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. 

golden point

In January 1976 I vacate my beloved room tacked onto the old Bemboka Road farmhouse with mixed feelings. I am now a qualified teacher about to begin my first job at Castlemaine High School.

In the last Friday of the 1975 school year with my girlfriend Cate and I drive to Yandoit for a final weekend together in a revitalised bed-and-breakfast cottage of local stone on the old Cobb and Company coach road. Yandoit is not to far from Castlemaine.

I ring ahead and arrange to meet the principal of my new school. Somewhere along the Calder I realise that I have no shoes on or with me and will meet Tom Kavanagh barefoot. It is his last day before retirement. The campus is empty; the rest of the school is away on an end-of-year picnic.

Mr Kavanagh assures me that no new teacher at ‘his’ school turns up without shoes and dismisses me. Mollie Brennan is the principal when I arrive six weeks later to be her drama teacher.

I spend my first week sleeping in my minivan in Peter Hill’s backyard in Maldon before moving into a room the size of a cupboard under the stairs in an A-frame house on the Golden Point Road. Barbara and Denise are my house-mates, both first-year-out primary teachers. We get on well enough but I don’t stay long enough to know if we might be friends. Denise shares my age and birthday.

Up the road is Golden Point reservoir with its Major Mitchell plaque tacked onto a tree. I swim in its chill brown water with The Pod and Grogan after school in the late summer heat. We explore the gravelly hills behind the A-frame where the hippies—potters and leatherworkers—have moved into the area and built muddies.

I teach drama in a former biology lab at the top end of the school. It still has functioning gas-taps for Bunsen burners. A dazzlingly well-made year 7 girl named Trudy stripteases during an improvisation in one of my classes. Some of the year 9 girls innocently but deliberately provoke my lust; it’s in the paradoxical nature of year 9 girls to do this.

  

The school year still has three terms, not four. By the time the May holidays come round, the dogs sleep in the A-frame’s driveway, wake covered in autumn frost. I accept an offer to move in with two second-year-out female teachers from my school. I pack up my cupboardful of possessions and drive them to an old farmhouse in an apple orchard at Elphinstone.

I sell the minivan and purchase a white Kombi—KWB 270, my home away from home.

Rock on. 

delay

Three busy days in the office culminate with a late-afternoon train trip to Castlemaine for my last training session with a group of local mentors.

A large young man sits opposite. His belly balloons from a tee-shirt that cannot span it as he wrangles a bag into the overhead rack. His neck, a deviationless extension of his torso, reddens under the strain. He wheezes audibly from standing on tip-toe, gulps the life out of a ventilator, and sags into his seat and half the seat beside him.

The 4:15 pulls out on time. I’m reading The silence of the lambs. Many regard it as a masterpiece and I want to find out why. Improbable crimes of ultimate horror are not my cuppa; it is brilliant for what it is, for the genre, and I enjoy the tension.

As we pull into Kyneton the driver asks the conductor over the PA to proceed to the rear car when the train reaches the station. A few minutes later she announces a delay due to medical emergency.

Suddenly Fat Boy is out of his seat and straining his ear at the driver’s door. He tells me someone’s had a heart attack. Now he’s on his mobile, barking orders to his interlocutor to get on the scanner and listen to the ambulance frequency. Immediately he reports that they’ve requested a MICA, so we’ll be late home.

I know my slender time allowance to get from station to elderly citizens hall is blown. I have no contact number for Elaine, the program co-ordinator. I sit philosophically at the front of the lead car, picture mentors leaving the hall, making their disgruntled ways home.

Ten minutes later I’m scrabbling in my bag for my bleating phone. It’s Elaine. I give her the news that I’m blighted by train miscarriages. She says she’ll pick me up at the station.

The mentors are waiting patiently when I arrive, about 25 minutes late. Our topics tonight are mental health, drugs and alcohol, and the strengths approach. Despite my tiredness and suppressed stress about being unpunctual, I facilitate the group nicely. They’re smart as, full of bonhomie and good questions.

A woman visits me at the interval and says I should shut Ray up. I sympathise, tell her I’m patient. He is a pain. At the end of the night he drives me back to the station, tells me we’re kindred spirits and offers me his telephone number. I decline, but tell him I’d accept it if he were a woman.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says.

“I know you didn’t, Ray.” I close the door and make for the deserted platform, a citrus tart in my pocket to devour on the long trip into the night along with The silence of the lambs.

I finish the book at Mitcham. Three stations to go.

Rock on. 

days like these

The radio alarm rouses me at 6:15. I contemplate lying abed for another minute or two or even till the news at 6:30. But no. I need to be on the 7:32 to Ringwood so I swing the legs out from under the warm doona, make to stand, lose my balance, put a hand on the bedside table for balance. The top flips up, catapults the clock-radio, a torch, glasses case and candle across the room.

I climb off my knees and cross the floor to the light switch. I retrieve the flung items and replace them. I cook porridge and make toast while rounding up clothes to wear. The toast burns. I rush it to the back door and Frisbee it into the garden. I cut another slice and continue about my business. This slice burns even quicker. I sling it after the first, cut another piece of bread and eat it raw.

I allow extra time at the station to book my ticket for Ballarat, but the bloke behind the glass tells me the system is down and he can’t sell me a ticket. He suggests I go to Mooroolbark, though I can’t imagine why. The tannoy announces that the 7:32 won’t run today, nor the train after it. I begin to wonder what sort of day this is going to be. The portents are not propitious.

I sit on a cold steel seat and wait for the next train, barely able to see the platform’s edge for the gaggle of frustrated commuters in front of me. At Ringwood I alight and cross the ramp to the Eastland side of the station. The unglued sole of my boot trips me at the bottom of the ramp, pitching me into some street furniture.

  

I’m being picked up in the furthest corner of the underground car park before the Vic MM team motor down Eastlink to Frankston.

The second day’s training is awful. Sasha and I confabulate sotto voce about our misgivings. Neither of us feels we could present this PD in its current format—bloated with meaningless PowerPoint slides and in no order we can make sense of. Just before lunch the participants brains grind to an inevitable halt. Just after lunch I can take no more and abscond early.

The Frankston train to the city is delayed—an incident down the line—but I’ve given myself plenty of time for mishaps. The rest of the trip to Southern Cross and on to Ballarat is uneventful. My last evening of training Ballarat mentors is uninspiring. Only three of ten impress me. But I can’t knock them; they’re volunteers and giving much of themselves.

I do ask myself how a city of 100,000 people can’t do better. Tomorrow I run the second evening’s training for mentors in Castlemaine; all 21 are fabulous. This from a town of 7,000. Doesn’t make sense.

Today is not the best day of my life, but I’ve been philosophical about it since getting out of bed. Nothing has fazed me. In the end it’s a perfectly acceptable day. John Lennon knew there’d be days like these.

Rock on. 

part-time

I go to bed just after ten and read for a while. As soon as the lids start to wobble I turn out the light and sleep. The first piss is at one on the dot, the second at five o eight. I lie there a few more minutes, know no further sleep happening, and get up. Breakfast is done by six ten, my briefcase packed the night before. I go to work early.

I choose the 6:57 as a fine vehicle for travel today. It’s a Monday and I don’t work Monday. I spend four hours working from my desk at home on Friday, and I don’t work Friday. My work days, as a point sixer, are Tuesday to Thursday. Last week I’m at a three-day national meeting in Sydney with my colleagues, the MM project officers from every state and territory.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll go to Frankston to watch my colleague Viv deliver MM level 2 training. I’ll catch a train from Frankston to Southern Cross and on to Ballarat for the third and final training session for mentors up there.

On Thursday I’m breaking out, my first solo gig, an intro to MM for bigwigs from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in the eastern metropolitan region at Deakin University in Geelong. From Geelong I drive to Castlemaine for a second training session for mentors.

So why all the extra time, working Monday and Friday? Catching up and keeping up is the answer. Three of us service this state, Victoria, but two of us are learners and the other, Viv, has carried the program for five months since her fellow project officer left in December. So I travel and travel, learning, in order to be productive as soon as I can be.

All that travel—Adelaide, Newcastle, Darwin, Sydney (twice) and deep into the Wimmera—means almost no time at my desk, no time to read, to bone up on the content, to prepare materials, to search the net for back-up research, to learn to use the reporting software. So I work. Work on my days off, days I’m not paid for.

I’m not about to poke myself in the eye. When I first work part-time in 1999, colleagues insist I don’t fall for the trap of working full-time and being paid part-time. Somewhere in the back of my head is a scoreboard of extra days worked. I miss two days with a cold but have three up my sleeve. No problem.

I’m new in the job, nine weeks. I’m alternately excited and overwhelmed. I want to be productive as soon as I can be. So I work. It’s a million miles from where I thought 2012 might go for me.    

Rock on. 

overload

I rise at 5:15, wipe my eyes with a hot face-washer, and head for the 5:43 out of Croydon Station. I swap trains at Richmond and arrive on my Polish dentist’s Sandringham doorstep at seven. She ushers me in and I leave five minutes later with a remodelled denture and $380 less in my wallet.

Sandringham to our Collingwood office involves train and tram. I shoot into the dunny just after eight, grab today’s PD notes, buy a breakfast spanakopita at the Greek shop on Smith Street, leap on the jam-packed 86 to Docklands, then leg it up Spencer Street to the Independent Schools Victoria building in North Melbourne.

The PD runs from nine till three. I hike back to Southern Cross and catch the 3:15 to Castlemaine. Mike picks me up at 4:45 and drives us to the secondary college. I train 21 mentors till 8:45. One of the mentors, vivacious Virginia, wild white hair, brown lived-in face, about my age, drives me to the dark deserted station in her untidy old tray ute.

In answering her questions I tell her that for two months I thought I might end up sliding into retirement against my financial will. She says she knows what I mean. She’s an ex-journalist, land-care consultant over Hamilton way, struggling to cobble a working life together. She doesn’t say so, but had I not mentioned my good woman during the training, she’d invite me home and have her wicked way with me.

The train docks at Southern Cross at 10:30, the Lilydale at Croydon at 11:30. I climb onto an empty 366 bus. The driver says he saw me walking up the road, same time the previous evening. (On my way home from Ballarat). He clicks on the PA and asks customers to move up the back of the bus to free up some room. I thank him, tell him I’ll lie down and have a nap.

I feed the JRT, apologise to him, sit down and wonder how it comes to this, working days ending near midnight, working four days instead of three, commuting to the airport. Sydney next week.

I start this blog on 1 January to map my descent into the evening of my working life but find myself with barely a minute to put fingers on the keyboard. I’ve abandoned my tutoring of TZ; we couldn’t contrive contact over a month.

MM is enough to keep me occupied full-time, let alone three days a week. When the Ballarat and Castlemaine mentor sessions end on 28 May, I will undertake no more, let my business lapse. MM pays well, I like the people I work with, I like what we do, I begrudge nothing.

Rock on.