Mothers

If there were only mothers in the world, children wouldn't be allowed to fall.

Our kids learned to climb on monkey bars, to slide down slippery slides, and even to ride bicycles down hills in spite of the constant watching and urging to "be careful".

It was all so tedious and unadventurous really, but I really didn't understand the depth to which this genetic predisposition to the long term protection of our species ran, until the first week of our first absolutely without child holiday.

All of ours had grown beyond the point of needing intensive care, apart from the odd "are you keeping warm enough" over the telephone, it seemed they were finally well and truly in command of their own respective parts of the world.

There we were, reaping our reward, on a nice quiet piece of river with a tree-lined grassy bank sloping into a sandy beach.

We set up our chairs in the shade and had barely begun to settle into a quiet afternoon of reading, when it was brought to my attention that the small children nearby, were playing too close to the water, or were climbing too high in the tree, or perhaps the little one will get knocked over by the big boy with the ball.

"Shouldn't we stop that girl from getting her dress wet?"

"No"

"Ooh I think that branch is going to break."

"Good."

"What if someone gets hurt?"

"It's parent will take it to the hospital or the morgue."

Instead of celebrating the potential of the earth's population stabilising for a short while, she seemed to be fighting to retain a gene pool that was already bent on destroying itself. We had to leave.

I was reminded of that episode earlier this week, when we took the grandboy on an excursion to a playground near his place.

He was locked in to a swing. She was gently rocking it backwards and forwards as if it contained some precious cargo.

Not being yet of an age where sentence construction is high on his list of importance, falling somewhere well below food, drink, sleep and cuddle, for a time he rocked patiently, looking pleadingly at her and gently repeating himself:

"two. two. two"

Becoming frustrated, the softness left his voice:

"TWO TWO TWOOOOOOO "

Still she rocked, perhaps hoping to lull him into a deep slumber, unable to decipher what it was that so occupied the mathematical part of his brain.

It took the grandfather to translate.

Gently lifting the swing to about waste height, he whispered;

"one..."

As the swing raised to chest height, together they called "TWOOO"

With a push and a laugh, the swing flew half way to the moon;

"THREEEEEEEEE !"

She couldn't watch.

I don't like Cricket, I love it!

Cricket.

I found a picture of the famous Gabba cricket ground Scoreboard the other day, which probably wouldn’t be remarkable for anyone who was a collector of pictures of cricket scoreboards, which I’m not, and so I thought it's existence bore more investigation.

In 1958, we lived on Thursday Island, which in those days equated in technological and accessibility terms to being about as far away from Woolloongabba then as the moon is today, so it didn’t take much effort to deduce that my father didn’t actually take the shot.

It did take a bit of deduction though, to confirm that the score shown is actually on the second day of the first test in 1958, England vs Australia when Australia were defending the “Ashes” once again.

Either that, or it was taken by my father in 1960 when we returned to Brisbane and the scoreboard time had stood still for a few years, an admittedly unlikely probability.

So I dug around a bit.

My father was a bit of a cricket aficionado, and so it turns out was his father, who perhaps fortuitously passed away before he could be disappointed in the absolute lack of cricketing prowess in any of his son’s progeny.

Grandpa, as far as we can recall didn’t own a camera, but it appears he did ask someone at the grounds to take this picture so he could post it to his son, who was living as has already been described in the farthest flung reach of the country, at a place where even radio reception was too sporadic to hear every ball bowled.

What moved him to do this one might wonder? Surely by the time the photo had been developed and parcelled and sent, the results of the match would long have been relegated to history, even on TI.

This was what we'd call a gee-up. He was quietly if not subtly telling the his son that he could have been there too if he hadn't been living a few thousand miles away in the middle of nowhere, and although I know he'd have preferred they'd been together, he was making the most of the moment.

Then I remembered this post from last year, and I broke out in a cold sweat.

It would appear that I have been born with a genetic disposition to torture and torment distant sons(in law) who can’t make it to the grounds for major cricketing events. It’s not my fault, it’s in my genes!

Grandpa would doubtless have chuckled as much at my post as he almost certainly did the day he slipped the scoreboard slide into it’s envelope.

It’s all very liberating really. It’s as though I’ve had permission to keep up the good work!

There's a cricket season just around the corner. I think I shall.

The Living Fossil

At the edge of the town in Bundaberg there’s a relatively recent development on the river, with a pleasant cafe providing exraordinarily equally unpleasant fare. How anyone can get a toasted ham and cheese sandwich wrong is beyond my comprehension, but in retrospect the experience was worth it just to make me grateful for all the people in the world who can toast a ham and cheese sandwich with reasonable proficiency.

Surrounding the cafe is what the urban planners among us would call public open space, which actually comprises a carpark, a steep riverbank and a public loo, all pleasantly disguised behind landscaping and timber ramps, which are so prolific that one can no longer see through them to the boats moored on the river, which was the reason for putting the park and the cafe there in the first place.

Right at the entrance to the cafe though, there’s a bit of sculpture, “public art” the urban planners would call it, in the shape of good old Neoceratodus forsteri, the Queensland Lung Fish. It’s a monster lump of steel with a few bits of old outboard motor attached and at first glance I thought it was another of those witty pieces constructed entirely of pieces of old machinery popularised if not made famous by Mark Trotter, and I’d almost begun a yawn, when I realised it wasn’t. I’m not sure whether it’s a clever piece or not, or whether the exposed ribs and parts of the carcass were meant to be evocative of the danger in which the species now finds itself, but it started me thinking, which probably means as a piece of art it succeeded in any case.

I don’t even know if there was a plaque there to explain it either, I didn’t look, because by the time I would have in normal circumstances gone looking for it I was too immersed in my own thoughts of things near extinction and my fondness of the lung fish exhibit at the Queensland Museum when I was fifty years younger than I am at present. The museum was in that Baroque brick building near the exhibition grounds in those days, and to a small boy it always seemed as though it was a thousand years old even then. The interior was verging on shoddy really, and the displays in my mind at least were something reminiscent of museums from a far earlier time.

We’d arrive and crawl over the WW1 German tank “Mephisto” on the way in, then run straight past the rusty steel water tank that Eliza Fraser paddled in to safety across Tin Can Bay, to the impossibly small glass fishtanks so encrusted with algae that we could barely see through the murky water, and watch what we could see of the poor old “living fossil” meander up and down or mostly not meander at all. I have no idea what it was that fascinated us so, but I think it was that it was a genuinely rare and endangered species, and this specimen was even more endangered than his siblings, given that there was going to be at best limited opportunity for him to return to the place of his birth, let alone find a girlfriend in that small single fish sized tank.

Perhaps it was the thought that at every visit I could have been the last person on earth to see it alive. In the fities, extinction was what had happened to dinosaurs and this was a "living fossil" after all.

Everything else seemed to be in boundless supply.

The poor old lung fish in its own habitat, returns to the same spot each year to breed, and if the spot’s disappeared as a result of drought, or because a dam has suddenly appeared, or if the food supply isn’t up to scratch it simply won’t do the necessary business. Given that it only appears in the Burnett and Mary river systems, which are under reasonably intense water harvesting development, apparently there’s very little business being done at all these days, although some of their number have been relocated into other systems in an attempt to conserve one or two for future museum tanks.

The human population doesn’t seem to suffer from the same geographic fussiness for reproduction of the species as the lung fish, but if it did, I suspect that Bundaberg may well be a very tiny hamlet after just one generation. The town is nice enough of course, but the ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches would be enough to stop anything breeding.

Black and Gold

Black and Gold

Ice cream, like many things comes in many quantities, prices and qualities and I think it would be fair to say that the father of the household has never been too discriminating when it comes to that particular product. If it's cold and sweet, it will be consumed. Whether my lack of discrimination comes from growing up at a time when it was a very rare and very special treat, or whether I just don't have any discrimination, I don't know.

While I really appreciate the better quality, and would crawl over cut glass for a cone with a scoop of the really good stuff on it, when there are budgets to be met, as a foodstuff it is well into the optional zone, the cheap icy variety with solids of mysterious origin will do thanks very much. The fact that it can be had by the litre at a quarter of the price of one scoop from the specialty shops cannot be overlooked.

One special night a long while ago, we decided that ice-cream would make an ideal finale to a rather pleasant dinner, and feeling particularly flush with disposable funds at the time, the father was duly dispatched to the corner store for supplies.

Now my father was a child during the great depression, and it must be said that some of his lifetime frugality had been genetically transferred to his son. Unable to pass a bargain, I reached instinctively for the bucket labelled "Black and Gold", a generic and very ahem... economical label indeed.

Unlike their father, my children aspired to rather sophisticated heights and protested long and loud about the rather obvious lack of quality in the generic brand, which to be fair did seem to comprise little more than frozen water with a white tone to it. So perturbed where they, that they chose not to partake of any more of the miscreant material, leaving the best part of four litres to be devoured by their father over the next six months or perhaps eight.

The casual reader may think that six months is a long time to take to consume four litres of ice-cream, no matter how unpalatable that may be, and no matter that it was the task of one solitary person, and to a great extent they’d be correct.

In this case it was time we felt, for the kids to learn a lesson about the importance of being discriminating, or at least determining what is and what is not important enough to discriminate against. When a treat is offered, we felt they should learn to accept it with grace, and that perhaps there is a social price to be paid for creating a fuss where it’s not able to be politely justified.

Each evening for many months we'd offer them a dessert based on ice-cream.

They'd refuse, happily watching me eat a serve with fruit, with topping, with apple pie, or just by itself, content in the knowledge that it would run out soon, and their boycott would be over, but in the meantime they’d continue their protest.

Not once in that whole time did they question how long that one rotten el-cheapo bucket was lasting. If they had, they may have discovered the awful truth.

Each week or so, I’d buy a small tub of the good stuff which was easily affordable as only one of us was consuming it. With the arrival of each new tub we’d discretely empty the contents into the miscreant Black and Gold container, perhaps forgetting to spread the news of an improvement in the quality that may have resulted.

Eventually we owned up, to a family which I may add after twenty years still has its collective noses out of joint, and which still has randomly discriminating taste.

I thought they’d at least try things now before turning up their noses, but no, just this past weekend, after coaxing one of it’s members to try a new foodstuff, I was reminded in no uncertain terms how untrustworthy I am, and all because of “that ice-cream that tasted like dirt”.

When Good Birdseed Goes Bad

There was a time when the sparrows would fly through our house as though it was theirs. They'd eat crumbs from our coffee table and generally treat us with the contempt which undoubtedly we deserved.

We had a friend who maintained a large city hotel, who offered us a bag of a special sort of birdseed, which would, he promised with a wink which clearly wasn't observed by the female among us, disorient them, and they would never find their way back.

And it did, and they didn't.

Time went by, as it always does, and we found ourselves in the company of a young friend's budgie while she was away for a few weeks. Now it has been previously been observed, that we don't do budgies all that well, so it was incredibly brave of our young friend to leave said bird in our charge.

All went well for a time, until one coffee time, when a few ladies were assembled on our back verandah, and I was summoned from my office to see what I could do with what was very certainly a soon to be deceased family pet.

As the poor thing lay writhing, taking no comfort from the hands of one of our guests who was tenderly nursing it as it breathed it's last, I calmly turned on the stereo.

I wondered at the open bag of "special" seed near the cage. Was this, I wondered half aloud with shoulders dropped, the special seed which disorients sparrows?

Alas, my investigations proved it was the very same.

Incredibly, having missed the wink in that earlier conversation, and also having forgotten to replenish the dwindling stock of birdseed, one of us had used the special seed to provide sustenance to the poor thing.

Figuring I suppose, that a budgie cage is so small, a little diminuition of the homing senses could only be a good thing. Sort of like Alzheimer's for birds I guess. Surely if a bird forgot where it was in a small cage, it would be like living in a large cage.

Wouldn't it?

Well I suppose so, except that the “disorientation” dispensed by this seed was somewhat more significant than that contemplated by the keeper of the flock. Even when confronted with the evidential budgie in distinctly corpse-like repose, she refused to accept it as anything but mere coincidence.

A few days later, in an effort to prove me wrong, she sought counsel from the owner of the wink.

Without a word, the seed mysteriously disappeared, and rest assured dear reader, we haven’t come across another disoriented budgie to this day.

Yalleroi

Yalleroi couldn’t be described as a one horse town, at least not at the time we visited There were in no actual horses to be seen, nor were there any other residents than the sole occupant of the Public House, which was exactly that a house which was open to the public.

It was a house in those days, but with the passing of another thirty years or so, it would probably now be described as little more than a hut. It had two modest if not small rooms with a verandah at each end, one of which featured a little infill at the back corner which served as a kitchen. It was typical of the historic style of housing born from necessity in the 19th century.

The Public Bar consumed the one of the rooms in its entirety, it was simply furnished with a total inventory comprising one domestic dining table in the centre clad in a green marble laminex with a screwed aluminium edge strip which screamed “1955”. Half a dozen non-matching chairs sat around it, and in the corner of the room was a rounded Pope kerosine refrigerator which looked as though it had been sulking there for half a century, and it probably had been.

The fridge held the entire stock of alcoholic beverage available to the public, one brand of beer, thoughtfully packaged in a type of bottle known as “the stubby” which at the time was the ubiquitous measure of driving distance in country Queensland. If it was more than a stubby away, you knew you’d have to pack the Esky, and by golly a six pack trip could even mean stopping for fuel before you came home.

The cash register was in the centre of the table, and comprised a solitary ice-cream tin about a third filled with coins and notes of varying denominations. The tin itself was of the two litre (or half gallon as it was known) variety, made of metal not the plastic which has become all too familiar, at a time when a half gallon tin of icecream cost as much as a small television set.

The publican was the sort of friendly ancient bloke that one often meets at the end of a long trip when one is in the middle of nowhere with a disabled vehicle. He explained as he watched us chewing remorselessly on an entire box of chewing gum that once resided on his table beside the till tin, that he was the only one in town that week, as everyone else was out on a muster, but his dogs were around the place somewhere. They would he assured us, be back before dark.

He waved us off with the shake of his head, and welcomed us back less than ten minutes later with an identical shake. I actually wondered at the time if it hadn’t quite finished its farewell shake.

Clearly he was going to have guests at his hotel for the night. The problem with that of course was that the other room, was where he lived with all of his earthly belongings, but we were welcome to camp on the verandah, which would at least keep our swags off the ground when the night temperatures in the outback took their customary plunge.

By this time the last of the sun had almost disappeared, and he ducked away for a minute to start “the genny”, a hotchpotch generator powered by an old wartime truck engine, which powered the entire town. Everyone in Yalleroi went to bed at pub closing time, because that was when the genny was switched off. On his return he was accompanied by three hulking and somewhat terrifying shadows, who he introduced as his dogs.

These things were huge, they seemed to be part lion, part shark, and part very ugly dog, and he regaled us as he served some of his corned beef and damper, with tales of how they’d kill all manner of animal and human by the simple expedient of removing the innards of their opponents. No need to lock anything up he proudly explained and nodding in the direction of the till, a thief would be dead before he got to the door.

The dogs he said were sort of like werewolves in a way, by day they’d hunt if they were commanded to, but were as gentle as they were immense. By night however, every piece of the vicious gene manifested itself in murderous behaviour. Pity help any one or anything that fell across their path.

That night he told us all sorts of mustering tales, and drew maps of where we could find waterholes on the way back, and lent us a pair of plyers to crimp the leaking radiator closed, and showed us how to seal the rest with clay and straw.

As he was about to retire, and we rolled out our sleeping bags on the verandah floor, we nervously enquired if the the dogs knew we were their friends.

“Oh yeah they won’t worry you” came his cheery reply,

“As long as you don’t move once I turn the lights out.”

Chewy

It's been a long time since I was last in Yalleroi, and for a town that's in almost the geographic centre of Queensland, it's hard to imagine somewhere that's closer to the end of the earth.

I hasten to add that I'm not reflecting on the good townsfolk at all when I say that, if indeed there are any townsfolk left, and as far as I can tell from the satellite photos on Google Earth, it may well be the case that there aren't. I suspect that just as it did in 1974 when we passed by, the town still comprises less than a handful of houses and a population that can be counted on the fingers of one thumb.

Travel of any sort in 1974 was expensive. Driving was the only way of covering long distances in a reasonably affordable manner. Interestingly, heavy road transport was still to reach it's peak of efficiency and things we take for granted today, such as car carriers, were just not available. For the hire car companies it could take weeks to deliver new cars to a remote depot by rail, or to relocate them after a one way hire.

Being young, enterprising and broke at the time, I discovered that the companies were very happy to have someone deliver their cars between towns and would even allow a slight detour or two along the way, providing the cars arrived in due course with a full tank of petrol. This was a fortunate discovery at a time when my life was occupied undertaking research into Queensland vernacular architecture, a project that would have proved very difficult indeed without a good deal of waltzing round the countryside.

So it came to be that we drove through Yalleroi with barely a sideways blink en-route to Longreach, in a brand spanking new Holden Premier with air conditioning which was soon to be the pride of Longreach's Avis fleet. The road, as one may imagine, for a track between the not quite monster metropoli of Blackall and Jericho, was not a particularly good one, and there hadn't been much rain for a long while, which meant that like all unsealed roads in blacksoil country, this one lay several feet below a covering of rich bulldust.

It was just before dusk, well past the time when sensible people drive in areas littered with livestock and wildlife, and we were pressing on carefully, dodging kangaroos, and beef cattle, driving with our noses pressed hard against the windscreen to give us just a fraction of a second more warning of whatever might appear next out of the dusty gloom.

I can still see that big black pig as though it happened yesterday. It was a monster of a wild boar and it was travelling at full tilt toward and across us at the same time. It was all I could do slow the car enough to lessen the impact, but even at forty kilometres an hour, a half ton pig leaves a substantial hole in a plastic grille, and if one did not stop quite quickly enough, one could even find the radiator leaking through a pig-snout shaped hole in it as well.

On this occasion we didn’t stop quite quickly enough.

When one is miles from anywhere but Yalleroi, with water pouring out of the radiator of one’s car, prudence suggests that the best course of action would be to turn back and seek assistance, which of course we did.

For reasons which will become apparent on another day, the only commercial enterprise in Yalleroi was the Pub, and the only product it sold which looked as though it might be useful in plugging a leaking radiator, was chewing gum.

If we had known then what we know today, we wouldn’t have spent forty five minutes chewing the entire town’s supply of Mr Wriggley’s best before stuffing it in every leaking cranny of the radiator.

Certainly we wouldn't have struck out in the near-dark of the evening determined to get to Blackwater and some proper repairs.

We certainly wouldn’t have discovered that chewing gum, when heated by, for instance, engine water passing through a radiator on a motor car, liquifies in a very short space of time.

Neither would we have had the slightest inkling that liquified chewing gum, when dragged through a car radiator by an enthusiastic mechanical fan, forms long hair like strands which weave a vast sticky web over the entire innards of an engine bay, and start to flow out of the gaps in the car bodywork, before the temperature of the engine has had time to reach even normal operating temperature.

We know all of those things now, but most importantly, if it hadn’t been for that one gigantic porker, we wouldn’t have had the chance to stay overnight at the Yalleroi Pub.