ormond

Ormond is where I grow up. I am eight when we move two stations closer to the city from Bentleigh to 265 Grange Road. Thirteen years there take me from Laurie Boatman’s grade 3 class at Glenhuntly State School to walking out of the first year of an arts degree at Monash University and across Blackburn Road to enrol in physical education at Monash Teachers’ College.

No distinguishing feature sets 265 apart from other houses. Its backyard is long enough for me to play (and commentate) extended solo football matches, weaving between two apple trees to snap the sock footy through the green fibreglass garden stakes poked into the lawn as goalposts.

In grade 3 Jackie Krafcek and I have the footy to ourselves in the schoolyard at Glenhuntly. Geoffrey Gent is the only kid who can get it off us. I can name all but three of the 46 kids in my photo of Miss Rice’s grade 4 class. One day after lunch Dominique Rouvet pulls down her pants when I return a football to the sports cupboard at the top of the dark stairs. I am suitably moved by her largesse.

The next year is the first of nine riding the 627 bus to Caulfield Grammar School in East St Kilda. I am a good student who excels at football. Geoff Smith travels on the same bus and we become best friends for three years. He lives in Carnegie near Bakers Paddock where we ‘drive’ burnt-out car shells, catch tadpoles in scummy puddles, and hunt down discarded girlie magazines.

My first room at 265 is a long narrow built-in back verandah until a sunroom and new bedroom are built by one of my father’s drinking mates, Mr Kirby. My mother doesn’t like Mr Kirby, my father’s drinking, or any of his other drinking mates at the McKinnon Hotel where he sinks half a dozen pots every afternoon after getting off the 5:05 at Ormond Station.

My mother’s interest in gardening and Australian native plants begins here. This is the first of many gardens she transforms. My father runs his accountancy practice and has a heart attack at 44. My mother runs the house, plays golf at Keysborough on Tuesdays, makes cushions, curtains and lampshades, and graduates to upholstering furniture.

I’m good at whatever I want to be good at, but grapple with a painful lack of confidence. I watch girls—the 627 bus is full of them—but never approach or speak to any, not so much as a word, not even at the Friday evening dancing lessons I attend with all the other Caulfield 16 year-olds.

I get my first glasses at 12 and my eyesight deteriorates rapidly thereafter. I can’t draw but don’t want to. The secrets of science elude me. I love languages and study French for two years, Latin for one, and German for five. But I can’t see a future in languages; no one can in 1969. I fail physics, chemistry and maths, and hence my Matriculation.

Next year I pass German, English Literature and Politics with distinction and enter university. Just after the 1971 grand final I quit university, leave home one Sunday at midnight, and catch a plane for Hobart. For the next two months I live on a beach in Tasmania’s southwest wilderness.

   

Rock on.