Big Blue Sky Read online

  My grandparents’ house smelled of pine needles outside and camphor mixed with old people’s cooking odours and pipe tobacco inside. Full of dark timbered furniture, each window engulfed in heavy curtains, it felt a world away from home. Adjacent to the house was a big paddock where a single large horse quietly grazed. Of course I wanted to catch it and ride bareback after imaginary baddies like a Texas Ranger (Tales of the Texas Rangers being one of my favourite TV programs at the time). Armed with a stepladder, reins and bridle, I’d spend hours working my way into position, with the bridle bit at last wedged into the horse’s mouth, only to have my steed move off just as I was about to make the final leap. Undeterred, I’d drag the ladder across the paddock to the horse, still nonchalantly chewing grass, and try again. Finally, one year, I at last managed to get everything in place and clamber onto its back before it took off again. Triumphant, I was now ready to gallop across the paddock and chase down the marauding gangs still lurking in my imagination. Instead, the horse stood stock-still, and I couldn’t get it to move at all. My dreams of successfully pursuing swarthy robbers and cunning thieves were dashed.

  My grandparents had lived through two world wars and the Great Depression—a tougher time by far—and never forgot it. They were frugal and industrious to a degree that intrigued me as a child. So much effort was given over to labelling and storing food, in stark contrast to Mum’s regular Friday afternoon supermarket run, in which the boot of the car was crammed with a jumble of shopping bags whose contents were demolished within a week. In my grandparents’ home, tins of used rubber bands, bits of string tied up in a ball and an assortment of paperclips, old pens and pencils all jostled for space on shelves neatly stacked with tinned food and preserved fruit. Shopping coupons advertising the latest specials were cut out of newspapers and stuck up on the kitchen wall; clothes in need of repair were sewn up and made good. Everything had a place and everything was marked, nothing was thrown away. The expression ‘waste not, want not’ rang in my ears for years afterwards. It’s such a stark contrast to the way we live today. Now, mountains of waste are a sign of the times, included in the national accounts on the positive side of the ledger. Massive bins sit outside most homes, filled to overflowing with food scraps and rubbish that end up in landfills, which are overflowing too. Our recycling efforts are outweighed by the tonnes of stuff we chuck out by a factor of ten to one.

  My grandfather Len was one of the gentlest men I ever knew. He had seen the Great War up close, stationed in Egypt and the Middle East as the Allies staggered to victory. He came home to convalesce with half a lung, and most of his hearing gone from the noise of battle. The doctors said he wouldn’t last long, but he thumbed his nose at this miserable diagnosis, put up with a giant hearing aid inserted in his ear, retrained, and worked for the rest of his life as a dentist.

  After a long day in the surgery he’d retire to an enormous double garage full of tools, a lathe and other (to my eyes) mysterious machines. Here, pipe on the go, humming quietly, he’d busy himself weaving fabrics, building model railways—the engines, tracks, rolling stock and furniture—or just plain pottering. When not in the garage, he could be found hammering away on a braille typewriter translating books for the blind. This unsung service to others was incomprehensible to me at the time, but I later found it a great inspiration.

  My grandmother, Emily Jane Collin, was a no-frills person and incredibly tough. She was tiny, and carried herself like a determined sparrow unwilling to cede the smallest breadcrumb. She’d grown up in the small western Victorian town of Nhill and in her early twenties travelled to Western Australia—in those days an epic journey of over 3000 kilometres lasting up to three months, travelling by horse and dray across the arid Nullarbor Plain—to work as a nurse. There she joined Daisy Bates, a well-known journalist and amateur anthropologist, caring for survivors of first contact—Aboriginal people with leprosy—who were often confined to islands off the remote Western Australian coast, well away from the public eye.

  These were my ancestors, the ones who came before me, whose genes I carry in my blood.

  …

  Today, West Pymble, the suburb where I grew up, is picture-perfect, its tree-lined streets boasting well-maintained houses and gardens.

  Yesterday was another story altogether.

  In the nearby Lane Cove River valley, home to the Guringai people, there was plenty of food—oysters, crabs, possum, kangaroo and waterfowl. Described at the time of settlement as ‘friendly’, by 1856—only a hundred years or so before my birth—they had been pummelled by disease, a fact that was hardly registered by the European settlers then, or afterwards. Here the bush was full of good timber—stringybark, turpentine, blue gum and ironbark—and as in many parts of the new country, logging was the first recorded industry.

  The area was subdivided not long after 1900—another great Aussie tradition: subdivide and development will follow—but it was rugged and hilly and so slow to be settled. When my parents moved there, it was still a frontier suburb. (Less than a mile from where I grew up, a notorious illegal gambling ring operated on weekends into the mid-1950s.) As tracks were pushed into the bush, two- and three-bedroom weatherboard cottages started to appear, home to defence personnel and families like ours, with modest means and ambitions.

  Our house was the first built in the Broadway, the last street on the edge of West Pymble. To the east, behind the back fence, was order and calm, with tidy streets leading up to a small collection of shops. To the west, out the front door and across a dirt road, a sandstone ledge drop-off led to dense bush and a river valley filled with native birds, whose screeches and lilts—C’mon, sunrise!—woke me most mornings.

  West Pymble was fast becoming populated with up-and-coming professional and business types, leavened with a smattering of manual workers who’d bought early, before land and house prices began their inexorable climb. When I was five, we moved up a notch to a three-bedroom, red-brick bungalow at 22 Grayling Road. We were now smack bang in the middle of the suburb and more firmly ensconced in the middle class. Though a mere half a kilometre further east, we were now on a tarred road and closer to schools and the North Shore railway line that ran into the city. In other words, we were closer to civilisation. It was here that I spent my first fifteen years. Also living in the vicinity was Johnny O’Keefe, the famed Oz rocker, but I never saw him and there was no graffiti to announce his whereabouts. So too was Jacki Weaver, who went on to become one of Australia’s best-known actors. I was at primary school with her brother and glimpsed her a few times around the traps. That sent the pulse racing even at my tender age.

  By the time we reached our new home, another boy had arrived—my brother Andrew—and Matthew followed two years later. We were a tall family in a smallish house. Andrew and Matt, closer in age and several years younger than me, shared the second bedroom while I occupied a small, windowless room at the back. An enclosed rear verandah with steps leading down to a sloping backyard had been turned into guest quarters, and doubled as a playroom when it rained. Timber paling fences on either side, covered in choko and passionfruit vines, separated us from our neighbours, and there was an acre of bush not yet built out at the rear.

  Black-and-white television arrived not long after we moved in, and proved a sensational drawcard. This blinking, moving diorama sucked children in like insects to neon. I pitied the affluent trailblazers in the street who’d been the first to acquire this magic box; they didn’t get a moment’s rest. Despite the magnetic attraction of moving pictures on tap, even when we got our own idiot box I loved being outside, and this was where I spent most of my time, playing with my brothers or the neighbourhood kids.

  Along with many of my friends I walked and later rode my bike to Gordon West Public School a kilometre or so away. Other than the skinny eucalypts that now dot the grounds, it hasn’t changed much. It was here that I strained to keep up at mathematics but sailed through English and, along with my friend Grant Andrews, who went on to b
ecome a notable rugby union player, represented the school and the district in athletics. We must have been one of the last generations to receive free milk, in half-pint bottles with silver caps, inevitably warmed in the morning sun.

  After school we’d gather in the street. There were no cement gutters to crack our shins on and mercifully few big front fences. Most importantly, it was a safe arena for play, until increasing traffic made setting up cricket stumps in the middle of the road impossible. We roamed through the bush, played soccer and cricket in the backyard or down at the local oval, rode our billycarts and, later, primitive skateboards down the steepest hills, made cubbyhouses and climbed the tallest trees.

  As we got older we ventured further into the nearby Lane Cove River valley. Here, especially in the holidays, I would spend endless hours with my mates, Steve Adams and Bruce Diekman (who later went on to work for the Nature Conservation Council of NSW), whose mums also let them roam freely, exploring, damming small creeks, building makeshift rafts to float down the trickle that was the headwater of the river in summer. Fanging down the bumpy tracks on our bikes was the best feeling, and who knew what lay in store as we entered our hidden hideaway—stands of thick forest—only a hundred metres from the road? We never saw another person and, left to our own devices, invented a gritty fantasy world to play in. This gave rise to a blended feeling of contentment and challenge that happens when you’re exploring nature without an adult issuing directions. You just felt so alive.

  Sunset was the cut-off. Mum would relent to yet another plea to head out and play with, ‘Okay, but just make sure you’re back before dark’, the words already fading as I tore out of the house. But inevitably I ran late, a habit that stayed with me for years. There was just too much going on: massive games of hide-and-seek involving twenty or more of us with plenty of options for concealment, friends’ houses to visit for cordial and biscuits before heading back out to kick a ball around, more tracts of bushland to explore. At a nearby disused quarry, which became a favourite haunt, the paths around the quarry walls were narrow and rough, and even for agile ten-year-olds on the run, escaping from rival Lilliputian gangs who roamed the amphitheatre playing out mock battles, a fall was always on the cards. So extra care had to be taken, and that took more time, didn’t it, Mum?

  Such open-skies freedom must have given rise to a fear on the part of some parents that sooner or later someone’s kid would be seriously hurt. Scrapes and bruises were already common and, as it happened, around this time I was proudly displaying six stitches sewn to close a large gash over my knee, courtesy of a misjudged jump from one rock platform to another. A committee of local parents formed to encourage the establishment of a boys’ Cub and Scout troop, to be followed later by a girls’ Brownie troop as well. More fun, except now we had uniforms and badges. Our escapades would be legitimised and our thirst for adventure and risk-taking at least partially slaked.

  First land needed to be located and a hall built, and so began the community fundraising effort to secure a space in which to contain this wild gaggle of kids. The main source of funds was multiple progressive dinners and bottle drives. The progressive dinner was exactly as it sounds. Individual families hosted one course of dinner as people who’d paid for tickets ‘progressed’ from house to house until, at the final destination, coffee and tea were served. Bottle drives were an early form of recycling. The neighbours were letterboxed and asked to put any empty bottles or jars out on the nature strip between their house and the street, to be picked up and later sold.

  Weekend after weekend—or at least that’s how it seemed—we were either sticking notes advertising an upcoming bottle drive into assorted letterboxes, or scouring the streets of West Pymble, emptying various bottles of their dregs before stacking them in cardboard boxes and loading them into the boots of various dads’ cars. Like our school milk ration, the smell of stale beer warmed by the sun and dripping into boxes was ever-present, and even today if I catch a whiff when passing by a pub, it instantly takes me back to this time.

  That these frantic rounds of raising much-needed cash quickly bore fruit was evidence of the truth of another of Gran’s favourite sayings, namely that ‘many hands make light work’. In no time we had our new hall and a more controlled environment in which to let off steam, learn some new bush skills—like tying knots and reading a map—and, most importantly, make plans for numerous thrill-seeking escapades, which were now officially sanctioned by the New South Wales scouting movement. While this new knowledge proved useful over the years, no more so than when I went seriously bush in the 1980s, the most salient lesson I took from my time in the Cubs was how the wealthy got that way, and how they behaved towards others.

  At that time, the annual fundraising activity for Cubs and Scouts was Bob a Job Week. Over the course of a week you would knock on a neighbour’s front door and ask if there was any small job you could do for a ‘bob’—the nickname for a shilling—which roughly equates to $1.40 today. Competition to raise the most money was fierce and as a Cub leader I was determined to show the way. I spent most afternoons trudging the streets, cajoling the parents of friends and close neighbours to give me jobs. One year I hit a dry patch near home as lots of families were away, so I decided to head up the hill towards the railway line and into the well-heeled suburb of Pymble. Here, estates with driveways longer than three cricket pitches laid end to end abounded, with spacious gardens and substantially bigger houses than the modest fibro and brick dwellings of West Pymble. And so I reasoned the fruits of my labour would be greater as well.

  As it turned out, I fared poorly. In some cases, despite my Cub uniform and obvious willingness to work, I was turned away. If the lady of the house was home alone, there was a chance I might get a simple gardening chore or a car to wash—this I was used to. If, on the other hand, a man answered the door, then sometimes I wasn’t sent off, the temptation to abuse my offer proving too great. I’d be ordered to rake a lawn the size of the Sydney Cricket Ground with specific instructions on how to do the job properly, or to sweep and clean a garage the size of the house I lived in. The stern male who’d issued the instructions would then disappear inside and I’d battle on, spending at least twice the usual time taken on these chores. Once the job was finally completed, and duly inspected at length, one single bob would be pressed into my, by now, blistered hands.

  The first time it happened I put it down to unusual circumstances. I’d struck a real-life Scrooge, I marvelled—in Pymble of all places! But the pattern never wavered and after two days of hard labour I headed back down the hill. There I was greeted, as was the norm, with a cheerful, ‘Sure, love. Work for half an hour, will you, and then just chuck the rubbish/lawn clippings/bucket over there.’ Two bob or more would then be pressed into my hand. It was an encounter with the polar opposites of generosity and greed that I never forgot.

  …

  The only shadow on the wall in those carefree days was my health. My parents, like many in their time, were lifelong smokers and I was born with asthma. Dad was already prone to the same condition, which worsened over time. I was allergic to numerous things: different foods and various pollens and grasses. I’d put in time in an oxygen tent when very young and, despite the ceaseless outdoor activity and generally being pretty fit, I was still vulnerable if any of these triggers crossed my path.

  On these occasions I’d have no choice but to hunker down and wait it out. The lack of windows in my bedroom can’t have helped, but it was my struggle and I wanted to meet it, front on, in my domain. And so Mum would sit with me, and if it got bad we’d pace through the house together in the midnight hour as I strained to get enough oxygen, waiting for whatever medicine had been optimistically prescribed that year to kick in.

  These attacks continued through to my mid-teens, stymieing my efforts at sport and causing some anxiety if I was spending a night with a friend or relative whose house might be full of animal hair or dust, both guaranteed to cause wheezing. After one particularly
nasty attack, while staying with family friends at Pacific Palms, a remote village on the Mid North Coast, a long way from doctors or a hospital, I feared I might cark it and got a massive attack of the panics as well.

  From that point on I chucked out all the drugs and threw myself into a tougher fitness regime with lots of surfing and breathing exercises. Thankfully these efforts saw it off, or possibly I simply grew out of the ailment, or one complemented the other. Whatever the case, it no longer flared up to flatten me and I never looked back.

  Ten years later, when I was spending a lot of time touring, trapped in hotels and hire cars, I took up tai chi to help keep my lungs open. I learned it from a ponytailed rock singer called Erle Montaigue, who’d been to Taiwan to study with exiled grandmasters and held classes in a warehouse near Central Station. I bypassed the esoteric philosophy but it really helped to keep me healthy and on an even keel, and I practise to this day.

  …

  I always loved music. The cadences and melodies of nursery rhymes and Christmas carols locked into my head early and singing felt like the most natural thing to do.

  My dad could often be heard whistling or humming a tune. He was a bit of a showman, courtesy of his days as a member of the Killara Liberal Party younger set who put on fundraising concerts for the blue bloods of the North Shore.

  Occasionally he’d launch into one of my favourite songs of the time, Perry Como’s ‘Catch a Falling Star’. The lyric was ever so simple, hinting at mysteries that were a long way out of my reach.

  Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket