Big Blue Sky Read online

Never let it fade away

  Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket

  Save it for a rainy day

  For love may come an’ tap you on the shoulder

  Some starless nights

  Just in case you feel you want to hold her,

  You’ll have a pocketful of starlight.

  An unforgettable melody, imprinted forever on my brain.

  I sang at school and at Sunday school, but to this day I have no idea how I ended up as the youngest member of the choir of St John’s Anglican Church in Gordon, a suburb up the hill, next to Pymble. This was high church—all ritual and mysterious incantations—where religion was taken very seriously. It was dark inside, candlelight flickered on the crossbeams and trusses that held the giant roof in place, faint light fell from stained-glass windows with medieval illustrations and the smell of incense hovered in the air. We wore cassocks and sang the liturgy in Latin. And this was the early 1960s!

  Despite its brooding solemnity, and the air of pomp with a dash of boredom that hung like a low cloud over the congregation, I loved the singing. Once underway, the soaring organ was as loud as anything I’d heard and I came to love the music too. The notes were in the right place and the content was stirring. With the great hymns and carols of the English tradition, courtesy of composers like Wesley and Britten, booming and echoing through this elaborate theatre, it was my first encounter with the transformative power of music. I hope to sing in a choir again one day.

  …

  There couldn’t have been a greater contrast between the solemn rituals and reverence that characterised St John’s and the constant toing and froing that happened at home.

  Grayling Road had a dual personality. During the day, ours was just one in a row of indistinguishable brick houses in a leafy, suburban street. Here, family rules dictated that beds were made every morning before school and teeth were cleaned every night, while chores and, later, homework had to be finished before we could jump into any other activities.

  Come nightfall it was a drop-in house; the door was always open to impromptu visits from neighbours and friends on the way home from work in the city.

  On the weekends, and occasionally during the week, it could expand like a giant piano accordion with music and laughter, and the mingling smells—perfume, cigarette smoke, alcohol, potato chips—of a party. If a big one was planned, the grog would be stashed in laundry tubs filled with ice on Saturday afternoon. As evening fell, modestly made-up wives would gather in one corner, chatting and gesticulating, while their red-faced husbands, sleeves rolled up and with a glass of beer in hand, would congregate in the kitchen telling jokes and catching up on news. The gramophone would be fired up and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Gilbert & Sullivan, Sinatra, Rodgers & Hammerstein, especially Richard Rodger’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, Elvis and early Beatles would all get a run. Later, there would be dancing to Chuck Berry. At only eight or nine years old, I was the sober one—as I’ve since been most of my life—watching and helping. It looked exciting but at the same time exhausting, and I couldn’t understand how my parents still managed to get up early and do household tasks or, harder still, head off to work the morning after.

  The frequent mid-week socialising wasn’t without consequence. Phone calls would come in from angry wives demanding to know where their husbands were and vice versa. Sometimes uninvited guests who’d overstayed their welcome would be gently nudged, swaying, out the door, only to reappear a few weeks later with a sheepish smile and a bottle of brandy in hand to say sorry.

  I learned a lot about people at this time. With a few drinks under their belts they started to relax and it didn’t take too long for their personalities to emerge: the flirt, the joker, the tense and nervous, the kind, the distant. I came to see that my parents’ friends were just older versions of young people like me. I became quite close to a number of them, the Saxton and the Vasey families in particular. Both Pam Vasey and Trish Saxton were pert, engaging women with a ready-for-a-party air about them. Russ Vasey worked at Qantas and, surprisingly to me, loved classical music. When Mum dropped over to visit the Vaseys I’d tag along, and he and I would listen to Mozart—the Horn Concerto No. 3 in E flat major with the Australian soloist Barry Tuckwell was a favourite—sitting on a vinyl couch in their living room and following the score with a pencil.

  Not surprisingly, there seemed to be lots of minor car accidents at this time, and sometimes I’d lie awake with one ear listening to the adult conversations filtering through my bedroom wall, the other ear cocked for the screech of brakes and, occasionally, the sound of metal hitting metal, a brief moment of anxiety. Luckily, no one suffered much serious injury. One evening my father appeared at the front door, red-faced, to explain he’d run into a parked car—a black Rolls Royce, what’s more—fifty metres from our house. It was obvious to me, and I assume to Mum, that he’d been drinking, but he was insistent that he’d done nothing wrong. The car was jet black, for starters, and the careless driver hadn’t left the parking lights on and so, unusually for Dad, he subsequently refused to pay the owner for the necessary repairs. The fact that he’d made contact with the same make of car the Queen was driven around in was a matter of some pride, and so the accident quickly entered into family folklore without too much speculation as to how he had managed to hit such a large object in his own street.

  …

  Above all I loved being in the water, and on weekends and in the holidays we’d head down to beaches close by—Harbord, Bilgola or Palm Beach—or go north to the Central Coast in the summer break.

  We often rented a house at Norah Head, overlooking a long strip of open beach. Hidden away at the southern end, between a giant bluff and a massive rock that was fully exposed at low tide, was a small cove. The biggest thrill of all was running across the sandhills and down to this spot when we first arrived. Surges of water and seaweed would wash up and back into the narrow gap of the cove, carrying us along for the ride. My brothers and I would spend day after day swimming, exploring the rocky headland and catching waves.

  Very few families came to this wilder spot and here, with Mum and Dad perched on their beach chairs, reading and chatting, I was happiest. Other than playing golf, these were among the few occasions my dad truly relaxed. At night a board game would keep us going for hours until at last we’d fall into bed exhausted. With sand in the sheets and the muffled crash of surf interrupted by snatches of laughter from the kitchen, all was right in my small world.

  For any trip to the beach you needed to be well prepared: beach umbrella stuffed under one arm, clinging on to a big bag overflowing with towels, flippers, a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil to ensure everyone went copper brown, books, magazines and some fruit which quickly went soggy as the day wore on. Laden families would lurch out of the car park and down onto the sand, little ones trailing behind, older kids hanging on to surfboards, chafing to get into the water as soon as possible.

  For a young Australian the stages of the surfing experience are a mini marine version of the Stations of the Cross. You begin with making sandcastles and paddling at the edge of the water under someone’s watchful eye—sheer bliss.

  When you’re a little older and able to swim, you’re ready to go further out and learn how to dive under waves and get back to shore in one piece—great for confidence building.

  Then you graduate to flippers, or a boogie board or surfboard, and catch as many waves as you can until your arms ache so much it feels like they’re going to drop off and salt has seeped into every pore—excitement, total satisfaction and a challenge overcome.

  I saved up and with a bit of help from my parents got my first surfboard in my last year of primary school. It was a Barry Bennett nine-footer, so long and heavy I needed help to carry it down to the beach, me holding the nose of the board and Mum or Dad or a helpful stranger clutching the other end. You had to paddle like an iron man to get beyond the waves, but once out the back, the board floated like a fibreglass boardroom ta
ble. You could eat your lunch on this monster, it was that big and stable.

  Paddling onto the rising wall of water that was the incoming swell and jumping to your feet, a new world opened up. Time was suspended, the water and the translucent reflections around you breathed sparks, as some hidden hand thrust the wave, the board and you—half crouching, half standing—towards the shore. It took hours for the exhilaration to subside.

  If these recollections make my early years seem idyllic, that’s because in many ways they were. In the early 1960s we weren’t constantly bombarded by the woes of the world, nor its enticements. I was living in a cocoon of family and neighbourhood, with each day’s adventure unfolding at its own pace, and sleeping happily night after night.

  2

  QUIET AT THE BACK

  WHEN I FINISHED primary school at the end of 1964, I had no strong feelings about which high school I should go to. Friends were scattering up and down the North Shore, some to local high schools, some to private schools that mimicked English public (but actually private) schools like Eton and Harrow. The main carryover from these nurseries of the English class system was the embedding of a clear pecking order between older and younger boys, and between prefects—appointed to exercise authority—and the rest of us. This, and the arcane school uniforms that owed a lot to Tom Brown’s School Days and took no account of Sydney’s warm climate.

  My father’s choice of school for me was Barker College, at the upper end of the North Shore. I knew he wanted his sons to enjoy the best possible sports facilities, superior to the ones at his public high school. I suppose, too, he wanted us to have the advantages that a private-school education would confer in a class-conscious society. It is inevitable that he would have seen how effective the old boy network could be. I didn’t know enough or care enough to protest. If going to Barker meant pleasing my dad, then I was happy to go.

  Overnight, my life was transformed beyond recognition.

  Barker was then an all-boys Anglican school, located on the Pacific Highway at the end of the North Shore train line in Hornsby. It consisted of a series of low, brown-brick, thirties-style buildings—sober in scale and demeanour—including classrooms and boarding residences, a large chapel and a library. Behind the older buildings sat a modern assembly hall and a series of science labs and newer classrooms, plus numerous playing fields and, further down on the far side of the school grounds, a junior school. Above all, and especially to my young eyes, Barker was big.

  Out had gone the scruffy school shoes, shorts and loose shirts, to be replaced by long trousers, shiny black shoes, crisply ironed long-sleeved shirts, a blazer with the school emblem embroidered on the pocket and, in a final ridiculous touch, a straight-brimmed straw hat called a boater.

  My fifteen-minute bike ride to Gordon West Primary School with my friends had turned into an hour’s slog each way as I trudged from home to bus stop to train station, to be joined on the crowded platform by hordes of other boys and girls in similar attire going to similar schools, our bags weighed down with books and sports gear. If you were unlucky enough to have a prefect living in the same suburb, then you would have to run the gauntlet of his watchful eye, always on the lookout for minor dress infractions and the opportunity to punish the miscreant.

  The overwhelming regimentation came as a shock, and not only to me, judging by the comments from kids in my class. It included North Korean-style mass rallies, at which the assembled student body would be exhorted to rise to superhuman heights for the weekend sporting competition against other private schools, and to turn out in force for the First XV rugby contest in winter, where Barker’s reputation was on the line. ‘But it’s only a game’, a tiny voice inside my head reminded me. The hardest part was that I now hardly saw my West Pymble playmates. My free-range afternoons had been replaced by regular homework and practice for team sports, and my donkey trudge home from the bus stop often happened in the dark. It was the end of an era I’d loved and I felt miserable for the first year.

  To be fair, despite its overwhelming air of privilege, Barker attracted a range of students. Some boys were there automatically as their families had always gone to schools like these; the sons of doctors, lawyers, graziers and businessmen predominated. But there were others like me, from the ‘wrong’ side of the railway line. A few had earned scholarships, others had parents or grandparents who scrimped and saved to cover the fees. Everyone assumed his or her children would be happier and get a better education at a school like Barker, where tradition and discipline were taken seriously.

  I can’t help but feel that my father’s decision to send my brothers and me to a private school contributed to his declining health without a corresponding increase in opportunity for his sons. None of us ever reached the giddy heights of the top sporting teams, although my brother Andrew, a tenacious rugby player, nosed in and out. Matt was a more rebellious spirit and ended up being expelled, escaping to an alternative school in Balmain, lucky boy. None of us excelled academically. With the exception of the music and theatre programs, which I alone took advantage of, we would have been just as content and likely just as successful—however this is defined—had we gone to a government school nearby. The school fees had to be paid each term and once three boys were enrolled it was a hefty sum. Add to this the increased mortgage when we later moved to a two-storey home in Lindfield closer to the city, and Dad’s office-manager salary was stretched to breaking point. Even with Mum working nearly full time, the budget wasn’t easily balanced and we tipped further into debt. Dad fretted, smoked and drank too much for his own good. His already precarious health deteriorated bit by bit as the years rolled on and pressure from work mounted.

  Meanwhile, I gradually adjusted to my new existence. I became familiar with the private-school routine and eventually made some new friends as the carefree days of West Pymble receded into memory. I joined the chapel choir and my familiarity with the English music canon—the parallels between the music at church and at Barker were eerie but entirely predictable, as both were Anglican institutions—meant that, in this environment at least, I was more confident, standing on solid rock. Still I spent most of my years at Barker in the B class. It was lots of rote learning—chalk and talk—with the teacher standing in front of the class, writing lessons on a blackboard, which we dutifully copied into exercise books and regurgitated at exam time. I enjoyed English and geography, especially when a teacher with a bit of get up and go managed to turn our lights on. The science lab remained a place of bewilderment, though, as did the constant emphasis on beating other schools at sport.

  There was a plethora of dos and don’ts that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of curbing the effervescent spirits of boys like me. I was gregarious and was frequently punished for chattering in class. (‘Garrett! Quiet at the back!’) Barker still practised corporal punishment and if you pushed things too far, as I occasionally did, you’d be frogmarched to the feared deputy principal’s office for six of the best, applied to your bum with a bamboo cane.

  This was both scary and potentially very painful. Yet all students knew the trick to minimising the hurt was to stuff a couple of exercise books down your pants. We all did it, and while it must have been glaringly obvious to the chief enforcer, he never asked me to pull the packing out.

  …

  By 1966 I’d graduated from Cubs to Scouts and had been designated troop leader. We were a brand-new troop and I was the youngest to take this role in the district. But as the stack of school duties and obligations swallowed more time, it became clear I’d have to quit. A great adventure was planned for my swan song and a gaggle of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, without any adults or senior scouts, caught the train north, taking some rudimentary camping gear and a collection of ropes and twines; we were going to sea. In my mind’s eye we were following in the wake of explorer Matthew Flinders in his tiny Tom Thumb, usurping the latter-day adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, who’d led the famous Kon-Tiki raft expedition from South America to Poly
nesia. Who knew where we’d end up and what excitement lay ahead?

  We camped near a secluded beach and scoured the area for materials to build a raft. Having gathered two ten-gallon drums and assorted bits of wood and iron—Aussie settlers discard everything—we lashed them together using every knot we knew.

  The next morning dawned fine and seemingly calm. The raft, now trussed up like a chook with a life sentence, was duly launched and then, with some difficulty, dragged out through a moderate swell.

  Once past the shore break we clambered on board and aimed for the open sea, rowing furiously with our makeshift paddles, which were in no way equal to the task of propelling our rickety vessel at sufficient speed to make good progress through the breakers.

  A much larger set of waves loomed up ahead of us, and when the first giant broke the raft fell apart as a wall of white foam knocked us to smithereens.

  Unhurt, we swam to shore, pieces of our brave vessel floating past on the swirling current. The glorious excursion had lasted no more than five minutes.

  …

  My scouting career had ended but the thirst for adventure remained, even as the options were narrowing. I loved reading adventure yarns but wanted to get out and explore the world even more. For the time being, however, I had to endure the weekly, monthly then yearly routine of commuting, classes, sport, homework, choir practice and end-of-year exams. There was some welcome respite from the tedium, though.

  On Fridays I would take the train into town and walk up past The Rocks—the collection of old cottages and warehouses that clustered around the western side of Circular Quay—and through the Argyle Cut, a roadway that had been tunnelled through sandstone by hand with convict labour. I was on my way to Millers Point Community Centre, where Mum had been appointed the first community social worker, to the Friday-afternoon singalong.

  Here I’d loosen my tie, reef off the boater and entertain the retired merchant seamen and wharfies and their wives, salt of the earth in every pore, as we roared our way through old classics: ‘The Road to Gundagai’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, ‘Daisy, Daisy’. It was amazing to me how many of the denizens of Millers Point could play the battered piano that was pressed into service for these singalongs. Otherwise the only interruptions to the long march of schooling were the holidays and the chance to spend some time at the ever-enticing beach.