menzies creek

In June 1984 my three year-old daughter, nearly five year-old son and I move to Menzies Creek. The rest of my family are already in residence, my retired parents in a rebuilt house on the south side heading down to Cardinia, my sister and her family a little further down toward the lake.

My house, the first I ever own, is on Menzies Road, the Clematis end. It’s an old fibro fruit pickers’ hut on a north-east slope, one acre, down the bottom, unseen from the road. Real estate agents would advertise it as renovate or detonate; quaint is the nicest thing to be said of it. But it’s mine. The twenty or so—I never count, just guess—mountain ash at the front of the block are prime.

My kids get to see their grandparents, their aunt, their cousins. I stop racing from kindergarten to day care and to work. I visit Centrelink, become a supporting parent, supplement that pittance by cleaning shop windows in Berwick every Friday. I walk my son to kinder up the road, walk the dog along the Puffing Billy line. I watch Play School, Kimba and Astroboy.

I paint the outside of the house, dig a trench further than I can roost a torpedo punt, and have the water connected. I wrestle the blackberries from the garden, build a chook yard and a tiny pond. The hens don’t lay many eggs, but the Indian runner ducks lift my spirits. I hitch a rusty trailer to The Barge and go hunting firewood—I have a fireplace and a stove to feed—anywhere I find it.

On Saturdays I play cricket with the Creekers, try out a pre-season with Emerald footy club but at 33 with two little kids to look after, it’s too much. The neighbours are kind and I meet a single mother, a long-plaited Englishwoman with a killer smile whose son is at kinder with my son. We end up in bed together.

I have no money but life has meaning and bringing up my kids on my own is not to be missed, especially after thinking I had lost them. Their mother turns up occasionally, unexpected, out of her head. She’s moved to a commune-type place in Montrose. The kids come home from visits underfed and grubby.

My sister’s best friend, another single parent, asks me to build a bench in the bathroom of her raw new mud-brick house at Chum Creek. She has designs on me I don’t even suspect and soon has her wicked way with me. In the end it’s not hard; she wears her sex on the outside, has big breasts.

For a while I don’t know which way to turn, but opt for the Englishwoman. She lives just up the road and also has big breasts. But her gay lodger stuffs things up by getting jealous and working out that maybe he’s a bit bi. I never liked complications, leave them to figure it out themselves.

In late September 1986 I rent out my cottage among the mountain ash and my kids and I move 60 kilometres away to Chum Creek to become part of a blended family. And I can get my hands on those big tits day and night.

Rock on.