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.