accountants

I come from a family of accountants. My father, BCC, is an accountant, long retired. His father, ECC, was an accountant, long dead. His brother, OCC, also long dead, was an accountant. My mother’s father was an accountant. He died of pneumonia in 1933. My sister married and had three children with an accountant, now long divorced.

It’s entirely appropriate that three generations of my family celebrate their births on the first day of the financial year. Today we gather in Rainy Hill Road, Cockatoo, for my father’s eighty-seventh birthday, my sister’s fifty-ninth, and her son’s thirty-third, albeit that tomorrow is the day, the first of July.

Present are my mother and father, my sister and her second husband, two of her three adult children, me, my good woman and my two adult children, my nephew’s partner who has prepared lunch for twelve of us, and my grand-daughter.

My daughter and grand-daughter are unexpected guests, a surprise. Bendigo is a long journey. It’s not her birthday, but Nerri is the star of the show, my parents’ only great-grandchild, the only child of five cousins.

We come together in Rainy Hill Road because my nephew has bought 16 acres and a mud-brick house here, moved in a month ago, and wants us all to see it. We’ve all seen the real estate photos but want to feel the walls, sit on the bio-loo, climb up to the mezzanine. It rains, of course, and we huddle round the fire and a large circular dining table while 16 acres of bush goes unexplored.

Prue serves vegetarian lasagne, Syrian chicken, spiced beef roll, steamed green beans, a huge green salad, cous cous, tomato, cheese and onion pie, pumpkin and spinach leaves with slivered almonds. We eat and talk and laugh. No politics, religion, or skeletons from the family cupboard divide us.

My good woman gives gifts to the three birthday people; they are not her family. I don’t give presents, but everyone is used to that. They joke that I’ll get my comeuppance on my birthday when no one gives me anything. I bring good books I’ve read and give them to whoever would like them.

I ask my good woman on the drive home why we don’t come to grief as so many families do when they mass for annual rituals. “You are normal,” she says, explaining that we respect each other, and no money or inheritance issues drag us apart.

Perhaps it is no more than my mother says: we are nice people. Nice could be a synonym for bland, for the stereotypical view of accountants, and the sons and daughters of accountants.

But I don’t think so.

Rock on. 

at the g

I’m under-dressed in a cotton tee-shirt, cotton windcheater and Gore-Tex jacket. The air is gelid. The smokers are heaving nicotine into their lungs and guiltily exhaling what’s left into the night air before going where no smoker dare tread—the members’ stand of the MCG.

Text messages join us—Outside Gate 2; Four minutes away; By the statue of the first ever game; Heading in your direction.

Jim and I haven’t seen each other for two and half years since his Darwin wedding that didn’t happen.  I’d booked the tickets so went anyway. He’s a teacher who’s given too much of himself, now care-taking a millionaire brother-in-law’s vineyard. Danger there for the lapsed Catholic son of a Papal knight.

Jim grew up in Hawthorn, supported them when they’d won no premierships. Now he’s seen nine. I’ve seen eight of the Blues’ flags. My team hasn’t beaten his team in seven years: I don’t expect that to change tonight.

We’re supposed to meet MC-G, another rabid Hawk, dubbed “dial-a-quote psychologist” in the big paper’s Heckler column two weeks ago. Jim says MC-G’s dialled in crook; it’s just Jim and me. I prefer it that way.

I hand him my dosh and he flashes his medallion at the visitors’ ticket window, buys me a barcode. Scarves and coats reserve every seat in the lower deck, so we ascend to the gods. We might as well be in a helicopter. Jim sips a coffee, I polish off my cheese roll brought from home. No hospitality thieves rip me off at the footy.

The pre-game entertainment—a boisterous, bum-waggling calypso band—make conversation difficult. Jim tells me about his departure from Darwin, from school. I talk about my change of job. The game begins and his team quickly assert themselves. We don’t barrack; we analyse this game and the game of football generally.

Jim shifts to politics: he’s apoplectic at greedy miners, the shit-storm lashing Julia Gillard, Abbott’s George Pell connection, off-shore processing of asylum-seekers. We’re of one mind—radically compassionate—but I no longer let myself pop blood vessels over national politics.

Walking to the station after Carlton’s fourth consecutive defeat, one that surely consigns the coach to death row, I remark that we’re older than the thousands of fleeing fans surging round us. We laugh. What else can you do?

We’ll catch up again, soon, at the vineyard near Avenal where 66 year-old Jim wakes each day stress-free. The silly bastard still wants to teach. You just can’t beat the Catholic martyr out of the son of a Papal knight.

Rock on. 

childers

I arrive at Trafalgar High School a year after making an inauspicious start at Castlemaine High when I arrive to meet the principal having forgotten to wear shoes. This time I don’t realise that I've inadvertently applied to be Traf’s physical education teacher when, in fact, I’m a drama teacher.

For the first week at my new school the dogs and I live in my Kombi on roadsides in the Strzelecki Ranges. Jenny, an English teacher, asks if I’d like to share her house, Doctor Danger’s place, another old blue weatherboard farmhouse, this one surrounded by a young pine plantation at Childers. I move in and we get on well.

Childers is nothing more than a disused primary school and scattered dairy and potato farms. I drive my Kombi up and down the Thorpdale Road each day to school. I teach drama, an unexpected addition to the timetable. I play footy for the Bloods for two years with other teachers from my school.

Jenny’s a big-time dope smoker. So are her boyfriend Ross, his friend Ig—they work night shift between joints at Hazelwood power station—and Ig’s girlfriend Mexie, a teacher from Wonthaggi. Plenty of choof gets choofed up at Childers.

The outrageously loud Annie, black cape and wild blond mane, drinks whiskey and eats hash on the Warragul train on her way to visit and fuck me on Friday nights. She whoops and shrieks and frightens the bejesus out of me. A girl at the local pub asks me to name my Kombi after her—Sally-Ann. I decline.

At the end of 1977 Jenny transfers to Foster and I stay on alone among the pine trees. Late in April I’m away running a school camp when Marilyn comes calling. I’d met her at Easter at my friend Will’s house in Eldorado out of Wangaratta, where I’m instantly smitten by henna’d hair and breasts clearly visible through thin cheese-cloth.

I come home from camp to a polished Rayburn stove and a note from her. I can’t believe my ill-fortune. I have pinned all my future hopes on the second coming of this dream woman. A fortnight later she re-appears in an old Holden station wagon packed with her world. My world capsizes.

She cooks meals, makes butter, sews clothes. We get a milking goat and I make a crude milking stand with hammer and saw. Hilda gives birth to two kids. A rustic idyll explodes into my teaching and sporting life. I’m living with an earth goddess.

On 8 September, her twenty-sixth birthday, Marilyn goes to the Latrobe Valley Hospital and has her IUD removed under general anaesthetic. A fortnight later we conceive a child in the briquette-hot midnight lounge room among the pines at Childers.

The place is long gone now, rotted away as the pines grew and kept it in perpetual shadow, but the product of our coupling there will be 33 ten days from now.

Rock on. 

grand-daughter

She drills a finger into my left pectoral muscle. Checking for holes? Then my right collarbone. She moves her face up close to mine and scrutinises me from about an inch away. She scrunches her face, tilts her head at ninety degrees, then turns and bounces to the other end of the couch, throws herself on her mother, my daughter.

She is Nerri, 22 months old. One day she’ll be measured in years, but for now it’s months.

I’ve given up chasing my daughter in order to know my grand-child in a way my grand-parents never knew me. So I live in the hope that we will bond, my grand-daughter and me, though I see her irregularly. Her other grandfather lives in Bendigo, sees her often. Last time we meet a month ago it takes time for her to feel comfortable with me.

Today she is comfortable with me almost from the time I arrive. She knows my name, points at me when my name is spoken, though sometimes she points at the dog. In the kitchen she raises her arms for me to pick her up. She’s heavy. My arm soon aches. How does my small daughter lug this child around half the day?

She looks at me quizzically—who are you? Where or how do you fit into my world?—then bursts into a smile, as if she’s guessed I might have something to do with the mother she adores. She inspects the stubble on my chin, pokes a finger into my moustache. She traces a furrow on my forehead. Not once does she try to remove my glasses as my kids frequently did at Nerri’s age.

I am falling asleep. My daughter takes Nerri out to hang the washing and I doze off. I am asleep maybe for two or three minutes when the phone rings. I wake with a start, no idea where I am. I sit and wonder how it is that I have so little memory of my own children at Nerri’s age. I sort of remember the joy and wonder of them, but no particular moment.

I wonder about people who are able to remember such things. Do they have some capacity I do not? Or is it I who have the capacity they don’t possess; the capacity to move on to whatever comes next, to absorb what was, and to simply let it go?

This will perplex me a while yet.

Rock on. 

daughter

I drive to Bendigo in the late afternoon. Tomorrow I train another group of mentors. I organise to kill many birds with one visit. The first is to have dinner with my daughter. I ring on Sunday to make sure that it is just us two, no partner, no grand-daughter. I have not spoken with my daughter one to one since I left Bendigo 14 months ago.

I park outside the Malayan Orchid at the top of View Street opposite the QEO about six thirty. I wonder up and down the footpath waiting. After ten minutes my toes are so cold I open the Jazz’s hatch, whip off my shorts, slide on the trackie daks and a thick pair of socks.

She arrives and we’re ushered to a table for two next to a wall furnace. The Orchid is up-market, for me anyway. It boasts three consecutive years of an award-winning wine list on the front window. The menu is varied and includes dishes with crocodile, emu and camel, well-known Malayan fauna.

My daughter looks exceptionally lovely, but a father would say that, wouldn’t he? I ask her what character she sees emerging in her nearly two-year-old daughter. I tell her I admire her as a mother, that although she cannot remember how her parents reared her at such an early age, she must have absorbed the business by osmosis.

My good woman calls my daughter my masterpiece, but she’s wrong. She’s a masterpiece of fortunate genes and her own making. But not perfect. She says she is seeing a counsellor. That she lost it with her partner, screamed at him, said terrible things, stormed off into the bush, screamed some more and threw rocks. I’m sure she had good cause.

Nothing I hear surprises me; it confirms the inklings I have had, the reason I wanted to talk alone. I pass on whatever wisdom I have about relationships, not much, or maybe not wise, given my limited success at them.

  

I tell her about this blog, what it started as, what it has become, my misgivings about who reads it, whether she or her brother should read it.

“I just want you to know it exists and that I’d like you to read it should I get bumped off my bike into an early grave.” She says she’ll read it.

The food is marvellous, the service unassuming but attentive. The iced water keeps coming, the subliminal music no effort to talk over.

We hug for a long time before she goes home.   

Rock on. 

liberation

Not too long ago in a post I write about my pay-TV subscription and the obscene amount of sport—that is, AFL, EPL, A-league, and associated commentary programs—I could watch if I had a mind to. The thing is, I don’t seem to have a mind to watch much any longer.

The EPL and A-league are in recess, but Euro 2012 is on. I’ve not watched a minute of it.

I’ve despaired about elite Australian Rules football in other posts. The game once rewarded the player making the best effort to get the ball; now it penalises him. Players are more skilful than ever but the game is become a rugby and soccer hybrid that has lost its integrity.

For years I ask myself why I hunch on the couch season after season subjecting myself to the wee-small-hours frustration of Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal? Why I endure fraught afternoons of Carlton butchering opportunities to kill off hapless opponents?

Perhaps the stress of being a supporter has got to me. I don’t want my spiritual well-being determined by my team’s position on the ladder. I just can’t see it as important any more. Maybe the business of sport being a business has soured it, tainted it beyond redemption.

I reach tipping point. I feel things dying inside me—the need to know the scores, who’s in and who’s out of the team. I sit on the couch less, don’t turn the radio on. Instead I think about my job, give it time and thought above and beyond what I’m paid to give it. I pick up a book.

I’ll stay up late and watch the 99th edition of Le Tour, but “this could be the last time, this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don’t know, oh no, oh no.”

Yesterday I meet Nicky at North Ringwood Reserve. We ride for an hour in pale cold sunlight around Wonga Park, an enclave of country nestled close to suburbia. She racks her bike on the roof of her 4WD and heads home.

I wheel the Cervélo up onto the viewing platform on the roof of the change-rooms and watch an under-age game between North Ringwood and Croydon. The lads slog through the slush, their endeavour palpable, the one-on-one contest to the fore. I smell the liniment, the meat pies; my nostrils salivate.

Sport is a pastime. Before sixty there seems endless time to pass, rolling in the mud, pursuing a slippery pill.

Now, somehow, it seems a waste to pass what time is left to me watching sport. I clip in and pedal home.

Rock on. 

mindfulness

Mindfulness is all the rage, ‘intentional’ eating the latest mindful vehicle on the grid. Rather than subject the body to ridiculous regimes devised by the Israeli army or armies of dubious doctors out to make a killing, we are urged to think more as we actually eat, to savour every mouthful, to taste every molecule, as a way to eat less.

Professor Wiki describes mindfulness as an attentive awareness of the reality of things, especially of the present moment. No less than the Buddha advocated mindfulness in day-to-day life: a calm awareness of bodily functions, sensations and feelings, thoughts and perceptions, resulting in wisdom. It’s one of the seven factors of enlightenment.

I don’t remember why I have The Penguin Krishnamurtu reader in my early twenties; no one I know recommended it. Jiddu Krishnamurti is a self-styled world teacher of no religion, philosophy or political persuasion. In the second paragraph he asks if we can either seek or find happiness. His answer, as I read him, is that we can and the way to achieve it is mindfulness.

He suggests that before we can have any relationship to anyone or anything we must first understand ourselves: our way of thinking and why we think certain things; our conditioning and why we hold certain beliefs; the intricacies of our thoughts and feelings; and it’s extremely difficult.

The difficulty is compounded by finding the time for self-reflection, to study ourselves in action, when we are earning a livelihood, discharging our responsibilities, honouring our commitments. Well, if we want to get there, we just must find that time.

Krishnamurti wrote this in 1954. I embrace it and silently, privately practise this business of the self—self-reflection, self-awareness and self-understanding—described in those first five pages of The reader when I read it perhaps in 1977. I rarely mention it to others.

My good woman likes my mindfulness, that awareness of what’s going on around me, and inside my brain, my mind and my heart. I’m not always as thoughtful as I might be (of others), but I’m as mindful as all get-out. I try to keep it one step from self-obsession.

Unfortunately all the mindfulness in the world doesn’t improve the memory. Have I been here before?

Rock on. 

business

MM demands so much time and energy that I give up some things—teaching English to TZ, a Burmese refugee—and sacrifice others—my gym membership, time on the bike. Once I get sacked from the big project I decide to run down my business too. Trouble is, it just won’t seem to run down.

At the job interview for MM I indicate that I have two outstanding jobs lined up through my business involving three trips each to Ballarat and Castlemaine to train mentors. They look a doddle before working for MM heaves into view. My relief at completing the travel and the training is huge.

While presenting my first level one MM training I get an email from East Loddon P-12 College asking me to train mentors in a one-off three-hour session. What can I say? It’s not sufficient time  to really do a proper job, but I’d rather they had one good training session than none at all. I say yes.

On Wednesday I get an email from my former Bendigo employer. The staff miss the fortnightly bulletin I wrote, edited and collated for four years—95 editions. I’m sad and glad. The deputy CEO asks if I’d consider editing a new monthly double-page edition with the same quirky feel? I will not only consider it, I’ll do it.

The current financial year is about to end and my business earns twice this year—over  S16k—what it earns last year, which is twice that of any since it began in 2005.

After seven years the thing has gathered the momentum that a website and nice business cards could not achieve. By word of mouth and quality products—hate that concept, so I’ll call them good works—business generates more business.

Six months ago I thought this might be my only income in 2012. Now I have a job and need no extra income. I doubt I could make a living income from my business, but if I had to, maybe, just maybe.

Rock on. 

visitors

The new desk is due at 9:30. The previous evening I dismantle my ‘old’ office, the bench the length of the room under the window, the computer and umpteen peripherals—cords untangled, monitor, modem and telephone disconnected.

A thirty-third hours of rain wets me as I begin the day ferrying shelf after shelf to the carport. I scale the ladder time and again, store the shelves and retrieve others from the rafters. I clean each new shelf, swabbing off god-knows-what muck from the carport roof.

I vacuum the office floor and all is ready. I start piecing the new shelves together until the JRT rushes the front door. Instead of the desk man, my friend Rob stands on my threshold, numb face, a huge filling repacked. His dentist practises in Lilydale. Unexpected visitors are rare, the previous one in 2005.

We hug and he enters, climbs over the office stuff that clutters the lounge room. Rob fondles the JRT’s ears. We talk about days in the shearing shed, fellows we went to school with. The desk man arrives at eleven, unloads three flat packs and two long shelves, goes to work. Rob and I chew the fat; I’m glad not to be watching the desk take shape in the other room.

Rob departs as Desk Bloke finishes. He carries away an expansive rug, sundry tools and three large cardboard boxes in one hit. I wipe down the desk, vacuum the sawdust. The JRT rushes the door again. My parents, a Boston bun, and goodies I’ll take to my grand-daughter in Bendigo next week enter the house.

My mother hands me a wonderful little gift, an Aboriginal dot painting mouse-pad—the Stone Age meets the twenty-first century. I fill her empty bag with five books. We talk in the lounge room, religion, politics, children—hers, mine, my sister’s. My niece is in hospital again, psychotic. They depart in the early afternoon.

Lunch is another slice of Boston bun, then it’s the delicious task of making a ‘new’ office. Up high above the desk go the two big shelves, the shelving unit on the other side of the room next. Books and boxes come out of other rooms. I spend an hour under the desk reconnecting the computer and peripherals, toggling cords, tucking them away behind the modesty panels.

I flick the switch and everything fires up first time—monitor, modem, speakers, woofer, telephone, printer, wireless mouse and keyboard. I vacuum again, spread an Afghan rug of the floor.

My good woman rings to check progress. Done and delighted, I tell her. She asks about the rug; it’s on loan from her friend. Perfect, but it cost nearly $2k so I tell her I can’t afford whatever price her friend wants to sell it for. My good woman tells me it’s a birthday present from her. Wow!

I make a cuppa, sit at my new desk, get some music coming out of the speakers, and type.

Rock on. 

rat

Two escalators ascend from platform 4 at Parliament Station to the surface. The choice is to stand to the left and ride the things to the top or to climb on the right. Climbers are either in a hurry or health-conscious. I climb because standing is boring, lazy, infra dig.

As the colourless crowd shuffles towards the barriers and their blithering card-readers I reflect that I promised myself I would never do this: commute to the city, lab-rat my way through the maze, park my arse on cold steel benches and wait, wait, wait.

Few newspapers unfurl in the train; tablets rule the day. Fingers flick the digital pages of news items. Phones are for games and movies and loud private conversations. Books are as common on e-readers as on paper and every ear has a white bud in it.

My inbound train ride is relaxed. Croydon is the third station on the line; seats are available; I’m awake, breakfasted, reading, books—hard copy, regular page-turning. Seats are rare outbound in the late afternoon. People congregate around the doors; I push through into the aisle, no reading here. If I score a seat, I nod off quickly.

The 86 tram is different. The clientele is down-market, as likely to be rendezvousing for a dope deal as heading off to work. Caucasians, sub-continentals and Asians ride the train; Africans, down-and-outs and the occasional bunch of Aborigines ride the tram along Gertrude Street through Fitzroy into Collingwood.

From the corner of Smith and Gertrude Streets I walk on down Gertrude toward Wellington past an engineering workshop. Living places that don’t look like residences hide between the old factories and warehouse; some are old factories and warehouses. Designer clothing labels lurk between the workshops, the lanes and the boutique art galleries.

It’s a million miles from the two-block journey to work in Bendigo, a seven-minute stroll up Napier Street and Pall Mall, a 90-second ride on the Red Rocket. If I ride to work now it takes 90 minutes.

Today is the year’s shortest day: I leave home and arrive home in darkness, rain falling. It continues into the night.

Rock on. 

tradies

Plasterers are plasterers and plumbers are plumbers. Plasterers fling plaster all over your house, plumbers tramp mud everywhere. Carpenters are chippies and electricians are sparkies. One carpenter is a chippy, but is one electrician a sparky or a spark? Perhaps other trades have traditional nicknames but I don’t know them.  

They’re useful things, tradies. They fix stuff around the house that I can’t do, don’t know how to do, or would prefer not to do, like anything to do with electricity. I’ve rewired power points and batten light fittings in the past, but the coloured coatings on the wires can confuse: red is positive, black negative, and green earths things. What does a blue wire do?

My other dealing with tradies is on the early-morning road. They cut cyclists no slack, seem to hate us passionately. The bicycle inflames tradies’ notion of themselves as self-important people requiring get-out-of-my-way urgency. Builders in particular will run a cyclist off the road if the mood takes them.

But sparky Joe seems a nice bloke. The JRT sniffs his leg, approves. He arrives this morning at the appointed time. Tradies aren’t supposed to do that, but it’s only for a quote and his first call of the day. He’s young, tall, keeps his diary in his phone rather than in a yellowed, dog-eared bundle of papers on the front seat of his vehicle.

I ask the burning question and he tells me first up that an electrician is a sparky, with a y. Knowledgeable bloke.

We get to the business of his visit, a power point here, one over there, and an inspection of the switchboard and its charred fuses. He gives me three options; I’ll have a new switchboard, thank you. He photographs it with his smartphone, screws off the front plate and snaps the gizzards too.

We wander out the back and look at a light on the outside of the house above the rubbish bins I can’t see in the dark. The on-off switch is cactus. No problem. Standing in the cold, he quotes what seem eminently reasonable prices for the work to be done. Back inside I sit at my electronic diary and we synchronise our appointment time for Friday week.   

The JRT sniffs his leg again and we’re all organised.

Rock on. 

berengarra

I press Send and 1550 words fly away. They are destined for the Inbox of the principal of Berengarra School. Eighteen years ago I am its departing principal. Overseeing the life of this unique place is the pinnacle of my working life. The school and its staff and the seven years I spend at Berengarra teach me more enduring professional and  life lessons than any other experience.

Pete, the current principal, engages me to write the copy for their new website. The place has changed in 18 years but I have its essence. I sit with Pete at lunchtime and we hammer out the kinks in the script I’ve written. I come home and edit, edit, edit. I like the result.

In preparing the copy, I read the staff and curriculum handbooks. A page titled The other Berengarra in the staff handbook captures why this school means so much to me, why I become its principal 22 years ago but will never be the principal anywhere else.

I think a younger Nerys wrote The other Berengarra. The writing feels like hers. I appoint her to her first teaching job and later she wins a Victorian teacher of the year award. In 1993 I jointly present a conference paper with her in Fremantle. We research it together but she writes it. It’s unlikely I’d allow my name on a paper written by anyone else.

She writes that the school “encourages its staff to be first and foremost people in their own right and encourages them to show themselves to students as unique and varied individuals who are able to work together as a team.” Teachers are meant to behave like this.

She continues: “This school encourages its teachers to relate to kids in an alive, energetic and real way. We encourage teachers to use … spontaneity, lateral thinking and intuition in their dealings with students.” Truly shocking stuff.

She describes how Berengarra puts “a great deal of faith in the professional nous of its teachers” and “that this faith in the individual teacher is balanced by being part of a supportive staff team, both for its own sake and to serve as an example to kids.” Surely we can’t have this going on in schools?

Berengarra spoiled education for me by showing me what it can be, even with the most difficult kids: effective, common sense, and above all, respectful of young people. Far too many schools and teachers talk about respecting kids but have little or no idea what that is in practice. Teachers perpetrate a lot of the bullying and harassment in schools.

What I like about my current job with MM is its potential to change school ethos and culture. Reading The other Berengarra reinforced the value of the professional development that MM is, or could be.

Rock on. 

elphinstone

After my first term as a brand new teacher I leave Golden Point and find myself in an orchard at Elphinstone. Orchards are a recurring theme in places I live. The Pollards own this one, and like many farmers of the 70s they build a soulless cream brick veneer house for themselves and rent out the gorgeous old farmhouse.

A Rayburn warms the kitchen but the rest of the house is an icebox, no room colder than my room at the front of the house looking across the apples to the Calder Highway 300 metres away. I recall still, clear June mornings, temperature below zero, washing ice-stiff on the line, standing naked on the verandah, cracking the frost with my morning piss.

  

My housemates are fellow Castlemaine High teachers, Jenny and Carmel. Jenny is a no-nonsense type, slim, attractive, with a boyfriend, Shane, who plays for Uni Blacks. We kick a footy around the paddock. Major depression keeps Carmel bedbound in her room for weeks on end. I can’t see what her problem is: my knowledge or experience of anyone in the jaws of the black dog is zero.

My minivan dies. Now with an income I buy a second-hand white Kombi, park it in the big shed behind the house, build a bed and storage spaces in the back. I spend more time in my car than in the house, barely remember living there, no meals, no laughter, no camaraderie with Jenny and Carmel.

I drive out to Newstead for footy training Tuesday and Thursday. Terry, Californian phys ed teacher, lives in a muddy at Muckleford South. John, Indonesian and Maths, lives in a tiny caravan and builds a muddy at Green Gully. The Kombi, the dogs and I park ourselves in the surrounding bush. Terry makes pancakes for breakfast, John rolls a number.

Terry runs marathons. I run with him and Peter, another teacher, on aimless, empty bush tracks, keep up for seven, eight kilometres, then watch them pull away. Terry and I become friends and would be still, but he returns to the States when his year’s contract ends and we lose contact.

I buy my first bicycle, a ten-speed Centurian. I don’t know how to ride it, can’t figure the gears. I move the chain to the big ring to go up hills. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

My year in Castlemaine and eight months with a Kombi are the most sociable times of an unsociable life. In December the Education Department transfers me to Trafalgar High School to be a physical education teacher, despite being unqualified to teach phys ed.

Come January 1977 the dogs and I are living in the Kombi on the roadsides of Gippsland’s Strzelecki Ranges. A couple of weeks later we move into Doctor Danger’s house at Childers.

Rock on.

scores

I read Saturday’s big paper from front page to the last page of the travel lift-out. Sunday’s paper is all yuppie supplements, no discursive essays to make the mind tick. But Sunday’s paper has the country footy scores.

I climb down from the loft-bed, open the front door. The JRT dashes out for his urgent morning piss. I retrieve the big paper, head back indoors, brew porridge and spread the broadsheet across the island bench. I finish my morning cup of tea deep into the sport section, page 22, Scoreboard.

VAFA Premier is what I know in 1971 and 72 as A Grade Amateurs. Caulfield Grammarians are in A grade. I play on the half-back flank down at Albert Park number 3 oval. The team descends to D grade; this year they’re winless in their first year back in the top grade. They’ll go straight back to Premier B. An 87-point flogging this weekend.

In 1974 and 75 I’m on the back flank for Ringwood, black guernsey, white yoke. The old EDFL is a murderous competition, pocked by nasty brawls involving players, officials and spectators. Ian Montgomery, former Collingwood hard-nut, captain-coaches; Ralph Rose, Bobby’s brother, ruck-roves. Sixteen year-old string-bean Paul van der Haar gets a game late in 75. This week in Division 3 Ringwood go down to Templestowe 8.7 to 12.9.

In 1976 I don the blue and white stripes for Newstead; their captain Mac Fyffe teaches at my school. I move to the pivot and enjoy my first taste of country footy, win the club B&F with over 200 votes, the runner-up on 137. Last year the Maryborough Castlemaine League absorbs half the old Lexton Plains league. Yesterday Newstead 23.16 pound the arch-enemy Maryborough Rovers 1.5.

Trafalgar are the powerhouse of Mid Gippsland, red and white stripes, always play finals. This week they kick 17.10 to Yallourn Yallourn North’s 5.5. The Mid Gippy is largely as it was in 1977 and 78. Big porker Jim Forsyth, former Essendon ruckman, exhorts us to “bring home the bacon” each Saturday. I’m a utility player, backline, forward line, centre and on the ball.

Greta, purple and gold then, navy blue now, kick what is a record Victorian score so far this season of 56.16 to Glenrowan’s 1.1 yesterday. They’re mid-table in the Ovens and King. In 1980 Gunna is the gun centreman so I go into the forward line, kick goals. Greta come from seventh in 1979 to win the 1980 premiership. I’m proud to win another best and fairest, this time in a premiership team.

My footy career ends there, but the scores go on forever.

Rock on. 

repairs

Every home repair job uses three times as many tools and takes three times as long as first anticipated. This is the First Law of the House, known to every man with a shed, every single woman with a useless hammer in the drawer under her cutlery drawer.

In anticipation of the arrival of my new desk next Friday I get out of bed and dismantle the Ivar bookshelves where the desk will reside. I clear the large dining table in an adjacent room and transport endless armfuls of books, a shelf at a time, and stack them in order on the big table.

Reassembling half the shelves on another wall requires tape measure, screwdriver, spirit level, drill and bits. Things go well and the job is executed efficiently and without a hitch. I repack it with my collection of books about language, sort some into more appropriate places. Phrasal verbs, where?

After breakfast I fix six red brackets to the wall. Two long wide shelves will come with the new desk and house umpteen magazine holders packed with the garnered research wisdom of thirty years.

Careful measuring is in order. The floor drops away by centimetres into the corner so I measure and mark the location of the centre bracket. I will determine the heights of the other five by spirit level rather than height above the floor.

I screw up the first bracket and realise that I have no suitable woodscrews for the other brackets. A trip to the shed, slide out every little plastic drawer in my knick-knack racks. No right-sized screws. A trip to Bunnings: what home repair job doesn’t involve a trip to Bunnings? While there I purchase the polymer floor mat that will live under the new desk.

Good tools are things of wonder. Despite their lack of modernity, I know my tools and love them. No power drill for this job; the hand drill is easy—no cord, no extension cord. My slightly bent Phillips head screwdriver still screws up tight. My small green plastic spirit level is as good as a shiny metal job a metre long.

Brackets mounted, I test them with a makeshift shelf. Not a millimetre out. Bravo!

I ring my good woman’s recommended electrician and organise an inspection and quote for Wednesday morning. I need extra power outlets to cope with the new desk’s requirements—computer, monitor, printer, modem, radio, fan, telephone and a recharging station for two mobile phones and two laptops.

The satisfaction of home repairs well done is close to good sex and the glow lasts longer.

Rock on. 

desk

This afternoon I buy a desk minutes before closing time at a Bayswater office furniture showroom. I like to shop local. For 13 years I’ve sat at a bench that comes in Scandinavian flatpacks. It’s really a converted shelving unit. The time comes when a bloke who likes to write needs a desk and not a shelving unit.

My desk is the most important furniture item in my house. I write at a desk. I sit in a comfy chair to read but I can read at a desk. I eat breakfast at my island bench in the kitchen but I can eat breakfast at a desk. I can do all these things in bed, but not nearly so comfortably as at a desk. I can sleep at a desk too.

My first desk as a kid is a strange archaic thing of solid dark wood. A lid folds down to rest on two slide-out supports. Deep shelves behind a glass-panelled door make up the right-hand end of this quaint piece. Even in the late 1950s it’s from another era.

I’ve had countless desks at home over fifty years but none comes to mind. As a school teacher I am given the same bog-standard school cubicle—one narrow shelf for textbooks, four wrought-iron legs—surrounded by 20 or 30 clones.

I work for nine years at a community health service housed in a converted private hospital. I get the space no one wants—the nurses’ station on a corner where passages intersect. It’s a three-sided bench, acres of space, a pin-board for notices, contact lists and business cards behind the main working surface. I dig it.

Every desk before my current bench is a desk to write at with a pen, not a computer. My new desk is a corner desk. The computer will live in the corner, the space to my right will be a writing surface. I will mount two long shelves on red brackets above it to match my red desk chair. I will buy a polystyrene mat to protect the carpet under my swivel chair.

A ‘sling’ under the desk will hold my CPU, the cords and cables coming up from under through two small ports. The ergonomics will be right, the aesthetics perfect. 

Rock on. 

conference

My colleague Sasha texts me as I sit on Parliament Station’s number 4 platform on my way home from two days at my other colleague Viv’s profession development workshop on students whose mental health is a major concern.

The message enjoins me to be at the Positive Schools Conference at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre at eight the following morning. MM is one of the conference sponsors. I’ve no idea about the conference theme or my part in its proceedings.

I figure I’ll be up before six and on the 6:57 out of Croydon. And I am. From Southern Cross I stride down Spencer Street and over the Yarra. This part of the city is a mystery but I’m pretty sure Jeff’s Shed is down here somewhere. Once inside I have a half kilometre hike to the other end.

So this is what became of South Wharf where I came as a kid to meet my grandparents returning from the Orient. I enter a cavernous glass foyer, the Polly Woodside looking in the window. I front a reception desk, register for the conference, depart with a dinky red carry-bag to fill with conference goodies. A nameplate dangles from a lanyard around my neck.

Our MM and KM banners and stand are down the far end, books and pamphlets and KM’s ‘bling’—wristbands, pens, more lanyards—arrayed on our tables. I sit behind the MM table. About 20 past eight Sasha and KM’s Rob and Paul come out of the theatre where they’ve been setting up the stage since six thirty.

Delegates start milling at coffee dispensers and some make their way to our table. Sasha spontaneously breaks into an MM spiel. I do my utmost to discombobulate her with one-liners, cheap laughs for the ‘customers’. I initiate no conversations but await questions. I have no patter, no sales pitch, but I’m comfortable with stand-up comedy.

We talk with delegates before the show, at intermission and through lunch. Our goodies march off, mostly in the hands of South Australians. After each break a bell summons the delegates who siphon themselves through the theatre doors for the speechifying.

The theme is Eyes wide open; it’s about the pornification of our kids, as Melinda Tankard Reist calls it. Her feisty presentation is 200 slides of young people being exploited by advertisers, clothing labels, anyone with an eye to the youth market. Carr-Gregg exhorts us to engage the media, to hold politicians and self-regulatory bodies to account.

Self-regulation, as always, is a euphemism for open slather. Advertisers have no scruples, capitalism no ethical boundaries. I don’t care too much about the sexualisation, sexification, pornification, raunchifaction, whatever. Lust is the least of the deadly sins: it’s greed I hate.

We talk to the punters, scoff the conference tucker. Praise be that I don’t have to come back tomorrow for Day Two.

Rock on. 

conversation

At 4:07 I’m on a Lilydale train somewhere near Hawthorn Station reading a book. I don’t hear my phone ring. It’s my son Mo. He leaves no message, never does.

I walk in the door just before five and unpack my bag. I check the phone, see that Mo called. I ring back. “G’day. How’s it going?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what? You called me.”

“I was coming past, thought I might drop in.”

“Well, I wasn’t home, I was on the train. I guess you’re now somewhere else and not coming past here.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s work? Are you working hard?”

“Half the time.”

“What’s half the time?”

“It’s a bit quiet.”

“Lynne rang the other day, said she’d seen you and you had a ring.”

“Yeah.”

“This’d be a ring for Katie. Do you have any plan about giving it to her, saying anything significant, deep and meaningful?”

“Not really.”

“Does she know you have a ring to give her?”

“No. It’s sort of hard to catch each other, even on Sundays.”

“Are you still intending to call her father and ask about marrying his daughter.”

“Not her father so much as the family. And I’ll just tell them that’s what we’re planning to do.”

“Good. Coz you know I don’t approve of asking fathers if you can marry their daughters. It’s tantamount to treating women like possessions to be given away.”

“I know how you feel about marriage. I just think it’d be nice to tell them. Her mother said she wants to know before anyone else.”

“So marriage has been mentioned with the family?”

“Not really, but we’ve been together nearly four years so I guess they sort of think it might happen.”

“OK. That’s good. Has it been four years? That long? Listen, when you do you ask Katie, I want her to ring me and tell me she’s going to marry you. If you’re extending that courtesy to her parents, then I think she should call me. And I want to tell her that she’s more than welcome to marry you. And that I’m delighted it’s her.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“What’s that noise?”

“Just came out of the shops and turned on the bluetooth.”

“Sounds pretty weird. Look, there’s about twenty minutes of daylight left and Jezza hasn’t had a walk. So I might go and take him for a quick one.”

“No worries. Talk soon.”

“Yep. See ya.”

Rock on. 

gillard

Our first female prime minister is copping a fair old shellacking. Buggered if I know why. She is a first-class negotiator and consultant and has the biggest vision of any other prime minister after Paul Keating. People hated Keating too. I understood that—his acerbic tongue guarantees enmity—but the hatred of Julia dismays me.

The Australian electorate is a mystery. We are surely the luckiest country on earth, that country with the greatest capacity to give, yet remain so selfish it beggars belief. The what-about-me attitude of the vast majority staggers me. Most of the PM’s interlocutors ask questions about their self-interest.

But Gillard is gutsy and gritty. For an hour on the ABC last tonight she graciously answers some tough questions, even when they come in threes. She never once mentions the opposition leader either by name or title. She doesn’t use the most bitterly obstructive opposition in Australian political history as an excuse. She is funny on occasion.

The tweeters’ crawl-bar runs about ten to one in her favour, when it might be expected to be the other way round.

Gillard has been through bad patches—‘the real Julia’, the last election campaign. Nonetheless, the alternative prime minister is less popular than she is. And the other alternative prime minister, the one in her own party, the one she has twice seen off, is clearly an unhinged and narcissistic sociopath. Yet he remains the choice of the broader electorate.

Here already are three reasons why I don’t get the Australian electorate. Rudd is clearly an unsuitable prime minister, ineffective when he had the job, but is the popular choice. The electorate hates Gillard who has done what Rudd could not—get our biggest polluters to pay for their emissions, put a resource rent tax on greedy miners, and keep us afloat through the aftershocks of the GFC.

She is a big-picture leader like Keating and a complete contrast to the pea-hearted Howard. And if she gets up next year when the real poll takes place, she’ll have pulled off the greatest victory in our electoral history. Am I crazy to think she might. Go girl!

Rock on. 

hibernaculum

Not a breath of wind disturbs Melbourne for three days. Beginning nine days ago with a Saturday of rain, the unrelenting greyness sits on us for nine days. In the east fog is a permanent pall no ray of sun can penetrate. We are locked in cold antipodean doldrums.

Winter begins officially on June 1, although the solstice usually marks the onset of the real wintry stuff. This year winter begins on New Year’s Day. Weekend cycling has been crap: buckets of precipitation fall each Saturday and Sunday. Hours of sunlight reach a new nadir.

Yesterday five of us ride to St Andrews. The air is chill and the steam rises from us as we pedal our steeds uphill from a swollen Yarra at Warrandyte. Traffic is sparse. I’m toasty in my new fire-engine red Turbine, a bit cool when I tuck it into the back pocket.

I’ve always preferred winter to summer—the chance to break out clothes not seen for months, sloshing through puddles, the sloughing off of summer’s torpor. I welcome the different seasons—how does anyone tolerate gorgeous one day, perfect the next?

Now I’m confused. Summer doesn’t really happen this year and I miss it. My vegetable garden calls it quits, all growth stagnates except for the flourishing weeds. My good woman is pining for warmth and humidity. The football fails to rouse any winter passion in me.

The easy way out if the dosh is available is to go to France with a bike, not an option for me this year. Plans are forming for a venture in 2013.

In the meantime, I’m organising my hibernaculum. A hibernaculum is the den of any hibernating animal, one’s winter quarters. Mine is to be all about reading and writing. Current writing conditions are unfavourable. The long bench I set up when I moved back to Number 96 is inadequate, the computer screen too low and too close. I have no place to write by hand.

First thing is to get a decent desk. I’ve measured up my back room office and a nice corner desk with two wide shelves above it is the thing. Hundreds of books and boxes and folders will need rearranging but this is fine winter sport.

I prepare a list of office furniture outlets to visit, get excited. I wake early. While snipping garden refuse in the front yard it dawns on me that today is a public holiday. I will put no hibernaculum in place today. Bugger!  

Rock on. 

concern

An unselfish concern for the well-being of others does not come naturally to me. I do, however, believe that acting for the benefit of others is right and good. Both are definitions of altruism. Am I altruistic or not?

My mother believes the people of her family, grandparents, mother, father, herself and her children are nice people. She doesn’t define nice but her descriptions are of gentle folk who bother no one. I believe they would all act for the benefit of others.  

Having said that, I could not say that I see my mother as altruistic. Nor my father. His initial response to most requests is negative, then he goes and finds a way to do what is asked of him. I believe he is generous, generous in a way my mother is not.

It’s hardly surprising that I don’t see myself as innately altruistic or generous. Nice, sure. The good man my good woman believes me to be? Certainly; why not? I intend well. I do good things. People say I have integrity.

My good woman feels ashamed of her part in the recent bike accident that resulted in a broken arm. For a few seconds she is on the wrong side of a bike path and an oncoming cyclist collects her. We spend four hours in the hospital.

At the time of the accident I do everything in my power to get it right: to be solicitous to the bloke I know to be riding too fast and more than partly to blame; to not make the accident site any more dangerous for other cyclists who happen along; to extract my good woman’s bike and her from the swamp without further mishap.

I invest concern and effort in her injury and insist on taking her to hospital. Aware of my lack of charity I put personal concerns away and sit with her. I try to be conscious that I am just there for her, that nothing else matters this afternoon.

A week later we talk though the events and I am the one who comes out ashamed. I have been less than I tried to be, less generous, less well-meaning. My patience fails to stay the distance in that hospital corridor.

Some things do not come easily. I try but don’t get there this time. There will be another time.

Rock on.