon from the beaches and this is normally sold to a cannery or a
smokehouse, but a lot of it finds its way to the tables of local folk and is nearly as popular as
snapper. Snapper is caught beyond the islands and is traditionally rendered inedible by coating it
with a thick batter and then dehydrating it in a vat of scalding vegetable oil until it is as deficient in
nutrition as its traditional accompaniment, the french-fried potato, or chip.
Oyster Harbour, to the north east of the town, used to host some delectable shellfish from which it
gets its name. In recent years these have nearly been depleted, as have the abalone.
Again, if you want to pass yourself off as a local, you must call it “abber-loney” or they won’t know
what you mean.
Once these magnificent shells could be found clinging to granite rocks all around the coast,
particularly in more sheltered coves and bays. Now, just as along the Perth coasts, they have
been decimated by poachers who remove far more than their bag limit and try to smuggle them
into China where, like almost everything that is not grown in that country, it is regarded as an
aphrodisiac.
I much prefer an abalone to an oyster but I have never been under any illusions as to what effect
it has on that part of my private anatomy!
Being an Albany boy I have never needed any stimulation in that department whatsoever. I am
not boasting, just stating a blunt fact.
Species Homo Sapiens from the Great Southern are known in science not only for their incredible
fertility rate but also their anxiety to practise it as often as possible!
Whether this is because of the cool, clean environment, the absence of traffic lights for a radius of
at least two hundred kilometres or the consumption of all that parsley, even the CSIRO has not
been able to ascertain. But the Census Bureau has been aware of this phenomenon for many
decades.
I think it is the catering! It must be! Albany girls are brought up to believe that the way to a man’s
heart is through his stomach, even though the men know the real way involves ministrations just
below that organ and on the outside.
Many a girl has migrated to the town, has been snapped up within days of arrival and finds
herself, without any struggle or regret, at the altar within a matter of course, despite her culinary
prowess.
Skinny Dipping
But other than when I have been sick or suffering a hockey injury, the only times in my life when I
was ever off my food it involved a girl.
She was quite a cute looking thing, a year younger than me at High School. I met her at a
Christian Endeavour meeting and at first was too shy even to speak to her other than as part of a
group.
Then one Easter when I was fifteen, we all went off to Pemberton, deep in the jarrah and karri
forests near Manjimup. (Just to clarify that last sentence, there was only one Easter when I was
fifteen. I just did not say it very accurately.)
The youth group was holding a “house party” which was really a weekend spent in a series of
timber huts surrounding a huge hall where they made us sit and listen to sermons and lectures on
how young ladies and gentlemen should behave when in each other’s company.
I knew how I wanted to behave in Jenny Malone’s company but it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon
that I found any opportunity. (NB: Malone rhymes with pinecone, not abalone!)
All Good Friday, Saturday evening and again on Easter morning Reverend Greene preached at
us to the point that our rebellious little teenage spirits were bursting at the seams. Then with a
surprisingly relaxed attitude, he suggested that the afternoon be spent in quiet meditation and
reflection within the cathedral-tall forests around the town.
We walked along quiet country lanes made of red gravel, wondering at all God’s creations – the
height of the trees, the brilliant flashes of colour as a parrot would dart from branch to branch and
the still, placid lakes formed by streams from icy underground springs.
I marvelled at the way Jenny’s tight blue jeans clung to her every time she placed one foot in front
of the other.
By teatime I was so hot I would have evaporated any of those icy ponds had I stuck my toe into it!
That evening I sat through a two-and-a-half-hour evangelical sermon designed to bring together
the lessons we were supposed to have absorbed over the past three days. All I wanted to bring
together was Jenny’s firm little body and my own.
So after the sermon while all the goody-two-shoes sat around in the cookhouse drinking cocoa
and singing verses and hymns, I asked Jenny if she wanted to go down to the swimming lake and
look at the Easter moon reflected in the water. To my enormous surprise she said she’d love to!
My mate, Steve, took my lead and asked the exact same question to her friend Anne and
although I would have liked to be alone with Jenny, we set off between the giant trees to the lake,
a quarter of a mile away.
The Easter moon was high and clear in the sky. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, which made the
scene really surreal and romantic. But as it was well into the autumn and the latitude quite
southerly, the absence of cloud cover meant that it was also very chilly.
This was good at first because, although we were all Albany youngsters and quite used to the
cold, it gave us the excuse to cuddle up nice and close and see if we could find warm places to
put our hands.
Jenny commented that although the lake would seem pretty cold at first if you dived in, it would
actually be warmer than the surrounding air and you would quickly acclimatise to it.
Without saying anything, I shucked my jacket, shirt, boots and socks, jeans and then, in just my
underdaks, took a long, flying dive into the water.
It was freezing and it felt like a knife had been driven into my chest. I gasped for air through my
restricted throat until my bronchus relaxed enough so that I could fill my lungs properly. I heard a
splash beside me and Steve’s head broke through the surface.
We shrieked with exhilaration and turned to look at the shore. Jenny was already naked to the
waist and pulling at a boot while Anne was looking uncertain and unbuttoning her cardigan.
“Come on in!” I yelled. “You were right! It isn’t a bit cold!”
Jenny stripped away the last few garments and ran to the water’s edge wearing the tiniest pair of
knickers I had ever seen which, at that early stage in my life, I had to admit was a very limited
sample.
In the bright moonlight she looked magnificent and even though I was sure I was going to die of
pneumonia, at least I would die contented!
Mum sent me to the house party hoping I would find God and instead I discovered heaven!
But just as she dived, I noticed two figures emerge from the waterbush and wattle undergrowth
surrounding the lake. It was the Reverend and Mrs Greene who noticed our absence from the
cocoa fiesta and came to investigate.
Jenny hit the water and a second later broke surface less than a metre from me.
“Shit that’s cold!” she squealed and Mrs Greene’s hand flew to her mouth. Reverend Greene was
striding down the path to the landing, barking out orders for us to come in immediately.
In the light of clear reasoning, he was absolutely correct. What we had done was complete
stupidity under the circumstances. It was so cold in that lake that we could have caught
pneumonia. It was also highly likely that the shock of so rapidly lowering our body temperatures,
and I admit Jenny had made mine extremely high, could have sent us into shock and we could
have drowned.
In addition, Steve had undergone open heart surgery for a ventricular septal defect, or what they
called a “hole in the heart”, less than a year before and it could easily have killed him. As I say, it
was utter stupidity!
But none of that mattered to Reverend Greene. We were boys and girls together and we were
unclothed! He could easily explain away our deaths or serious permanent disability but how
would he ever be able to formulate a good enough defence for our depravity and his inadequate
chaperoning skills?
Three near-naked teenagers in the lake and another only slightly better attired on the bank while
under his jurisdiction? No defence attorney in the world would take on that case in the court of
public decency of a small southern town! His reputation as a youth leader was in tatters. He
would have to re-apply to the missionary organisation for a posting to Papua or The Amazon!
I swam to the landing and nonchalantly climbed up the ladder right in front of Mrs Greene. I
thought it best to enter the enemy’s lair boldly and showing no sign of weakness. Besides, my
recently proud manhood was shrivelled to infinitesimal proportions by the icy water so she
wouldn’t have even had the thrill of seeing my young, athletic masculinity in full glory beneath my
Jockettes!
Steve jumped out right behind me and we ran to where our clothing lay. I grabbed my big woollen
jacket and took it back down to the landing so that Jenny could step right out of the lake into it
without having old Greeney cast his lascivious eyes on her.
For all his pious pomposity, I know he would have had lecherous memories of that moment for
the rest of his life if I hadn’t immediately hidden her in my coat.
I have those lecherous memories instead!
We dressed very quickly but in silence and followed the Greenes back to the house party,
shivering with our cold, damp bodies sticking to our underwear. Steve was grinning and trying to
get close to Anne, but Mrs Greene kept blocking his path. I put my arm around Jenny and we
both burst into laughter, which was the last thing the reverend couple expected.
On our return everyone was kicked out of the cookhouse while Mrs Greene ladled us huge mugs
of cocoa. I hate the stuff and poured some milk out of a bottle I found in the fridge and drank that
instead.
Then we got a lecture that would have scalded the ears off Ted The Toilet, had he been there!
The state of our health and wellbeing was not mentioned once although that should have been
his primary concern.
Firstly we got bombarded with scriptural quotes about carnal sins, iniquities of the flesh, riotous
behaviour and the results of a life of adultery. Then I was singled out for being the oldest and the
son of a deacon. The others, I was told, looked up to me as an example and I had let them down
with my lack of leadership. I squared my shoulders and decided to carry that one only because I
was flattered by it!
Jenny copped a serve because of the profanity she had uttered when she struck the water!
Then the real crux of the matter came out!
Everyone at the house party would know what had happened by now! How? I am still not sure,
but the following morning Reverend Greene made certain that if they did not know before
breakfast, they did afterwards!
And there was no way he could keep it secret, he gravely informed us. The word would soon filter
back through the entire church community, embarrassing our parents and families and bringing
shame on us which no amount of good work could ever reconcile! We were doomed to a life of
public disgrace and an eternity of misery and damnation!
His reputation as pastor of the flock was sullied and for the remainder of his tenure he would be
known as the one who allowed an orgy to take place right under his nose at one of his house
parties!
And all because we took off our clothes in mixed company!
On the way back to Albany, Steve and I were made to sit in the back of Reverend Greene’s car
while Mrs Greene sat in the front of another car with the two girls in the back. When we stopped
for tea, we were forbidden to speak to the girls and on arrival back in Albany we were driven
straight to our homes while the girls went directly to theirs.
Reverend Greene dropped Steve off first. He didn’t know Steve’s parents very well and was not
sure of his footing. But Dad was a member of the church – an office bearer and as such was in
for the full narrative, complete with scriptural verses, opinions, accusations of trust betrayal and
the reverend’s own personal condemnation.
Dad listened with a grim face for a couple of minutes then went and opened the front door.
“Thanks, Grafton! I’ll deal with it now!” Grafton? Dinkum!
Reverend Greene started to protest that he had not delivered the full, damning story, but Dad was
quite insistent. He left but only after trying to extract a promise that Dad would deal with me in the
severest, most appropriate manner. I think he was envisaging methods involving manacles,
lashes and straps embedded with metal studs.
Dad went into the kitchen and made a pot of tea.
“You’ll want to hear this, Love,” he said to Mum and she came in and took the cup and saucer
from him.
“So what actually happened, Son?” he asked, without any accusation or reprimand in his voice.
“Get back into the lounge!” he ordered my brother. “This doesn’t concern you!”
I told Mum and Dad pretty much exactly what had happened except for the warm places my
hands had discovered. Dad seemed to understand entirely and even though Mum said “I would
have expected more of you, Gra!” she made no effort to express anger or even disapproval even
though I know they both thought I was a total fool for what I’d done.
Mum wanted to know all about Jenny. Was she born again? Did she go to our church? Who were
her parents? Where did they worship? All the important stuff. Nothing trivial like: How old is she?
Have I known her long? Is she suffering from hypothermia?
But at least I could deal with these questions without being made to feel inadequate which at
fifteen, always ends in shouting matches and the offending party storming out.
Then Dad did what he always does whenever I got into any trouble with girls. He started telling
me about his escapades when he was a similar age until Mum told him I wasn’t interested in what
he had got up to with the floosies of West London.
I protested that I was interested but Dad stopped anyway.
Mum cooked two sausages, an egg and baked beans and I sat at the table to eat it but I really
wasn’t hungry. I pushed it around the plate and eventually went out and fed it to the dog who
thought cold fry-up was the best thing ever.
Then I went through to bed.
Lying there in the darkness I firmly believed I had fallen in love. Perhaps I had, I still don’t know.
How do you know stuff like that when you are fifteen, your hormones are racing and you have a
mad pastor telling you that he knew better than God who had, after all, designed fifteen year old
boys whose only function was to be as horny as hell!
My sister came home and walked unannounced into my room. She sat on the bed for a while and
giggled. I told her to buzz off but she stopped giggling and squeezed my arm.
“I like Jenny,” she said. “She’s nice. Did Mum and Dad give you a lecture?”
“No. Dad just told me what a randy little bugger he was in his day and Mum wanted to know if she
was a Christian. Do you mean that? You really like her?”
“Yes. Rodney says she’s nice, too.” Well, if Rodney thought she was, that was all that mattered.
“He says she’s very pretty. Do you think she’s prettier than me?”
“She’s not as up herself as you!” I said. “Piss off and let me sleep.”
“That’s gratitude for you! I came in to see you were alright.”
“Thanks. Now go!”
“Yes, well while you were cavorting naked in the pool, I was giving Rodney the scruffing of his life
in the back seat of his VeeDub!”
That was supposed to make me feel better?
She still hasn’t changed. It’s always got to be all about her! I sometimes wonder how come I
turned out so normal!
Next day at school I expected Reverend Greene’s prophecy to have come true and that everyone
already would know about what had happened. But if they did, they did a remarkably un-Albany
job of not letting on. At lunchtime Steve and I saw Anne and Jenny and walked over to them but
they were just going into the domestic science building where boys were not allowed.
It still amazes me that in the 1960s, girls did domestic science and typing while boys did
woodwork, metalwork and technical drawing and no amount of persuasion or reasoning could
sway the powers-that-be.
Two of the boys in our class became journalists, one became a chef and another two are qualified
tailors yet none of us were allowed to study these girl-only subjects. I don’t know if any of the girls
became engineers, architects, carpenters, fitters and turners, boilermakers, etc but I doubt it. All
they were trained for was sewing, cooking and secretarial work! But most important was cooking
and the way to a man’s heart. The official version.
So I never got to speak to Jenny until after school and then only briefly before her bus took her
into town and I was left leaning on my bike, gazing longingly after her.
She asked me whether I copped it from the old folk and I asked her had she suffered from her
brief immersion. We both laughed and I said I’d see her at Christian Endeavour on Friday.
But she never came.
On Sunday she was in church in the morning and I walked home with her, pushing my bike. I
asked her if I could take her to the pictures the following Saturday and she asked me what was
on.
“Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii!” I said. I had been looking forward to that film for a while and she
said “Good. I’ll see you at seven then.”
I asked her if she would be at CE on Friday and she said she doubted whether she would go
again. I didn’t ask her why but assumed she probably wasn’t allowed to any more because of
what happened at Pemberton. But hey! An Elvis film in the back row of the Regent with Jenny
Malone? God loved me more than Reverend Greene did!
I only saw her twice during the week, even though I hung around the bus stop afterwards. I don’t
know whether she deliberately avoided me or whether other arrangements stopped our paths
from crossing.
Saturday came around at last. I was still off my food and Mum began to think she should make a
doctor’s appointment for me to see if I was okay. I could think of nothing but the tender way Jenny
had looked at me and kissed me by the lake and what she felt like as she snuggled, wet with
lake-water, into my outstretched jacket!
I rode my bicycle into town and dumped it in some lantana on Parade Street then walked two
blocks to her place. It was close enough to the cinema that we could walk there and back and
then I could ride home afterwards. That autumn was strangely dry and there was still no forecast
of rain. The errand boy at the newspaper whom I would replace at the end of the year was
obviously delivering the weather to the satisfaction of the storemen at Drew Robinsons!
I went up onto the verandah and was about to bash the knocker on the door when it opened.
Jenny stood there wearing a housecoat but looking as gorgeous and desirable as I had ever seen
her.
“You ready to go?” I asked.
“Go where?” she said, her eyes deliberately not looking at mine. My heart sunk and I backed
away.
“We were going to go to the pictures. You remember? Elvis? Blue Hawaii?”
“Oh, I’d love to but I have to do some stuff. Homework and I need to wash my hair and things.”
“Can’t you do your homework tomorrow and I don’t mind if you come to the pictures with dirty
things,” I said, trying to sound light-hearted although I knew it was futile. I was dumped. Good and
proper!
I didn’t wait for a reply. “See you in church tomorrow!” I grunted and started walking back to my
bike.
Then a thought struck me. She was going out with someone else! That was it! Reverend Greene
had spoken to God and this was my punishment!
So for an hour and a half I sat beside a pampas grass where I could see both the front and back
door of her house at the same time. Eventually I realised I was being silly and fetched my bike
and rode home.
Boy, that roast beef and Yorkshire pudding tasted good next day at dinnertime!
My appetite was back, but right through that dry, cold autumn I would get little sads every time I
saw her. She stopped coming to Church and CE and I stopped hanging around the bus stop after
school. By winter, she was just the memory of a childish crush that I had outgrown. Besides, the
hockey season had started!
For five years I hardly thought of her again. I did my Junior exam and passed really well. Then in
January I started working and made a new circle of friends. I practiced hard on my guitar and was
thinking of forming a serious rock and roll band, much to my father’s disgust. He had always been
a huge fan of Doris Day and thought I should get into swing music, maybe a bit of jazz, but rock
and roll was a passing fad and that Elvis and Gene Pitney and Cliff Richard were little more than
one-hit-wonders.
But I was devoted to it and when the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers brought their
Merseybeat to Australia there was no way any other music would be good enough. When the
Seekers came along and Judy Durham replaced Little Pattie in my fantasies, I had completely
forgotten about my first experience of love.
Years later I came out of the back door of the newspaper office and saw someone sitting in my
Anglia. I didn’t have a regular girlfriend and none of my other friends were likely to do that – just
turn up unannounced and wait for me in the car. It wasn’t my Mum that was for sure and my sister
was in Perth doing her nursing training, so I was a bit surprised. Robbie Bean’s mother once sat
in the car, expecting me to drive her home as though it was my duty, but this time the springs
were not flattened out and the wheel arches pressing against the tyres as they would have been if
his fat parent had been there.
I must explain something else here. In those days, nobody ever locked cars. Most people even
left the keys in the ignition. I don’t mean just for a few moments while they nipped into a shop for
twenty Rothmans or a red capsicum or something. They would park on York Street and spend
three hours in the Premier then come out in no fit state to drive and find their car waiting just
where they left it, unlocked and with the key still in place.
Everyone trusted everyone else and I am not aware of anyone breaching that trust or having their
car stolen. Except in one case and I will mention that later.
So to find someone in my car was not a serious breaking and entering matter, just a rather
curious event. It would have been quite normal to just walk through the back door into the comp
room, come over to my frame and say “Can I get a lift home with you after work, Mate?”
But here was a very attractive brunette sitting in my passenger seat.
Cliffy and the foreman nudged each other and gave me a knowing wink.
“Looks like you’ll be breaking the drought tonight, Lizard!” they chortled.
The girl looked vaguely familiar and it wasn’t until I was at the windscreen that I realised it was
Jenny Malone.
“Pleased to see me?” she laughed, shaking her head to flick the hair out of her eyes.
“Yes, well it’s been a long time. Elvis has made quite a few movies since you stood me up!”
“You’re not still sore about that, are you? That was years ago. We were just kids!”
I was still sore and I felt squirmy. Although I did not have a steady girlfriend I was uncomfortable
about being with Jenny, even though she looked fabulous. Even though she smelt nice and had a
very sexy laugh. I just didn’t know.
“You broke my heart, you know!” I told her, feeling like a fool but unable to stop myself. “I took it
pretty bad!”
“Yes, well I’m sorry. I was confused back then too. It was puberty. It happens to girls too, you
know!”
I peeled out of the car park and took her along to Festing Street and stopped outside the house
with the verandah that I had watched from the pampas grass all those years before.
“I don’t live here now. My folks went back to the farm after I left school. I’m training to be a nurse
at the hospital near you. I live in the quarters.”
I U-yed out of there and drove her to the hospital. She prattled on all the way and when I stopped
outside the nurses quarters she made no attempt to get out. I misunderstood what she was doing
and thought she wanted me to do the debonair stuff. I got out and walked around to open her
door for her.
She laughed and blew cigarette smoke in my face. I hated girls doing that. Not only did it seem
trampish, it was plain bad manners. It put me in a rotten mood.
“You’re home”, I said. “Mind how you go.”
“Can you pick me up tonight? I hear you are playing at the Stomp and I wouldn’t mind going.”
“Sorry!” I said. “My car will be full of equipment. There’s a bus at seven thirty and I’m sure you’ll
find someone to bring you home.”
She got out and I drove away fuming. Was she just using me to get lifts around town or was she
trying to win me back?
Don’t be a fool, I told myself. She’s just a user. Peel out!
I had a shower and put on my nice new paisley shirt that Mum had brought back from England for
me when she went back for Grandad’s funeral. I hadn’t worn it in public and I was sure everyone
was going to be impressed with what I looked like!
The fellows in the band noticed and told me I looked like a sissy but I expected them to say that.
We set up the amps and drums and microphones and, not really understanding what a sound test
was, we slapped a few chords, said “One-two! One-two!” into the mics and then went to get a
coke and a Beach Coffee Bar Burger from the kiosk.
She was one of the first to come in through the door. She still had the power to make me wonder
what might have been between us, but the other blokes just stood and gawped! When she came
over and threw her arms around me and her lips around my face, they nearly split their skin-tight
jeans! I asked her to let go of me so we could start playing and she ran her hand over my arse
and let it linger long enough for the guys to drool with envy.
Then she sat on the edge of the stage and stayed there right through the bracket. When I sang a
Stevie Winwood number she stuck her ear up to my voice amp. That pissed me right off!
In the first break, I spoke to her severely.
“Knock it off, Jenny!” I told her. “You’re not only making a fool of yourself but you are making me
look like an idiot, too.”
“Twang!” she pouted. “Those boys in the band are creaming their underdaks about me. They’re
all jealous of you!”
“Just go away. Find someone to dance with. There’s Old Boongul! Go and dance with him!”
But again she sat on the stage right in front of me.
I had a really good friend called Glenda Rockman. She was a bit of a tomboy but we got on well
together. Nothing sexual, just great mates. All my friends accepted her in exactly the same way.
She used to give my car a lube and oil job and change my points and plugs. Well, the Anglia’s,
anyway!
But her sister was a real piece of work! Glenda was a tomboy but Karen was something else
again. She showed me how to surf, taught me to play in the bass clef and could bowl Cliffy out in
the nets. And he was one of the top-scoring batsmen for North Albany! She was very popular with
the boys and was always surrounded by half a dozen of them.
She also had a great singing voice.
One day at Glenda’s I picked up Karen’s guitar and played a few chords and she came in on the
piano. Next thing we were singing a whole bunch of Nancy and Lee, Johnny Cash and June
Carter and even Sonny and Cher. Glenda insisted we should do a few songs together at the
Stomp and it became a tradition that during the second bracket, when there were enough people
there but things hadn’t really started swinging we do a handful of these duets. A sort of a crowd-
warmer!
Karen came on stage, as usual the life and soul of the party. We started a really wild version of
“Cinderella, Rockafella” and flirted like crazy, our lips almost touching on some occasions. The
dancers always loved this. It was up-tempo and great to stomp to. And Karen’s act was so
sensual it even made me horny.
Reverend Greene would have been left a gibbering wreck!
But Jenny looked daggers! She glared at Karen and stormed down the hall and leaned against
the counter, completely ignoring Don when he tried to tempt her with a hamburger. She stood
there fuming while Karen and I did “I’m Goin’ to Jackson” and then she disappeared.
Good riddance, I thought. She was freaking me out!
But she seemed to get over her anger and when I lugged my amp out to the car afterwards, there
she was again in the front passenger seat.
“Can I get a lift home with you or are you taking her?” she said, indicating Karen who was
carrying my bass while a crowd of her admirers brought out incidentals like my mic and gig bag
full of leads, picks, spare strings and condoms. All the regular paraphernalia carried by bass
musicians.
“Stop being a pain in the arse!” I warned her. “You’re getting on my nerves!”
But I drove her home, foolishly and told her not to bother me again.
It didn’t do any good. Every time I’d come out of work when she was not on duty she would be in
my car. At every dance she would be there, sitting on the stage until the blokes in the band
started to refer to her as ”Lizard’s Groupie”, “The Lizard Tragic” and eventually just “Traj”. This is,
I am told, the origin of that unique Albany expression. It was thought up especially for my stalker!
The word stalker was not used in those days. It wasn’t regarded as seriously then as it is now.
There was a fellow who regularly came to the Stomp who used to stalk girls all the time. He would
phone them, hang around outside their houses and kerb crawl when they were trying to walk
down the street. He was under the misapprehension that they were flattered by his attention but
mostly they were just frightened of him. On a number of occasions we had to go and drag him
away and try to convince him he was being a prat!
But Jenny was starting to put the wind up me, although nobody else took it seriously. Cliffy was
the exception however and, in the goodness of his heart, tried to reason with her.
“But he used to be besotted with me!” she cried.
“But you weren’t interested in him then,” Cliffy argued. “He moved on!”
“He was so juvey then. Now he’s more mature.”
“Now you’re the one being a bit juvey,” Cliffy said. “And you are getting on his nerves.”
“You’ve never been in love, Cliff. You wouldn’t understand!”
Of course, Cliffy did understand what it was to be in love. But this was not love, it was obsession.
She really startled him when she suddenly said:
“Did you know I’m going to have his baby?”
Cliffy came and asked me if this was true and I said that unless they’d found a way of doing it that
they hadn’t told me about yet, there was absolutely no way possible! He went back and
challenged her with it.
“That’s not what I said. I said that one day I would have his baby, just you wait and see. And I will,
too!”
Karen and Glenda were delighted by it all. They really didn’t believe there was something going
on even when I started locking my car doors.
“Look, Lizard,” Karen said. “You’re a lovely boy and we love you to bits. But face it, you’re really
not the sort who a girl like her is going to go head-over-heels in love with. She’ll turn out to be
quite nice when you get to know her, you’ll see!”
One evening Dad asked me if I was having a problem with a girl. Someone in town had told him
because if anyone in Albany has any sort of personal situation, it immediately goes into the public
domain. Dad is always the last to hear about it.
I explained to him that this girl would not leave me alone, following me around, cramping my
style. Dad looked thoughtful for a moment then launched into one of his experiences.
“I remember when I was about your age there was this lass who lived in Brentford. She used to
watch my brother Les and I play football. He was a great right half. Very fast and could turn on a
sixpence. The ball never left his feet! I played in goal and used to feed the ball straight out to him
and he would dribble it right down the touchline then pass it to our centre forward who was a
chandelier at the boat-yard.”
“I think you mean a chandler, Dad.”
“Yes, that’s right. What did I say?”
“Never mind, Dad. Go on with the story.”
“Between the three of us we got promotion two years in a row and a talent scout came over from
Fulham to look at us.”
“Was there a point you wanted to make, Dad?”
“Oh, yes! There was! Um, this girl used to have a thing for Les but he was already married to your
Aunty Phyllis so she switched her attention to me.”
“And?” He had the faraway look in his eyes.
“Oh yes. She used to stand behind the goal and talk to me through the net and once she
distracted my attention and I let in an own goal that a defender passed back to me. The coach
wasn’t ’alf cross because we were down one-nil at the time from a penalty.”
“Good story, Dad. I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Glad to be of help, Son. Any time you’ve got problems, never be afraid to come and talk to me
about it.”
The Anglia had a little T-shaped handle with a keyhole in the middle of it which you used to open
and close the boot and lock it if you lived anywhere but Albany.
It never occurred to me that if I locked the passenger and driver’s doors, Jenny would open the
boot and get in there. But one day she did. I dropped Old Boongul off at his home before I
realised she was in there.
Suddenly the lid flew up as I put the car into reverse and prepared to back out of his drive. As I
was skewed right around looking through the back window at the time, it didn’t half give me a
fright.
Then Jenny’s face appeared over the top and I braked hard. She fell out onto the drive and I got
out to give her a real basting. It was even more stupid than diving into a freezing cold pool in
Pemberton at Easter! I could have reversed over her!
But she was crying.
“I didn’t know it would be so scary in there’” she sobbed. “I was petrified! I tried to get out while
the car was going but I was even too scared to do that. When it stopped I thought we were at
your place!”
I understood about claustrophobia. My arsehole of a brother had closed the lid of Dad’s Cortina
on me while I was in the boot trying to change a light bulb. I was in there for about three-quarters
of an hour before Robbie Bean came over to see if I was going to the Drive-In.
When he asked my brother where I was, he replied, smirking, “Still in Dad’s boot I suppose. I
locked him in. There’s no way he could of got out!”
Robbie got the key from Dad and released me and I didn’t seem any the worse for wear. But two
weeks later I went inside my wardrobe to fix the shirt rack and felt a bit uncomfortable. When I
closed the door I started to shake and every time I got into an enclosed place I had an anxiety
attack, especially if I couldn’t see an escape route.
Nowadays they have to sedate me if I have an MRI scan. Although I have tried to overcome it, it
still gives me nightmares when I hear of people trapped under rubble or in mine collapses. That’s
a legacy of my smart-arsed brother and his nasty pranks.
I knew that Jenny must have been pretty scared so I drove her back to the nurses quarters. She
left me alone for a while after that then gradually began frequenting the Stomps again and
pestered me for lifts home.
But it was pretty half-hearted now and eventually, when I left town, she married a farmer from
Gardener River.
However when I returned from working in England, several people told me that the marriage
broke up and she came back to Albany for a while. She often asked where I was, then eventually
drifted off again. I haven’t heard of her in thirty years now and haven’t a clue where she is. Maybe
she is in London hanging around Fleet Street waiting for me to give her a lift home!
Broad Beans
But it wasn’t only his Mum’s duck eggs that had that effect on Boongul. My Mum was also partly
to blame.
She used to make a cauliflower cheese that was the stuff of legends! I know her secret ingredient
and use it but not too many others do. It also involves not using parsley, so it never really caught
on in Albany, But like everyone who ever tasted it, Boongul could not resist it. It was up there with
drinking Emu Export Lager straight from the bottle as far as my mate was concerned.
Then Mum went one better! She applied the same cheese sauce to some stewed broad beans
and baked that. It was sensational! Topped with breadcrumbs and a little nutmeg, its memory
remained on the palate all evening and every time Mum asked what we wanted for tea, that was
our first request.
I think the bean option came about because once, when she went to Dad’s garden and cut a
cauliflower, she found that the cabbage moth larvae had eaten all the insides out of it leaving a
perfectly formed shell only a few millimetres thick. It was the last one in the garden and the shops
were already closed.
So with typical Albany Mum ingenuity, she looked around for a substitute and there, just like a
footballer waiting on the bench to be selected by the coach, were three neat rows of bean vines,
heaving under the weight of their pods, crying out to be harvested.
Dad is very proud of his vegetable-growing prowess. He also has a secret ingredient but there
are very few gardeners in Albany who don’t already use that vital compound to make their
gardens the envy of Western Australia. It is the end product of the equine digestive tract and is
often referred to as manure. My Uncle Buck calls it “horse’s doin’s”.
We had a pastor from England once whose very posh wife told Sugarbag he should learn to call it
fertiliser.
“I’ve only just learned to call it manure, Marm!” he told her.
But Dad was inordinately proud of his vegetables, particularly his legumes.
“My broad beans are next to nothing this year!” he once boasted to Mrs Bull.
“He means ‘second to none’,” Mum had to explain.
Anyway, Boongul loved Mum’s vegetable dishes, particularly her mornay. I don’t know if it was a
chemical reaction with the duck eggs or whether it was just a phenomenon of his particular strain
of gastric juices but the broad bean cheese worked like a charm on Boongul. You could hear him
as he set off down the road and he was still clearly audible as he went around the corner.
Jeremy O’Keefe
Jeremy O’Keefe worked for a menswear shop on York Street. He had been there since he left
school sixteen years previously and knew almost everything about menswear, alterations and
repairs, fashion, how to match ties with shirts and a myriad other things that go into dressing the
male body.
So one day after a hissy fit with his boss, he decided to go out on his own. He managed to save
most of his wages over the past years and he rented a small premises in town, liaised with the
representatives of garment wholesalers from Perth and stocked the racks he had Steve, who was
a cabinet maker’s apprentice, build for him in the shop.
I bought a couple of shirts from him the day he opened and so did Steve and some of our mates.
The band contemplated asking him to fit us out with uniforms but as we were all far too busy
trying to learn new songs, write original material and get laid, we never quite got around to it.
After about six weeks, I remembered seeing some sharp-looking waistcoats among his stock
when he first opened and paid him a visit.
He was glum!
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” he moaned. “I’ve hardly had a single customer in here all
week.”
“Why don’t you put an ad in the paper?” I asked. “Maybe people don’t know you are here.”
“They should,” he said. “I’m right in the middle of town opposite the library and council chambers!”
“Yes,” I said. “But you’re at the far end of the arcade, upstairs over the model railway shop. You
haven’t even got a sign outside.”
I bought the waistcoat from him and noticed that the sales docket was only number twenty-three.
After nearly two months of trading, that was not very promising at all.
In my typical fashion, I lost a button off the waistcoat the following evening and couldn’t find one
to match in the basket Mum has in the linen closet where she keeps those kinds of things. So I
dropped back into Jeremy’s shop. I noticed that he had taped a sheet from an exercise book on
the wall outside the model shop. In blue biro, it read: “Jeremy. Gentlemen’s Outfitters and Tailors.
Alterations and Repairs. Upstairs.” There was an arrow pointing in the direction of the
aforementioned Upstairs.
But when I went up, his face was longer than ever.
“Must be a recession!” he wailed. “It was never this quiet at Percy’s! And I put a sign up outside
as you suggested!”
“No offence, Jeremy, but that is not really what I meant by a sign. You need a professionally
painted one.”
“I can’t afford that!” he grizzled. “I’m losing fifty or sixty dollars a week as it is. And I’m drawing no
wages, either!”
“I’m not surprised!” I said. “Seriously, Mate, no one knows you’re here!”
“Can’t you tell all your friends at the Stomp and get your Dad to announce it at church on Sunday.
Like you said, I have to advertise and everyone says word of mouth is best!”
“Look, Jeremy, I’ve worked at the newspaper for four years now and I tell you, you will have to put
an ad in there. Probably in the sports section. Tell you what, I’ll talk to Alf Bond and see if he can
do you a special introductory ad at a reduced price. I know he’s done that before to help kickstart
new businesses.”
The logic behind this was good. If business was slow before advertising, then picked up
afterwards, the retailer would realise the reason and buy regular space in order to keep his name
in the memory of shoppers.
Alf was happy to oblige because in addition to his salary, he got a commission based on the
number of column inches he sold. The first ad appeared a week later.
Jeremy made a special trip over to see me.
“I can’t thank you enough, Lizard!” he enthused. “Business is booming! You were right!”
“Well,” I admitted modestly. “I do know what I am talking about. You have an extensive range of
really fashionable stock and your service is exemplary so people are delighted to shop with you,
now they know you’re here!”
In the following week’s ad he included the words “extensive range”, “fashionable stock” and
“exemplary service.” He invited me to select, free of charge, any tie from his extensive range. He
made the same offer to Alf who searched through the purples, pinks and mauves and eventually
found a slim, dark blue number with a little white anchor on it. His cost one dollar twenty-five while
mine was ninety-nine cents.
I continued to shop there and noticed an ever-increasing number of customers each time I visited.
Jeremy’s old EH Holden made way for a brand new Ford Fairlane and his smile grew wider every
hour he had the shop open.
“Don’t you think you should have a signwriter do a big display on the awning out the front?” I
suggested one day. “Locals know you’re here because of the ad in the paper, but in a few weeks
there will be a heap of holiday makers in town and they might not know about you! A sign would
attract them in!”
“Oh, I don’t know.” he said, his smile drawing in a bit at the edges. “That would be pretty
expensive. I don’t know it would be worth it.”
“I think you’d be surprised,” I said. “Signage is cheaper than most people think. I’ll ask Robbie
Bean’s uncle to come and give you a no-obligation quote.”
So two weeks later as I came out of the library I looked across the street and there was a large
fifteen by five foot sign mounted above the front awning of the arcade, glistening wetly in its fresh
paint, reflecting the pale midday sun back across York Street.
Then suddenly, three weeks after that when the town was full of pastoralists in for the stock sales,
grain growers spending their harvest money in one go and Perth people escaping the searing
heat of the “smoke”, Jeremy came in and cancelled his ads.
“I can’t afford to keep advertising,” he bitched.
“What’s the matter,” asked Alf. “I thought business was booming!”
“It is! The shop’s full all the time. I can’t keep up the pace. I’m rushed off my feet all day every
day!”
“Why don’t you hire an assistant, then? You can’t do everything yourself.”
“Yes, but that would cost twenty bucks or so a week! Wish I’d never gone into business now.
Paying for this, paying for that! I’ve had my hand in my bloody pocket the whole time!”
That’s not really the end of the story, though. I have to tell you these couple of anecdotes.
The following week Old Boongul was in my room looking for a comic. He saw the treasured copy
of Hard Times on my bedside table and picked it up.
“Charles Dickens? He hasn’t written anything new for quite a while now, has he?”
Then, of course, there was my Dad.
“Gregor at the cafe says you were in there with a really pretty little girl last night. Was it someone
we know?”
“No, Dad. You’ll never believe this, but it was one of the singers from the concert. She’s from
Melbourne. Do you want to hear her record?”
He listened and nodded with approval.
“She’s good. How come you were with her in the cafe?”
So I told him the whole story and he nodded again.
”That reminds me of once when I was going home on leave from my battalion!” he started. “I got
off the train at Charing Cross and there was a whole lot of people on the platform sheltering from
an air raid.
“After a bit, the all-clear sounded and we went up the stairs. I was thirsty and hungry because
we’d come up from Sussex so I went into a tea-shop and sat down. It was crowded and I got the
last table. I was sitting there by myself when who should come in and ask if she could sit next to
me but Vera Lynn!”
“Are you sure it was her, Dad?” I asked. “There must have been hundreds of women in
greatcoats and caps with that hairstyle!”
“It was her alright,” he insisted. “I should know. I had a picture of her in my boot locker!
“Anyway, she had a cup of tea and I had some Bovril. We got talking. She was one of the nicest
women I have ever met, other than your Mother,” he said, looking over his shoulder theatrically.
“It made me think that in an air raid, no one is worth any more than anyone else! A corporal in the
Fusiliers and the Sweetheart of the Forces!”
We both sat there for a few minutes with our memories, mine of last night, his of twenty-five years
previously.
Suddenly he said: “It’s odd, isn’t it? I had Bovril with Vera Lynn and you had coffee with Lynn
Verity! The names are similar.”
He went out and left me sitting there with Lynn’s song on the turntable and her book in my hand.
It was far spookier than that, I thought. A quarter of a century ago, a singing star made Dad
realise that all people are equal and now another singing star taught me the exact same thing.
Events in both our lives with lasting memories and a major lesson learnt.
But sadly, I no longer have that copy of Hard Times.
While I was in England, Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin and many people were left homeless. In the
public fund-raising appeals to help with relief work, many people held jumble sales and Mum
wrote and asked me if I still wanted all the books in my bedroom or could she donate them.
They were nearly all science fiction or Westerns, so I wrote back and said it was okay. It was
nearly a year before it occurred to me that Hard Times was among them but by then it was too
late.
If you have a very old copy you bought second-hand and it’s got “Lynn Verity” written on the top of
the flyleaf and an address in Albany at the bottom, look after it. I know it will bring you happiness.
The Beach
Ever since I was little lad in England, I have loved the beach. If summer happened to fall on a
Saturday or Sunday, my parents would wrap us up in our warm clothes and we’d catch the bus
down to Folkestone and spend the day on the “sands”, sheltering from the wind and rain under
the arches. Or maybe we’d go to Dymchurch where the beach was made up of smooth pebbles
that hurt our tiny feet to walk on and left bruises if you fell over trying to run on them.
So when we got to Australia it was like paradise to me. We lived about three miles from the beach
at Kwinana on Cockburn Sound before it got all oily and clogged with sea grass. The sand was a
brilliant white and the sea a sharp clear aquamarine, which I think is a beautiful word to describe
the colour of an ocean.
We loved that beach with its foot-blistering sand and the rusting hulk of the Kwinana, a beached
freighter that gave the shire its name. The captain’s name, by the way, was Medina and the
nearby town was named after him and the streets after his crew – Atkinson, Tucker, Hubbard,
Pace, etc. Oh, I suppose the main drag, Medina Avenue, was named after the skipper, too!
We would play for hours in the water with Dad and Uncle Buck while Mum and Aunty Gladys sat
under the peppercorn trees on a little grassed area near the dunnies, drinking Thermos tea and
reading English Woman’s Weekly which Aunty Dora posted them from Canterbury.
But when Dad applied for a job in Albany, we quizzed him and Mum when they got home from the
interview.
“Is it near the beach?” we wanted to know.
“Yes! The beach is just at the foot of the main street and there are bays and coves and rocky
headlands all around the town. We went for a walk along one of them.”
So although we moved there in August, we were eagerly looking forward to a wonderful carefree
beach-bum existence. Kwinana was warm enough to swim all year round for us little Pommy kids
who were not yet acclimatised and we imagined it would be the same in Albany, which was only
five hours away to the south.
Huh! That’s what we thought!
It was teeming with rain, which hit at an angle of thirty degrees to the ground due to the Roaring
Forty, a westerly wind which travels around the Southern Hemisphere, picking up speed as it
goes. It gets it name from the fortieth parallel but rides either side of it for a distance of about ten
or fifteen degrees. Bits of it race off up the western coast to make life unbearable for everyone
between Augusta and Mandurah. But most of it zooms in and focuses all its energy on King
George Sound. As it comes straight off the Southern Ocean, it chills the air to a freezing five
degrees Celsius which the weak Albany sun can warm only if it gets a chance to peep through the
thick blanket of clouds
So, to put it another way, it wasn’t ideal beach weather.
But was that going to stop us? No way!
The water in the harbour was just too nasty to swim in. It wasn’t really water, more like slime!
Even the English Channel had more H2O than this. This was like swimming in a jelly mould!
We were temporarily dismayed until a man who worked with Dad and whose son was in my class
at school, took us to Emu Point and Middleton Beach.
Middleton was magnificent. A beautiful, long sweep of white beach starting behind the northern
head of Princess Royal Harbour and extending all the way to Emu Point, five miles away. The surf
was powerful, breaking about seventy metres from the shore and the water was a deep gunmetal
grey to match the sky. There were dunes along the entire length and it could be reached at
several points from gravel roads.
At the southern end was Mermaid Cove with a jetty, some tiny grassed areas, a Surf Lifesaving
Club and the Beach Coffee Bar, home of the renowned Albany Stomp.
As soon as the icy spring made way for the cold summer, I started frequenting Middleton. Mum
would take us there on the bus and then we would walk home around Marine Drive and she
would buy some sausages or chops at the butchers for our tea. It was a great afternoon out and
the cold never really bothered us at all. It turned us into Albanians!
Then Mum got a job at the Anglican Church and couldn’t take us there any more. However, she
gave us eight pence each to catch the bus and have an icy pole at the Beach Coffee Bar. My
sister was at that age when she felt she should pretend she was growing up and didn’t want to
babysit two brats wearing knitted woollen swimming trunks who had noses all sloppy with mucous
from swimming in sub-zero water.
So just my brother and I went. We walked around the corner to Peels Place where the
Proudloves bus ran a half-hourly service on weekday afternoons. It wasn’t there when we arrived
so we punched each other and told each other stupid lies until it arrived. Then we climbed
aboard, paid our tuppence each for a ticket and commandeered the back row.
The bus set off and we resumed fighting. When it stopped at Middleton, we went to get off and I
realised we didn’t have our towels and trunks. A quick search of the rear seats convinced us that
we must have left them at the bus stop in town. We explained this to the driver who told us we
had better stay on board until he had finished his foul-smelling roll-up and made the return trip.
When we got back into Albany we collected our kit and climbed back on board the bus.
“That’ll be tuppence each,” the driver told us. I paid for my ticket but my brother burst into tears.
He had hoped to ride both ways and have an icy pole, or save the four-pence so he could one
day buy himself a toupee and a real estate agency. Now his plans were set back by a whole two
pennies!
He always turned on the waterworks if he didn’t get his own way. Dad nicknamed him
“Watermelon” because of his soaking wet cheeks. I believe that, up until this day, if he cannot find
a buyer willing to pay the vendor’s asking price, he still bawls his eyes out! At least, I wouldn’t be
surprised!
So we had the alternative of not having an icy pole or walking home.
I decided the walk home would be good for me, as there was no way I was foregoing my
confection! But the sook stood there whimpering for a long time before deciding to not have the
lolly AND walk home, giving him a four penny start on his Irish Jig and his career plans.
After I graduated from Primary School, I used to ride my bike to the beach several times every
week. We had moved up to Spencer Park by now and it was a great ride down McLeod Street
and Middleton Road but a hard slog home again afterwards. We had three-speed gears on our
bikes in those days, which were encased in the hub of the rear wheel and were high-ratio, unlike
the Shimano chain gears of today. On McLeod Street I used to get off and push it up to the
Miramar Road intersection.
But that never deterred me and I was one of the most regular visitors to Middleton in those early
years of the 1960s.
But I always felt cheated! In the movies, beaches were normally studded with palm trees,
beautiful dusky maidens in colourful sarongs or grass skirts. This idyllic scene was always
overhung by an impossibly blue sky. I had seen Blue Hawaii, South Pacific and A Summer Place
and a whole lot of other films at the Empire and knew what a beach was supposed to look like.
I had to make do with a few ragged Norfolk Island Pines, some old men scratching around for
jetsam in the shallows and the heavy rain clouds which didn’t only threaten, they delivered!
But although I felt dudded, I was now an Albany kid. I expected to be cold, windswept and
miserable. It didn’t worry me except it made it very hard to get a suntan like Frankie Avalon’s
But I persisted, lying in the dunes on a towel with the wind sandblasting my white, hairless body.
No matter where I lay, on whichever side of the dunes, that wind would find me and shred the
epidermis from me, leaving me even more sore and red than if the sun had been given a chance!
But I was not the only one who tried. There were always a few hardy souls in the water trying to
ride a wave and occasionally succeeding, but more often getting dumped ferociously on their
heads and losing their boards.
Once, I heard voices coming from the other side of the dune valley I was lying in. I didn’t need to
listen for very long to realise they were coming from a group of half a dozen girls from my class. I
crept up the dune and peered over.
Sure enough, there were my classmates lying on striped towels in their one-piece bathers, getting
flayed alive by the sandstorm. They had a huge battery-operated valve-radio playing the
inevitable Mantovani tunes.
I was going to go over and join them when I noticed two of them had their straps undone and the
tops rolled down to their waists. As they were lying on their tummies, I couldn’t see what all
thirteen-year-old boys dream of catching a glimpse of!
But, I decided, if I was patient, they would have to turn over to expose the front sides to the
carborundum effect of the wind.
I held my breath and didn’t blink once for over half an hour, while the other four girls rolled
backwards and forwards, their tiny breasts safe inside their cotton swimming costumes. But their
two more daring chums remained immobile until eventually they put an arm under the towels and,
holding them tightly to their blossoming bosoms, they hitched up the swimsuits and secured them
again with the straps.
Still, I had given it my best try!
One Saturday afternoon it was really warm, around eleven or twelve Celsius, and the beach was
packed! There could have been up to a hundred people in the water and the waves were ideal for
body surfing. I was swimming and catching the odd wave here or there with Watermelon howling
his eyes out nearby every time I got a ride and he didn’t.
Suddenly the siren sounded at the Surf Lifesaving Club and people began to leave the water. At
first I thought it was a shark alarm, then I realised I was getting pulled away from the shore.
I grabbed my brother and started towing him in which only set him off blubbering again, even
though he was only two years younger than me – about eleven or so – and in his last year at
Primary School. Still, you should never let your age get in the way of having a good weep, so I
grabbed his mouth to shut him up and hauled him into the shore.
When I turned around, there were a number of people being pulled out in the undertow, or rip, as
we called it.
I had often swum in the rip and knew that as long as you didn’t work against it, it was pretty
harmless. Just breaststroke with your body as high in the water as you could and go across it to
the edge where the water became choppy again. This way you conserved energy without fighting
it directly.
In the rip the surface was sort of smooth and gave the impression of being slightly concave,
although I think this is more of an illusion than reality.
I noticed a few kids from school a little way out and I went back, against the instructions of the
life-guards. They were not out too deep so I told them to come back in and explained what the
problem was and how to deal with it. They all quickly made it to safety.
Then I saw another kid a bit further out and he seemed to be getting sucked along. I swam the
few strokes to him and started to tell him, when I realised we were getting well into the middle of
the smooth patch.
“Just stay calm and wait until we get to the side,” I told him. “We’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I’ve got a crook heart!”
I ignored this remark as I didn’t know anything about crook hearts and was only concerned with
getting back to shore and trying to stop my brother from making a bigger sook of himself than he
already was.
“Just follow me!” I said and started breaststroking over to the edge, about fifty yards away. I
turned and saw I was swimming too fast for him and went back. To the kid’s credit, he stayed
calm and trusting.
“I’m Graham,” I told him. “The kids call me Lizard!”
“I know,” he replied. “We go to the same Sunday School. I’m Stephen!”
We breaststroked and dogpaddled over to the normal water and started to make our way in to the
beach. Stephen looked a bit tired so I stayed right alongside him. I already had my bronze and
silver lifesaving medals and was sure that if he had any trouble, I could pull him into the shore as
long as he remained calm.
We only had twenty or so yards to go when he stepped into one of those holes which often form
at surf beaches. He stumbled and I put my hand under his elbow and helped him up.
All of a sudden he was whisked off his feet and a womanly voice said: “Are you two alright?”
“Yes!” I said, recognising Miss Colmer, the Phys.Ed teacher from school. “We’re fine now!”
But she didn’t put Steve down because she knew he had a heart defect and wasn’t taking any
chances. She carried him in her arms as though he was a toddler. When she got him to the
beach, she checked his pulse and as it wasn’t racing any more than you would expect from a
thirteen year old boy who had just been physically handled by a bikini-clad gym-mistress, she
went to render her services elsewhere!
“Why did you let her do that!” asked Steve, quite annoyed. “I was fine once you helped me up!”
“Hang on, Mate!” I protested. “I didn’t have any say in it. What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m embarrassed. What if anyone else saw me?”
“So?” Then it dawned on me. “You fancy her, don’t you?”
“Drop dead!” There was an accusing silence. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I do!”
“I don’t like her much!” Tactless as ever. “She’s a grumpy old bitch!”
“She’s very nice,” Steve defended her. “She goes to our church, you know!”
“So does Old Gregson and he’s a bastard!” That was the strongest word I knew at the time.
In 1994 we had a class reunion. It was the first time we all got together since we left and Miss
Colmer was there.
She still looked as fit as she did in 1961 but maturity had softened her features. She was not as
old as many of our other teachers and I even had a little perv at her sensational legs.
She didn’t recognise me at first. I haven’t got as much hair as I had in those days and no acne. I
noticed one of the girls who had organised the evening go over to her just after I arrived and
whisper something in her ear. She looked a bit surprised and then came to where I was slapping
long-lost backs and kissing cheeks I wished I had been allowed to thirty years earlier.
“I’m so glad you came back for this,” she smiled. “Is Stephen coming?”
She hadn’t heard he had died when a truck hit his car back in the late 1960s. I told her as gently
as I could and a couple of tears formed in the corners of her eyes.
“I always thought of you two as David and Jonathon from the Bible,” she said. “I’ll never forget
that day you pulled him from the rip!”
I was about to tell her the real story but then changed my mind. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a
hero in her eyes. It was Steve who had the crush on her, after all.
But if someone believes something for thirty-three years, it becomes history according to the
Napoleonic edict I mentioned in the foreword to this book!
It is an illustration of John’s big heart and generosity that when we got paid for the three dances,
at first he refused to take his share.
“You and Lucio did all the singing and making the people laugh!” he said. “I am just happy to be
able to make the music for my friends to dance to!”
But although I could see Lucio’s eyes light up at the prospect of getting a bit more than he had
anticipated, he backed me up when I insisted John had arranged the gig and supplied the charts,
so deserved at least as much as we did.
Reluctantly he agreed to accept it. I think it only totalled around ninety dollars each for twelve
hours playing but remember in those days a tradesman earned thirty dollars for forty hours labour
so it wasn’t really anything to be sneezed at. And Lucio and I were still serving apprenticeships!
But John could not let it rest. The following Thursday he and Geri took us to the Esplanade pub or
“Ze Esply-o-nard” as he pronounced it, for a slap-up meal.
Watermelon
As unbelievable as it sounds, Watermelon occasionally drew the attention of one or the other of
the local girls. Perhaps they were attracted by his willingness to show his feminine side and not
be ashamed to cry in public, I don’t know, but he seemed to do alright for himself in that
department now and again. And when he did he became almost bearable for a little while.
One young lady who succumbed to his watery wiles was a skinny blonde named Cheryl who
worked for the radio station. He used to let her pay for his tickets to the pictures, the Stomp and
any other venue that required money and she bought most of his beer, cigarettes and petrol as
well.
Until she moved to Perth with her parents.
Normally he would have just unceremoniously dumped her and looked for someone else or sat
behind the woodshed until the next sucker came along. But there must have been something
special about Cheryl because he wrote to her now and again and also got replies.
One evening while we were watching “F Troop” on telly, he asked me if I wanted to go to Perth for
the weekend. Obviously the reason he chose me was so that I would share the cost of the petrol
or, hopefully, pay for it all after hearing his plea that he would be footing the bill for the oil,
servicing, wear and tear, tyre rubber, etc.
“No way,” I replied. “Not under those conditions. I’ll pay for half the petrol. That’s it. After all, I’ll
have to pay for a motel for the night while you’ll stay at the White’s for free. And food!”
He grumpily agreed. He’d probably already asked Whinge and his other mates and they had said
no so I was a last resort.
On Friday, we decided, we would come straight home from work, have a sleep for a few hours,
then set off around eleven. I was not playing in a band at that time. Folk music had become the
big thing and one of the chaps at the paper had asked me to form an acoustic guitar and singing
duo with him and we played most evenings in a coffee shop on the Terrace. It didn’t pay much but
it was easier work and I got to tell a few jokes and perform some of my own compositions as well
of those of The Seekers, who I idolised. And I fancied the proprietor’s daughter.
At around eleven, we loaded our spare jocks, toothbrushes and clean shirts into Watermelon’s
Cortina, along with a package of cakes, pies and sweets Mum wanted us to give to our sister at
the Nurses’ Quarters at Royal Perth Hospital. Then we belted ourselves in and he drove off the
lawn where he parked his car and onto the street.
The kerbs in Albany in those days were all slabs of quarried granite, half-buried alongside the
verge before the tarmac was laid and in some places they still remain. But most are now gone
and have been replaced with the smooth-edged concrete variety which are not so steep to drive
over.
As we bumped down onto the road, there was a bit of a clunk and scraping noise as Watermelon
had put lowering blocks in the U-Bolts under the axles to make his car ride only a few inches
above the ground. This modification was illegal but as even the gorillas at the RTA thought it
looked cool, it was not enforced.
It was raining slightly as we peeled out into the misty, miserable night. In those days North Road
was mostly on the drawing board and didn’t go right through from Spencer Park to Lockyer until a
few years later. It went from Bluff Rock to Sanford Road just past the hockey field and netball
courts. There was still a strip of swampland that had to be filled so there wasn’t even a track or
side road. We drove into town and then out the Albany Highway.
But at the Denmark Road turn-off, something made me check the car’s dials. I didn’t trust
Watermelon one bit and was probably checking that the car wasn’t overheating or that he was still
doing only thirty-five miles an hour. He was an arrogant little prat so I never put anything past him.
“I thought you said you’d already filled up with petrol!” I said. “We won’t get any at this time of
night. Everywhere closed at midnight. You’d better go back to Ma’s!”
Ma’s was an “all-night” petrol station and snack bar about a mile out of Albany on Perth Road.
When I say “all-night”, I mean it stayed open for about an hour-and-a-half after the drive-in
finished during the week and until about one-thirty on Fridays and Saturdays.
“I did!” Watermelon burst into tears. “I filled it at the Shell Station on my way home!”
“Then we must have broken the fuel line when we bumped off the kerb!” I suggested and a quick
inspection of the road behind us showed a slick of oily emulsion making rainbow colours on the
rain-soaked surface.
He turned the car around and we made it to within a quarter mile of home before the motor
spluttered and cut out. I got out and pushed to the top of our hill and Watermelon sat howling his
eyes out and steering. The mean little bugger didn’t even stop at the top of the hill and let me get
in, he just rolled down and parked in front of the house.
I ran down the road, my leather-soled Beatle boots sliding in the petrol slick on the tar. I was
nearly drenched by now and just wanted to have a shower and go back to bed. But Watermelon
had other ideas.
“Can we take your car?” he sobbed. “I don’t think we can fix mine. It looks like that little nipple
thing for draining it has been knocked right off!”
“I haven’t got much fuel!” I said, offering him a tissue. “Nowhere near enough to get even out to
Ma’s.” I habitually let my tank run really low, especially on Fridays, as I am sure Watermelon used
to siphon some off. I generally filled up on my way to the Stomp when his was already topped up
for the weekend.
And this Friday, knowing we were going to Perth, I had deliberately made sure I used it all up!
“But we can get going first thing in the morning when the garage opens at seven o’clock! Les will
fix it in a moment.”
“That’s too late!” he bawled. “By the time we get to Perth it will be nearly lunch time and we have
to leave on Sunday. It’s not worth going in that case!”
“I agree,” I said and got my bag from the boot. I made some Ovaltine and had a shower.
Watermelon kept on pleading but I ignored him. He wanted me to take the risk of running out of
petrol before we got to Ma’s but I wasn’t going to be in on it. I’d been drenched once already this
evening and besides which, I didn’t want to take the Anglia. It would be my oil, my tyres, my wear
and tear and – nothing was more certain – my petrol. There was no way he would offer to
contribute to the cost of the trip even though it was to his benefit, not mine.
I find it hard to believe he is my brother. Mum and Dad are generous to a fault and meanness is
certainly not among my sister’s many and exotic faults. She had a reputation for sharing it out
amongst the boys of her acquaintance and all her nicknames attest to that!
On another occasion he wanted to go to a quiz night in Denmark which is about thirty miles to the
west. Somehow he managed to talk me into going with him and even offered to take his car. I
had, of course, refused to take the Anglia because I didn’t really want to go and wasn’t going to
put myself out for him! However I had agreed to pay the five dollars for the entry ticket which I
privately thought was a bit exorbitant, seeing as it was, after all, in aid of his work social club! We
would be paying for the ticket at the door although he had already booked them and arranged a
table.
The tables each accommodated eight people so a total of forty dollars a table was to be collected
per group. Watermelon, I knew, wanted me on his table as I had a much better general
knowledge than most residents of the Great Southern who were only interested in football and
who was last scruffing who. Our table was, with him and me answering all the questions, likely to
take out most of the prizes.
I arrived home from work at five fifteen and Watermelon was already in the bathroom scrubbing
his tear ducts ready for the next outburst. I expected he would be in there for another fifteen
minutes or so, then I could have ten minutes to scrub off the residue from a busy day’s
newspaper composing and perform what was still, in those days, an almost unnecessary shave.
But although I banged on the door several times he wouldn’t hurry up. It was getting close to six
o’clock and I knew he wanted to leave around half past. I made a cup of tea and watched The
Banana Splits Show on telly.
Eventually I heard the bathroom door open and Watermelon emerged, fully dressed in his suit,
floral shirt and paisley tie, looking a million dollars. He smelt fabulous and I knew he had sloshed
my Old Spice on very lavishly.
“Aren’t you ready yet?” he wailed. “I’m ready to leave!”
“You’ve been in the bathroom since I got home!” I complained. “How could I have got ready?”
“Well, you’ll have to come as you are. I can’t wait for you. I told Andreas we would meet him for a
drink in the pub before the quiz.”
“Twang!” I retorted. “I’m not going until I’ve had a shower. I’ll only be ten minutes at the most.”
But the egocentric little sod wouldn’t wait. He insisted on leaving right away.
“You’ll just have to go without me then,” I told him. “I’m not going until I’ve had a shower.”
“Gloria won’t mind if you stink!” he said, referring to a girl he worked with who had a crush on me
and who I had decided might stand a chance if I was hard-up one night. “She’s got a head cold!”
“No, you go on your own. I might nip down to the Esplanade, instead.”
“Can you give me your five dollars then?”
“Drop dead! I’m not paying if I’m not going!”
“But you said you’d go and I’ve booked your ticket!”
“Then you’ll have to pay for it!”
“That’s not fair. You said!”
“Well wait until I’ve had a shower then!”
But he wouldn’t wait and I wouldn’t give him the five dollars even though he whined and sobbed
and appealed to Dad to intervene. Dad just told us a story about how his brother Les still owed
him ten bob over a bet they made in 1935 as to which one of them would be the to first get a date
with Marjory Lumsden at the Co-op in Twickenham.
For months afterwards Watermelon tried everything he could think of to get that five dollars but he
never did! At least, not that I know of. In those days people didn’t lock their doors!
That walk home improved a lot once I got the transistor radio. I would hold my guitar case in one
hand and the tranny in the other and listen to “Life With Dexter”, a radio show starring the
Australian comedian, Willie Fennell. It began at seven twenty and went for half an hour, so I just
got out of Bill’s studio when it came on and it would finish just before I got home.
One night as I walked by the Technical College, I saw a familiar figure emerge from the front door.
I was about to wave when my blood suddenly froze!
A year earlier, while I was still at High School, “Barrel” Ferguson had been my technical drawing
teacher. He was a miserable man, grossly overweight and probably very depressed. His skin was
ruddy, particularly his nose, which suggested excessive indulgence in the singing syrup.
One day we turned up for Tech D and were sitting at our drawing boards when Sinclair, the senior
trades master, came in and announced he was taking over the class because Mr Ferguson had
suffered a very severe heart attack and was in Royal Perth Hospital.
We never saw him again which didn’t surprise us because Pieter Flugge told us that his Dad
knew someone whose daughter worked at Royal Perth and said that Barrel hadn’t pulled through
and had died having bypass surgery.
We never rejoiced but we never mourned either. No one particularly liked him but also no one
particularly hated him. Except Flugge, whose arse had once been instrumental in breaking a
straight edge after he wouldn’t shut up in class and Barrel got fed up with him!
So to see Barrel, as large as life, striding out of the Tech building put the very devil up me and I
think I turned up the volume on Dexter and ran all the way up Campbell Road.
Next day at lunchtime I went over to the warehouse where Pieter Flugge worked and told him I
had seen Barrel and that he was as much alive as he had been the day he got his arse bruised.
“Yeah!” chuckled Flugge. “Youse dumb buggers all believed me, didn’t you?”
Not very funny! Willie Fennell would never have stooped that low to get a laugh!
Of course now that the boat was moored at Emu Point, my friends had no important plans for the
following weekend. In fact, they were all very eager to accompany me on the water. The only
problem for me was that I had promised to be on duty at the Surf Club both days.
However, employing a lot of eyelid batting, sweet talk and general seductiveness, Karen and
Regina elicited a promise from me to take them over to a little beach on the Sound side of the
Point where very few people ever went. We had discovered it one day while snorkelling as it
couldn’t be seen from the town side. In fact, you could only just see it from Middleton Beach,
three miles away, if you used binoculars.
I know they wanted to touch up their all-over tans and with bodies like that, who was I to deny
such perfection? So I agreed. Besides, who knows, they might ask me to stay and rub the Ambré
Solair on them!
The weather was still holding on really well on Saturday. It was not quite as nice as the previous
week and we had a couple of cold, rainy squalls on Wednesday and Thursday but the little panel
on the masthead of the newspaper said it would remain fine and who were we to argue?
Middleton never gets very busy until late in the morning on Saturday so I told the club captain I
would be there at eleven o’clock and could stay until three. That would give Karen and Reggie
over four hours to develop that mouth-watering tone that only the weak southern sun can impart
without first burning the top layer of skin. After dropping them off at their beach, I would return to
the boat mooring poles, drive around to do my stint at the club then return later to ferry them
back.
All went extremely well except they rejected my very kind offer to rub on the lotion or to even stay
and supervise. Reggie was wearing one of those peaks that look so silly on Boongul but which
made her lovely face even prettier. I wondered if Boongul’s peak made him more ugly and if he
took it off, would it have the effect of making him look more normal?
The girls shoved me back into the boat and pushed me out into the channel, making sure I didn’t
just stop off at the next cove and sneak back over the headland for a perv.
Back at the club we were quite busy. Chris Bell, the surf boat sweep, asked me to set up the
flags, particularly those which kept the bathers away from the area where the boat was launched
and re-beached. We also had some pickets and bunting we erected to mark the area visibly as in
the past we had a few near misses as the boat cannoned in to the shore on one of the waves.
A girl of about eleven hassled me constantly as I worked and followed me back up the beach to
the club when the boys took the Pontiac Chieftain II off on a patrol. The boat was a solid little
beast made of oak and carried a crew of five – four rowing and the captain coxing and working
the sweep oar. I don’t know what it weighed but it took six of us to carry it in and out of the surf
and place it on hard rubber cylinders to roll it up or down the beach.
They were out for around an hour and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had gone over to Emu Point
with the intention of sneaking a glimpse of Karen and Reggie! But eventually I saw them coming
back and lined up with the beach.
We had a loudspeaker mounted on a pole and I thumbed the microphone.
“Please remain outside the boat area as the patrol is about to return! I repeat, please stay outside
the restricted area as the surf-boat is about to return. Parents, please ensure your children do not
go anywhere near the area between the boat flags!”
Then I ran down to the water’s edge and screamed at all the people who had entered the
restricted area immediately upon hearing my announcement.
“Please leave the area!” I shouted to at least ten people who had taken up observation points
near the centre of the roped off bit. “Just do as I say! I will explain it to you later! It is dangerous to
remain there!”
Eventually I got everyone out and stood by one of the flags, ready to help the crew carry the boat
up the sand. The eleven-year-old girl was still standing alongside me, prattling on as only eleven-
year-old girls do.
The waves were beginning to get quite big now and I knew Chris and the lads would have a very
fast run into the beach. I had been with them on a few occasions and it gives you a thrill to race
down the face of a big roller with your oars shipped and let the momentum carry you right up to
the beach.
She was coming in fast! The crew had drawn in their oars and were holding them vertically so
that they would not get in anyone’s way if the boat went over. I could see Chris straining on the
sweep trying to keep it coming in straight.
Then out of the corner of my eye I saw my eleven-year-old shadow walking right across its path.
Finally she had got fed up with my ignoring her and gone to find someone else to annoy.
Without even contemplating the danger, I sprinted away from the post and grabbed her in my
arms and just kept on running. I didn’t dare look again to see how close the bow was but
suddenly there was a thud in my hip and a searing pain right across my left buttock.
I kept going and when I reached the bunting on the other side, I dropped her into the water and
verbally blasted her. I used words I never even used in the Army and she burst into tears and
called me a horrible, nasty man, completely oblivious to the fact I had just saved her from serious
injury, probably even death!
Glenda came running over and took the little girl from me.
“You’re bleeding!” she said. “I’ll find this girl’s parents then I’ll fix you up in the first aid room!”
My speedos were ripped and there was, as she had told me, some blood but the wound wasn’t
deep. I went up to the club and Glenda came in and ordered me to take my trunks off while she
collected some iodine and cotton wool.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Not the cut!” I told her, standing there naked, my pride and joy all shrivelled and shrunken by the
cold seawater. I covered it with my hands like a Second Year student. Not that she noticed,
anyway. Or she was too polite to say if she had!
“I took a hit on the hip and that feels a bit tender!”
Chris came up to say how he thought they were going to run straight into the girl and how he
wrenched the sweep oar right around so that they would miss us. Ironically it was the blade of this
which struck my hip. Still, better that than the bow!
Then he went to deal with the girl’s father who was complaining about how roughly I had handled
his precious daughter and that he was going to report it to the police. Chris restrained himself and
never punched him! He convinced the man that anything less than what I did would have resulted
in a very nasty accident and that, unless he was prepared to find witnesses and instigate
proceedings, he would be better off giving his kid a good smack on the arse and go away!
You could still legally do that in those days.
Meanwhile, Glenda was convinced I should go and have myself checked out at the hospital
emergency ward, maybe have x-rays to make sure nothing was broken or chipped. Club rules
stipulated that after any physical injury, this was the prescribed course of action.
“I thought you were a goner, Lizard!” she said, trying not to cry. But there was a little tremble in
her voice and some tears rolled down her cheek. She was driving my Anglia and we were at the
hospital in about eight minutes.
Of course, the triage nurse took about forty minutes to even interview me and then, although I
was the only patient in the emergency department, it took another hour before I was felt, prodded
and x-rayed and given the all clear. I was told to “take it easy for a few days” because the hip was
badly bruised. Finally, three hours after we arrived there, we got back into the car.
“Aren’t you supposed to be picking up Karen and Reggie?” asked Glenda and I looked at my
watch. It was nearly five o’clock.
The weather had broken while we were in the hospital and the drizzle had started. It was dull and
grey and the tops of the trees were beginning to sway. The girls would be getting cold on that
beach with only their bikinis and light shifts!
We got down to Emu Point and set up the boat. By the time we got through the channel there was
a howling wind and the tops of the waves were breaking over the bow of the little green dinghy.
Glenda sat in the middle so that my greater bulk would weigh the stern down but she eventually
came and sat on the other side of the outboard. We rounded the point and in a few minutes we
saw the girls huddled together next to a rock at the far end of the beach where there was a tiny bit
of shelter from the gale.
They were furious but when Glenda explained what had happened they calmed down. We had
the foresight to throw a couple of blankets from the boot of the Anglia into the boat and although
they were now as wet as we were, they stopped the biting wind from freezing the girls’ skin. They
had their beach towels as well, so they were quite protected from the storm that was now getting
fierce.
Even though it was only a week away from Christmas it felt like mid-winter. I was only in my
shorts, tee-shirt and a terry-towelling yachting jacket while Glenda had a nylon spray jacket on
over her shirt and shorts. We were pretty miserable!
Then the real fun started. The wind was coming from the south and blowing us back onto the
shore. We had to get out into the open channel or we would end off hitting the rocks and breaking
up the boat. Glenda and Karen were in the back controlling the motor, Reggie was sitting on the
floor in front of them and I had the rowlocks in and was struggling to fit the oars without knocking
her head off.
Eventually I started rowing and helped the little outboard to propel us out into the channel. Here
the waves were quite big and pounding towards the far shore, which I didn’t mind as we could
have beached there and walked back to the car. But the wind was doing its best to prevent us
reaching the point where the waves were breaking. Even then, I was reluctant to surf it to the
beach as a slight deviation could cause us to capsize or swamp. We had to try to get to the
calmer water inside the Harbour.
Regina was crying and looking petrified so Karen suggested they swap places. She came and sat
alongside me and took one of the oars. Between us we began to make headway as Glenda
coaxed every bit of power out of that ancient little engine. But at least now we were feeling more
encouraged as we could see the lights in the cafe getting closer.
It was nearly dark although it was over half an hour until sundown. The sky had turned from
gunmetal grey to jet black, except for the jagged streaks of lightning that lit up the waves, the
sand hills and the rocks every few seconds.
With an oar each, Karen and I dug deeply into the water and told ourselves that every stroke was
a yard closer to safety.
After what seemed like a lifetime, with my hip getting more painful at each stroke, we rounded the
point and let the wash of a small wave push us towards Emu Beach. It petered out at about the
same time as I did and I shipped the oars and stowed them under the seats.
Glenda steered us around the jetty pens to our mooring at the flats.
I stood up and the boat rocked violently, making me fall back onto the seat. My hip seized up
completely and I could barely step over the side into the shallow water and make my way back to
the car.
There was no way could I drive, so Glenda took over and dropped me at home first. She carried
the oars up the drive and put them under the house, then she and Karen hoisted the Seagull out
of the boot and stowed that as well. Dad came out and gave them a hand.
I could see Watermelon in the front room window with a grin on his face which surprised me until I
realised he was gloating about my sodden appearance and agonised attempts to mount the front
stairs.
Glenda said they would bring the car back later and they left. Mum made me a cup of Ovaltine
and a sausage and egg sandwich and I went to bed. I told Dad what had happened and he
related what it had been like jumping from the landing craft at Salerno under the Jerry guns.
When I started to drop off, he took my cup and plate and turned the light off.
A couple of hours later I awoke and Glenda was sitting on my bed. Karen was in a chair
alongside. Mum had let them in to see how I was but had remained just outside the open door to
make sure we didn’t get up to any funny business. After all, I already had one scratch on my arse
cheek!
After a day like that there was no way even I was going to submit to an orgy with two of the
toughest, nicest ladies in Albany!
Graham Lees
Kingsley, Western Australia
June 2006