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.