Julius at Falls Festival

Marion Bay is a quiet section of coast just north of the Hobart waters in Tasmania. Less than an hour from the capital, it has a secondary road leading in, and a well planned annual music festival, The Falls Festival.

The dirt road leads down a hill with the bay view spreading ahead. Mid afternoon on day one I’ve beaten most of the traffic, and drive right up to the welcome gate. Volunteers brace against a whipping gale and hand me two plastic bags – black for rubbish, clear for recycling.

I’m here following a directive from the editorial committee who thought it would be funny (for them) and enlightening (for our readers) to have a punter’s perspective from a punter who would not normally attend a gig like this. Looking at the short traffic jam of backpacker campers and cheap cars crammed with what look like children with beards, I feel the committee choose well.

Cars are searched. They are looking for booze and gas bottles, possession of either will result in you losing your ticket, the numerous signs warn. I possess neither so I am free to enter.

Now I am at the Gimmee Shelter chalet, a plywood erection with a cool dude inside. Literally chilled, the gale has peaked at about 400 on the Beufort scale by now. He profers the contract, which requires my name, address and phone number presumably so I can be hunted down if I steal the tent.

Tent # 104 is mine, thankfully free of a shared guest since these are twin share and had there been a lucky solo punter in the queue with me, we would have been consigned together. To share, and discover each over, yelling over the blustering of tent flaps and twanging of guy wires.

Duly established I tour my new world. Attempts at counter cultural vibe are everywhere, little woollen spider webs and painted logs poked in the ground. I do an outer lap, keen to inspect the facilities that will matter to me the most – the bar arrangements, and the other end of that process, the toilets. Both are in abundance.

Drinking is a serious business at Falls. First you need tokens – these come in $5 and $2 denominations (not refundable) and are, we are warned, water soluble. At least they warned us.

At a bar you dish up the tokens. This is presumably a clever form of tax on the drink concession, who can’t take actual money and who presumably redeem mountains of tokens for actual money, minus the Falls commission, later on.

Food concessions take money – lots of money. As I walk amongst the youth, marvelling at the lack of anyone remotely as old as I, the thinking turns to just how much money these kids have. At $7 for a beer, and $12 for a burger or $4 for chips, it’s going to be a long three days.

There are some terrific hippy vibed shops, and a too cool chilled beats coffee and pizza place with a DJ and decor that resonates with 18 year olds. I glance at the DJ, feeling empathy for his empty existence, standing there grooving away at his chill beats, chill wind whipping up his chilled shorts, blowing his neat festy dreads around like little whips. Ignored, as I am.

Absolutely no one says hello to a 56 year old, and I am starting to feel like a grizzled Toolie at Schoolies. It’s an all age gig, so the arm band tells who can and can’t buy booze. Unlike the walled confines of a club, it is hard to imagine how or if underage drinking is policed.

I see a sum total of two police, and the security is present but respectfully restrained. I like that. There are a couple of gruff encounters, but I’m used to that since my demeanour hovers between homeless grifter and absent minded pensioner. At least it does in this crowd.

There are three venue areas. The Main Arena contains the Valley Stage, which is a permanent construction sitting down the slope towards the Bay itself, framed behind. There would not be a prettier stage outside of Sydney Harbour.

You need to show your wrist band to enter this precinct, which has bars and concessions and toilets and probably would easily contain eight thousand people at once.

Leaving the secure area, you are in open country with concessions, camping areas, toilets and the disappointingly closed on day one Village. This appears interesting, yet remains unexplored.

The Field Arena is working on day one, with a low key and surprisingly quietly mixed slab of acts I’ve never heard of, like The Correspondents and Mountain Mocha. But the kids are happy. A surprising number of them are wearing onesies. I regret leaving mine in Sydney. It is flipping cold, but the wind abates at sunset.

I walked to the beach – easily a one hour return hike across the tundra, vegetation grimly clinging to the earth as I walk doubled against the arctic gale. A bridge over a creek has a sad lonely lifeguard in attendance, to deter anyone from drowning there. The beach has a troop of lifeguards, huddled in a sand whipped cluster. A dozen hipsters and one child wander the sand like extras from The Walking Dead.

Sleeping in a two man tent erected on a knobbly grassy slope is very hard work, even for an easy sleeper fuelled by Tasmanian beer and many little plastic goblets of excellent Pinot Gris ($9).

I stagger out at first light and hit one of just six hot showers ($2 for 2 minutes). It is gratifyingly gratifying. Just prior I closely inspected the toilet – a long drop arrangement that is infinitely more appealing than those porta loo things. A men’s urinal alongside is a tin walled area with guttering into which you urinate. I marvel at the considerable genetic advantage one has being male.

With no early opener in sight, I decide to pull up stumps and head for Mona in Hobart instead. I’ve experienced the life, heard the beats, endured the cold (it is 8 degrees this morning) and fulfilled my brief.

Next time, I’m going to force some of those glib young editorial types into something more Julius, like a Boz Scaggs concert. That’ll teach them.....

Rogues I know and almost love

I want to go back to Rudi's restaurant; Stuyvesants House in Crows Nest Sydney. Because I miss the dysfunctional floorshow, through some undiagnosed flaw in my values system. I miss the food from Max, with his trademark smoker aroma, pictured (minus the aroma) here:


Rudi takes no prisoners. These guys are seriously hard core.

My breaking straw event is detailed below. Here is Rudi with his apparently terrific son.





The deal breaker was that I had myself thrown out before Christmas 2011, as I could not abide by how Rudi treated another novice waitress. (Story here).

NEXT ROGUE:

How about Eric Robinson? 

Since the early 1970's one of the two dominant partners in Jands, and probably the toughest guy from the slug it out era of the 70's and 80's. He has always driven the concert audio side of the company, and needed to be aggressive and driven to get to the top.

Which is where he remains to this day. The stories about Eric are legion - one that sounds credible is when Samuelsons UK purchased the Jands Concert Productions business in the late 1980's for a reported seven million dollars. Eric flew over to London to head up operations, and upon arriving happened upon a vintage Rolls Royce in the warehouse.

'Get that thing out of here', he is reported as saying, although the language was inevitably more colourful. Transpires the car belonged to the Chairman, and relationships deteriorated over the next few years. Another time an old school type reportedly sneered that 'you Australians are all convicts', whereas Eric quickly replied 'yes, and you sent us here'.

He hasn't been pictured anywhere we know of, other than this from the 1990's. At the most recent Australian Road Crew Reunion in Sydney Eric attended, and the jokes flew thick and fast since at least half the people in the room had been fired by him at some stage.

Eric has a very fast wit, and his deal making skills are almost the best there are......

Berlin in one day

 It was Sunday and my train from Prague took almost five hours. Most of the time we were beside the River Elbe, one of the major waterways of central Europe. It runs from the Czech Republic through Germany to the North Sea.

The train was not an ICE high speed train, it was an electric train but very comfortable. There was a buffet bar where I ordered Goulash and a Draught beer .

It is so lovely watching the green countryside of Europe roll by, and the convenience of a train is hard to beat - city centre, to city centre. If I had flown, it would have been costly and take 2 hours in the air. Add on 2 airport hours and the transfers and the train won at less than half the price!

I checked in to the Adina apartment hotel at Kakescher Markt and being Julius set out to find a corner store to buy some milk for the morning tea. But everything is shut on Sunday here!

Beside the River Spree I came upon this delightful outdoor old time dance venue. They were doing the Tango just now. It's been a while since my Tango days, the rehabilitation was thorough, but the titanium rod in my lower left leg throbs whenever I hear the tell tale music!

Smiling I continued my futile quest. A shop, any shop other than souvenirs or beer. Eventually I just gave in, as you do, and had a beer.

Berlin cannot be done in one day. Not at all. So the next morning I looked out the window to see rain and wind. Fortunately my host in the Czech Republic had awarded me some merchandise, one of which was a perfect weatherproof jacket with hood! 

I chanced the trains, figuring the system and ended near to my target, the Brandenberg Gate.

At this point I've decided to never travel without mobile data again. I loaded the map on the iPhone using wifi at the hotel, and being myself (who I am) managed to navigate away and delete it. The map will triangulate and let you know where you are in reference to phone towers, but without a map it is just a moving blue dot on a sea of blue. Very opaque!

Lucky I had a tourist map with me, and the iPhone still operated as a compass, for West or East. Those are the directions that matter in Berlin.

 The Gates were built in the 1300's I think, and mainly used as an excise point between here and there. But when the wall was built, the Gates became part of no-man's land. Wiki says: "The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany."

But the real sombe event is the Holocast Memorial just down the road.

This memorialto the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, consists of a 19,000 m² (4.7-acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.  

At first it just seems like an architectural installation, but once you start to travel down these narrow pathways, and go down a hill so the slabs are tall above, it becomes claustrophobic and morbid.

I hurry away, towards Check Point Charlie, where I find a segment of wall standing. There is a display alongside, at the foundations of some SS establishment that was excavated.

There is a kind of museum alongside (I can't find the name, but it is right at the segment of wall) which deals with the slippery descent into the Second Wold War. It is a complicated, devious journey to dictatorship.

Sadly my history is riddled with gaps, so I won't try to fill you in.

The thing that struck me was the entreaty along the lines that when Hitler rose, the people were accepting, or went along with the ride, or kept quiet. The pogrom was around the corner, books were burned, and synagogues razed.

It just went from bad to mad, and of course the country fell. Berlin seems to be the centre of the horrible awakening, and the theme is to admit and to never forget.

This is kind of sick - photo taken before WW2 of some Hitler Youth frolicking with their preferred decorations. From Berlin Wall museum.

Prague in one day

This is Prague Castle, said to be the largest complex of its kind in the world. Of course I took the number 22 tram there. It ran through Belveder, Prague Castle and the end of the line is Pohořelec, which I discovered later because a sense of direction in old streets is impossible.

Those who know me, understand I enjoy the scenic route. Wrong Way Grafton, sometimes unfairly you mock me. How was I to know? I got off, the tram tickets here cost just 24 Crowns, and when you consider 1,000 Crowns is around US$50, this is a cheap destination!

Being lost, as I was, there was but one solution. Pilsner. A pint later, the barman pointed to the edge of the crappy tourist map to indicate I was indeed at the end of the line. The Czech's are very friendly so far, and I do like that.

I'd come down from the corner of Austria and Slovakia, where I was on business the day prior. Peter the taxi driver took me three and a half hours, for 5,500 Crowns (US$250). I think that was fair - he had to drive back again of course! Nice man, fractured English. Good driver too. In a Skoda, of course. The national car.

Of course I met Jaroslav Róna. I had to muscle aside a group of Russian tourists to get this picture. Some cultures, they must touch a statue. I tried to explain how, in Australia, we must kiss it.

Loved this old Trabant. Remember U2 had several of these on the tour in the early 1990's? Prague and indeed the Republic were part of the USSR until the Velvet Revolution. They never looked back - they offloaded the Slovakians, who now have their own (even cheaper) country, with the capital Bratslavia. We drove through there on the way in, from Vienna airport.

I'd flown to Vienna from Chicago, via Zurich. Swiss Air are tremendously efficient, the plane rolls up to the gate and they get that door open faster than I've ever seen and motion you off. None of the faffing around we experience daily in our country!

Up at The Castle, these poor buggers stand erect with their wooden guns, unflinching as dumb Australian tourists egg them on to mug for the camera and kids jump up and down and wave their arms a breath away. Worst job in uniform, probably did something bad late at night with a lonely Bratsworst and got caught.

I walked up Petrin Park, a really steep climb to the tower. Passed this little establishment along the way. Not much in the way of ambiance but no one answered my hopeful knock and call.

Walking.... walking .... took a few wrong turns and ended up on the Milady Horakove, a main road where they are making a big road tunnel. I had to stumble through the roadworks, of course. The workers ignored me, the tourist map in my left hand said it all really.

Exhausted, I returned to the Hotel 16 Kateriny which is a FABULOUS boutique place about 15 minutes from Wenceslas Square - the tourist centre of Prague. Beware pickpockets, they say, so I had the wallet in the front pocket but no need to worry - even at dusk on my way to dinner at Grosello at the Marina it was safe as anything!

 
So this is it. Alone and happy, Pilsner on the go, food on the river Vltava. Hard to imagine but it floods occasionally - this was in June this year, but nowhere near as bad as 2002 which was a disaster.

 
I've had breakfast and chatted with the delightful Pavla here at Hotel 16. I really must plug this place, it is essence of Prague and very caring. About US $160, there are cheaper, but this one is first class and truly great.

I'm headed to Central to buy a ticket (hopefully) on the 10.30am train to Berlin now.

Prague. Probably best to enjoy with a significant other, as I think it is one of the most romantic and affordable cities in Europe.

Enjoy!

USA, the trip that scarred me for life

I'm just about to head over to the USA. I was remembering last year's trip:

Tuesday, Sydney. I leave home at 10.30am and get to Burns Rd and realise I didn't print the e-Ticket. Turn the cab around, go back, of course the home Mac takes forever and we have just one sheet of paper in the printer. Get to Turramurra station late.

Change at Central, get the wrong airport line train. Who knew? Some of them go via Redfern all the way to Macarthur. And not to the airport. Get off at Redfern. Airport ticket refuses to scan. Hassle my way out of Redfern, try to get taxi. Hard.

Check in late. Discover, courtesy of checkin chick, that John Maizels has somehow slimed an upgrade and is sitting NEXT TO ME in premium economy, in what was a blocked out, EMPTY seat.

Find Maizels in lounge, acting all chaotic and busy because he is re-writing his CX contributions. He is making loud calls, and being all important. 'John, the flight is FINAL CALL', I interrupt his important phone call where he is telling someone he is super late for his flight and he has to know NOW some factoid that could be left off the story.

"It's OK, they will call us", he waves his hands towards the lounge reception people.

"I don't like keeping 300 people waiting", I say, and we depart. Sure enough, half way to the gate they page John Mazels and Julius GRAFTON! How freking embarrassing. "Hurry, you are the last to board", the gate agent says. "But they didn't call us in the lounge", says Maiz.

I should have strangled him on the aerobridge but no - the best was yet to come.

The Premium Economy cabin was 100% full, as was economy. 2 days before, I saw the seat plan was 50% full in PE. So Virgin Australia oversold economy (as airlines do) and then selectively moved up Gold and Platinum flyers. It transpires Maiz had TOLD them on the phone he was flying with ME, so they moved HIM up to sit with me, and then UPGRADED a bunch of Platinum flyers (like ME) into Business. They figured Maiz and I would be happy together, whereas if he didn't JOIN us in the reservation system, I would have gone UP and he may have stayed behind where he belonged!

But wait, it gets better.....

I have 2 carry on bags. Maiz has about 200 kilos of crap, with his own little trolley. And jacket. That must be cloaked on the plane.

But I realise during the night that I forgot to pack trousers. I have a pair on. Contemplate Malcolm Fraser, and even a Y front run to Vegas.

Still reasonably sanguine as we eat our meal, despite Maiz engaging the flight attendant in long winded and vacuous talk about crap, while the poor guy is trying to serve the cabin. My little request for something gets lost as Miaz overwhelms the airspace.

Somehow survive the night.

Exit at LAX, and we are given a Purple Express Card to get into (presumably) a fast queue at the Delta terminal.

Strangely, the card is collected again at the head of the immigration crush, with no fast queue. We line up. 4 dudes, 300 pax. Like a bad Bali.

But wait: they open the VIP queue, and we are not in it. So Maiz is punking out.

Eventually get through in 90 minutes.

Go to Hertz.

Get Ford Mustang Convertible.

Drive out of LA proper.

I am hungry - but Maiz is driving. He says iHop have free wifi that doesn't block the SMTP port for his email whereas McDonalds does. So I agree to stop at iHop. There are none. Eventually I am too hungry and thirsty - I gave Maiz the hot breakfast at 4am on the plane, because I can't stomach sausage or fried potato that early, if ever. So he is bloated, I am Biafran. He has a bottle of water, I do not.

Eventually I figure he is intentionally missing freeway exits in the vain hope of an iPhop.

We see one! The sign says turn right at Fred Hopper drive. We take the next exit and turn right, only to see a row of crap places. I INSIST we stop, anywhere, so I can hydrate and eat SOMETHING.

Drama - the first almost homicide. Eat, leave.

I am driving!

Control at last.

Miaz decides to retreat into the safety of the Cubit (metaphysical or fourth dimensionally crazy-little-spaceship that works the trade routes between Uranus and Venus without a reliable schedule), otherwise known as his 'tech zone', so he unpacks the following and retreats inside his massive brain:

iPad
iPhone
Blackberry
Cruddy old IBM laptop
GPS dongle
recharge cable A
recharge cable B
recharge cable C
odd cable D
Thing
and Other thing
with more crap

All this is on his lap, the floor, and in the door pocket. Of the Lime Green, almost new, Ford Mustang convertible. (The roof is up).

About now I comment it is 108 degrees outside, according to the car.

Then I blow up the car. It decided to switch to Sport Mode, and the Auto locked into top gear. This is gear 6, too long for most freeway activity.

We grind to a halt. The car is DEAD. Computer transmission failure, will not start. Hot air comes out the air conditioner.

Miaz is half way through a long and heated call to ATT, about his prepaid USA sim card, that has been shoved into the iPhone 4S. He is instructing Abby from the Denver call centre that he MUST get some package added on to some thing. I sit in the drivers seat and wonder when he will get hot, and notice we are on the right northbound shoulder of the interstate, with thousands of trucks and cars whizzing by.

I unwind a window, to draw attention to our plight - and to survive the heat.

Miaz swings into action. He calls Hertz - and gives them a reservation contract number that he found in the glovebox. The call centre drops him after 10 minutes, because the contract number is wrong, we guess. He calls again with the correct paperwork, retrieved from myself. They undertake to call back, a flurry of calls eventuate, the temp climbs to 110 degrees, and we are given a four hour timeline.

We attempt some repairs, and move around the cabin to avoid direct sun. Windows open. First call to Hertz at 3.15pm, we are rescued at 5pm - ahead of schedule, by Dennis from Barstow.

His tow truck saves us, and he advises due the altitude and Death Valley nature of the desert, a lot of folk break down. It was completely barren - there was no tree to shelter. We were munted by the heat!

I climb into the void behind the seats, as Maiz is too rontund to do so. Uncomfortably perched on my bag, I watch the cactus display as the truck grinds away, up the slope from our breakdown pergatory. We change to second gear, and a fucking truck stop swims into view - just 400 metres from where we were stuck!

Air conditioned. Beer. Toilets. I start to cry.

Got to Vegas at sunset, dumped the wreck in the Hertz lot, and hassled with them for a refund, status unknown.

Checked myself and the Maiz into junior suites at Hilton, and he looked hurt when I said: "See you at 9am in the lobby".

Had very long shower, went to The Gap to buy some dacks, had steak and beer.

FRANK FITZMAURICE

Father. Builder. My hero

This was my Eulogy to Frank Fitzmaurice, grandfather of my daughter Jessica and my mate. He passed away mercifully at home in 2005 with his family - well overdue, given his latter ailments. He went with grace and dignity at the age of 87.

Frank came with my marriage to his youngest daughter Caroline Mary, who I knew for some years and married in 1982. She came to live with me in 1980 with her beautiful daughter Sarah Jane, Frank’s second grandchild. We were together for 20 years.

The first impression I had of Frank was that he accepted me, despite that I came on top of a divorce from Caroline’s first husband. I fast gleaned that Frank and Monica were devout Catholics, and I tried to learn more of what that meant. Caroline filled me in.

Cas and I had success and bought a place at Lindfield. Frank had already transmitted through Monica that he would help all his six kids equally, and in our case this meant putting in a French window at our house. He came, he did the work all in one day, it was great! We had excellent doors opening onto our new pool.

Later I moved the family to the country, and when he heard I planned to build a house, he graciously offered to help. Praise God he did! Frank was a builder by trade.

BUILDING THINGS

If Frank hadn’t been there, I would have messed up.

He came and showed me how to measure out the house footings. How to do a 3 - 4 - 5 triangular measurement and make it square. How to dig a pad, cement it, and make a brick pier on top. Then how to mark out endless numbers of them, so they were aligned.

There were road trips west, one of them without the girls - and we were done at days end so a trip to the pub was in order. Frank’s drinking days were mainly done, he was 70 and on doctor’s orders. But we drove the dirt roads to O’Connell and on the way I saw a culvert pipe.

’Hey Frank, that’d be great for Jess (then a 2 year old) to crawl through – let’s load it in the van on the way back’, I yelled.

’Nup’ he said - and that was that.

At the pub, as I had a second schooner and he nursed a shandy, I ventured the lesson. ‘I know your faith, and I’m sorry - I was wrong to suggest we steal that pipe from its random abandonment beside the road and take it home.’

Frank looked over and put me straight.

’Bugger that. I don’t want to do my back loading it into the van’, he said.

Turns out his back was injured in the war in a flogging from his jailors. I never knew this because he didn’t venture much. I found things out through his life and they always amazed me.

His kids knew some of it, but they were also learning parts as they came out. What happened in the Second World War sets the scene for people like me who are born afterwards.

PRISONER

The back injury came from when his Japanese jailor beat him with a lump of wood after he decked a guard who spat at him.

Frank was posted to Timor, and was captured then transported - the Japanese boat was sunk and he spent too much time in cold water. He told me he had another, earlier, sinking in warmer water along the way, and spent some time with sharks.

Eventually he was put to work at Mitsubishi in Nagasaki and was in the brick outhouse the morning the atomic bomb was dropped. He woke up after being knocked out, covered in bricks and staggered about, temporarily blind.

The story came out in bits. He didn’t like to talk about it when I met him, but was more released as the years went by.

In the mid 1990’s Frank and a mate were taken back to Nagasaki by a TV network for the 50^th anniversary of the bombing. We saw the documentary, and understood more.

He was taken up into the hills by an old Japanese lady, and eventually rescued by the allies. He’s never talked about what he saw amongst the death and the dying.

It’s a significant miracle he emerged unscathed and had no radiation exposure. He went on to breed six extremely healthy children, whose 13 offspring are all similarly unaffected. As are their children.

FATHER

I heard he was really busy, and away a lot when his kids were young. His loving and devoted wife Monica was and is to me the kind of wife and mum that any girl should aspire to be.

Frank had just retired when we met; and that meant still keeping his hand in. He was still finishing the retirement house at Tea Gardens which seems to have been built from ‘scoreage’, which is builder talk for what is left over on a job.

I saw his HX Holden wagon struggle up Hermington street with a stack on the roof rack, and a load in the trailer. They would add in a car load of grand children, and make it all look impossibly easy to deal with. Sure thing, take the kids, take half a ton of building materials, work all weekend. That was easy for Frank and Monica!

Cas loved her dad (and her mum) heaps, but she had trouble being ‘seen’ as the second youngest of six kids, especially since the beloved last kid was a boy. I think any ‘5th out of 6th’ is always going to feel slightly out of the loop. She had firm and supportive relationships with her older siblings.

Life for the Fitzy kids wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t too tough either. Monica kept them insulated from the gritty side of going broke and having a dad who was forced to work out around Dubbo, building fibro project houses – one a week. He worked like a man possessed. His son Tony carries on the tradition. They were tough as nails.

Frank was delightfully old fashioned. He wouldn’t let anyone swear in front of his women. He decked a guy at the pub for doing that. One time he and Tony came home from the pub; got changed, and went back. For a stoush.

Life was home, family, church, and school. The kids were all raised through the Catholic system and all have stories to tell about how tough that was. I still don’t ‘get’ why the Marist Brothers and the nuns were so tough – or cruel, depending on your outlook.

“They used to flog me every morning because I never did my homework” Frank told me of his school days around Strathfield. When I reacted to that, and said how bad they were, he bounced straight back: “Oh no, they were good blokes, I used to play football with them after school”.

AND THEN:

I did the unspeakable, and exited the family. No one has done that, which is a big strength 

of the Fitzmaurice’s. At least, none of the other 5 siblings lost a partner - the core of the family 

is together, and they stay together.

We would gather every Christmas and Easter, and be a big family. Mon cooked a big roast, 

and always made sure I didn’t get peas because I hate them. She never forgot.

I really missed it when I left, and probably unrealistically I pined for some kind of inclusion. 

It came eventually, Mon wrote to me, and I bumped into a bunch of Fitzys - especially Frank 

and Mon - at a Chinese restaurant. They were gracious, and Frank was warm to me. 

As if nothing had happened. It lifted my heart, and I left smiling.

The next time I saw Frank was at his funeral. 

Father Kevin rightly said that Frank was sentimental. He got the following poem out of his 

wallet before he died, and gave it to his first born, Tony.

When I come to the end of the road

And the sun has set for me

I want no rites in a gloom filled room

Why cry for a soul set free

Miss me a little – but not for long

And not with your head bowed low

Remember the love that we once shared

Miss me – but let me go

After, I walked alone and slowly to the front of the Tea Gardens Catholic Church as the 

crowd filed out behind the family. There was a photo of Frank taken just weeks earlier at Anzac Day. 

He was in the top frame, looking proud and happy and frail, wearing his medals. 

In the bottom frame he is sitting in an MG sportscar before the little Tea Gardens march. 

He is smiling beatifically. He made it. My tears smudged the glass.

Footnote

I got a lot of joy and comfort from my daughter’s relationship with her grand dad. 

Jess and Nathan visited him, prayed over him, and were there on Anzac day. 

Their connection reached out and was part of me.

Mentoring the boy

My upbringing was thin on male role models. The married Reverend with whom my mum was having a long affair was occasionally interested in what I did and thought, once when I was 14 he took me to lunch at Buckingham's Steak House in Elizabeth Street Surry Hills to talk about my future direction.

It might have been my tendency to gravitate towards older single males like Eddie Van Der Madden, the projection genious and associate of Roger Foley. Eddie lived in a horrible boarding house on the high end of the corner of Liverpool and Bourke street, East Sydney. His room was crammed with apparatus he had scrounged - like old projectors, and fish tank pumps on little glass chambers through which he would project light. I'd met Eddie at The Arts factory where I would hang with hippies who were wide on acid. I'd walk through clouds of hash smoke.

Like most creative types, Eddie was troubled and not recognised. His survival was centred on that squalid room, with the half eaten cans of baked beans, dust and relentless noise from the street - this is before the tunnel took the trucks out of Darlinghurst.

Sometimes when I knocked and knocked in the afternoon, he would stumble out of his manky bed, dressed in his Y fronts and a smelly shirt, and let me in, muttering, returning to bed to talk reluctantly to this long haired friendly kid who just asked too many questions.

I think the Reverend was worried.

Eddie was nothing more than sweet and helpful. So was Sid, who built me an oscillator effect from an old wooden boxed TV set. He wired a mic inside, and the black and white TV would produce an oscillating wave pattern in time with the music. It was an early entrant in my own 'lightshow' inventory.

I met Sid via the fabulous experiment that was Guriganya school in Paddington, where I served time after being ejected from Vaucluse Boys High. Sid was unlike most of the parents there because he didn't smoke dope and his child (aged about 6) was relatively normal. They lived a few blocks from me, and I would go down and hang and talk about his TV repair skills. Sid was very quiet and introverted, so I think he appreciated my gentle insistence. Then his wife Lorna became hostile towards me, either because she resented my intrusion, or suspected something sinister of Sid.

Later I would pester Michael Elvins, who headed a new hippy collective called Omnibus. It grew from the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin, where we all went in Paul Close's rock and roll Ford F350 truck. Three of us locked in the back on matresses - that was a wild ride, pitch black and rolling. Only 12 hours there, and 12 back.

Michael was gay and moved into the row of buildings on Glebe Point Road that a strange property developer gifted to the collective. I would help him putty coloured perspex into the broken window frames, and sweep and clear up for our opening concert.

Our coffee shop at the front had old carpet and parachutes, reminiscent of the Arts Factory. But the era had passed, and we didn't get the hippies or the heads. We just got angry local youth, and had to talk them down while they scared everyone away.

So mine was a journey of displacement, wandering the wilderness looking for men to inspire me and teach me how the world turned, since my own dad was both incapable and removed from my life. I'd decided when I was around six years old that he was not a popular or liked man,because people would avoid us in the street.

Kids know things.

I went to work part time for the lovely Robert Nicholls at Strand Hire, looking after the lighting equipment. He was gay and would invite me home for dinner with his circle of screaming queens. When one tried to lay hands on me, he rounded and defended me. No one ever tried anything else - how naive and fortunate was I?

Through Rob I met Roger Barratt - also gay - who was my greatest mentor, right through to 1980. He taught me so much, about life, lights, and business.

I married Caroline, and gravitated towards Frank Fitzmaurice, her dad. He was a builder, and helped me learn to build.  I have a blog about him here as well.

Even now, in my mid fifties, I tend to lean in and listen to the older guys. My most recent father in law was/is Don Nielsen, probably the nicest man I know. He was a structural engineer and loved nothing better than to come to Wahroonga and gently advise me on how to best engineer the footings and frame for one of the decks I built there from hardwood and Merbau.

Don is still up there, and still the well loved dad of my ex, which complicates things a titch.

That's the story of men who help boys. Maybe this will help anyone with a boy child better understand what is wired in their little minds.