Swimming to the Moon Read online

  The community divided into Sunday Drivers or Sunday Drivees, depending on whether it was your family’s turn to tour the suburbs in the Holden or to preen behind the lounge-room venetians as the cars cruised slowly past. (Stopping the car and openly gaping was acceptable; picnicking on someone’s lawn, or playing cricket there, was not.)

  The drive itself was an event for most of the family. Grandma and the kids were piled into the back seat (for some reason teenagers weren’t so keen), the children suffering the boredom only because of the promise of fish and chips at the drive’s terminus at Fremantle.

  When did the Sunday Drive cease? When did all the high, all-enclosing limestone walls spring up? How come the houses in Perth’s suburban streets suddenly put up barricades? When did the innocent curiosity of strangers seem to morph into sinister snooping?

  I suspect it was when Perth lost its innocence in the mid-sixties. The four-year prowling and killing rampage of Eric Edgar Cooke charted in The Shark Net changed not only suburbia’s psychological state but its architecture and landscaping.

  This coincided with a financial boom or two that encouraged old middle-middle-class streets to go brashly and expensively upmarket. Sedate neighbour-hoods decided they should deter intruders and erected high walls. Understated ‘Californian’ bungalows became edifices and suburbs now paid homage to Los Angeles and Tuscany. Indeed, Perth architects seemed to embrace Tuscany with more enthusiasm than the Tuscans.

  The new barricades affected another sometimes welcome, often irritating, and peculiarly West Australian habit of yesteryear: the Unannounced Drop-In. What Perth household enjoying a relaxing weekend didn’t have to abruptly change its plans with the impromptu drop-in of friends, neighbours or even vague acquaintances?

  In my youthful experience, any given father would warmly welcome the unexpected pre-lunch Sunday arrival of any convivial people armed with Swan Lager. A mother, however, would smile grimly as she correctly envisioned the delayed and overstretched lunch to follow, not to mention the lost afternoon, the scratched-together evening meal, the drinking into the night, and the increasingly loud laughter that prevented the kids from sleeping.

  This habit did prepare me for the spontaneity of journalism, however, some of whose practitioners were so sociable they didn’t need the drop-in restriction of Sunday. Any night-time hour of any day, especially when the pubs had just shut, would do just as well.

  The stand-out drop-in champion was my friend David, who would briskly stride out from his home on Saturday mornings on some manly errand to buy paint or nails or putty. On his way to the hardware store he’d call in at the pub ‘for the one’. Saturday then seemed to rapidly disappear, having few geographical, liquid or personnel limits and speedily segueing into Sunday.

  In the early hours of Monday, after dropping-in to more homes than he could possibly remember, he’d be delivered to his door by a total stranger, often a milkman or garbage man and once by a lion-tamer he’d met at a pub near Bullen’s Circus. Once he was transported home rolled up in a length of carpet.

  His helpers would be assisted by the note pinned to his grass-stained jacket: ‘His name is Dave. If you are reading this, Dave is lost and wandering. His address is so-and-so. His wife will not offer you a reward.’

  TRANNIES

  Seeing my youngest daughter retiring nightly to bed with various sophisticated electronic entertainment devices reminded me of a time when my own most treasured bedtime possession was a transistor radio.

  How convenient and efficient my little Sony seemed. How compact and stylish it looked in its black leather case. How nonchalant this eleven-year-old felt as he placed it beside him on the pillow and fell asleep to the quips and contests of Bob Dyer and Jack Davey. How cool was this thirteen-year-old as he writhed on his bedroom floor in private mirth to the Goons’ nonsense on his transistor, a show so wonderfully incomprehensible to his parents.

  Not that adults disliked transistor radios. They were universally popular and they fulfilled a need. No keen punter was without one on race day, and no weekend gardener faced the weeding without a transistor tuned in to the football. Similarly, no journalist performed early-morning ablutions without a transistor broadcasting the ABC news and A.M. in the bathroom.

  Then one day they weren’t there any more. They disappeared overnight. How quaint they seem now: mere collector’s items for nerds, like their Bakelite radio predecessors or Elvis figurines. What happened to them?

  My friend Nick tried to buy one the other day. The incomprehension on the shop assistant’s face was a sight to behold. Nick might as well have wanted to purchase an ear trumpet. Hearing his puzzled tale of transistor woe, however, did remind me of my own Sony and the many evenings spent in the company of Dyer and Davey.

  Thanks to their popularity and long-running radio rivalry, you had to prefer one of them over the other. (It helped that neither was actually an Australian. Dyer was originally from Tennessee and Davey from New Zealand.) I liked Bob Dyer better, though I suspect now that Davey was quicker-witted and less rehearsed.

  In my busiest listening era, Dyer’s radio shows were sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive, with his opening and closing greeting of ‘Happy lathering, customers!’, and comprising stunts and contests that have since passed into the Australian consciousness, like The Secret Sound (such as a dog scratching fleas, a cat lapping milk, or someone ripping a bandaid off a hairy arm) and the country’s most famous quiz, Pick a Box.

  In 1957, Pick a Box moved successfully to television (Davey, by contrast, didn’t succeed on TV), where Dyer’s sponsor became BP and his greeting changed from joyous lathering to ‘Happy motoring, customers!’ (Other familiar salutations were ‘Howdy, customers, howdy’, and ‘Tell them Bob sent you’.) It was the biggest quiz show on national television, thanks to the encyclopedic knowledge of his most famous contestant, Barry Jones, and Dyer’s catchcry, which has passed into the national vocabulary: ‘The money or the box?’

  My trusty tranny coexisted happily with television, allowing me to follow sport in an era when it struggled on TV. There was no Australian Rules coverage on TV then, and if you wanted to listen to the cricket (Alan McGilvray on the ABC), or Herb Elliott blitzing the competition in the 1500 metres in the Rome Olympics, it was radio that triumphed.

  Alas, my Sony would meet a tragic end while I was still a teenager. Along with other prized possessions – my watch, jeans and a favourite pair of board shorts – it perished in a Rottnest fire. While I was absent from the camping ground, partying in a Thomson Bay bungalow, two adolescent cronies, Max and Rob, called in to my tent to socialise with a communal hipflask of rum. Then they fell asleep with cigarettes blazing. Max dragged Rob out just as the burning tent was about to engulf them. (Younger readers: let that be a constructive lesson on several fronts.)

  I returned to my camp to see a tent-shaped burnt patch on the ground and the Rottnest police sergeant raking the ashes for my body. ‘There you are,’ he grumbled. ‘I was wondering about the lack of bones.’ My beloved Sony was a lump of molten metal on the prongs of his rake.

  Ever since, I’ve listened to radio only in the car. Does anyone make transistor radios any more? Where would I buy one?

  BUDGIES

  Will the excitement never cease? Our village was in the headlines the other day for dominating the Australian Budgerigar Championships.

  A budgie owned by local enthusiast Mick Greber was named Australia’s champion dominant pied bird, and Bob Smith won reserve champion in the spangled class, and placed third in the sky-blue and opaline classes.

  Congratulations all round. I’ve neglected to put it on my CV, but as a former budgie-breeder myself, my acclamation comes wholeheartedly from personal experience.

  Aged eleven and twelve, I bred several generations of birds, some of which surprised me by appearing to change sex back and forth. But the star was a gregarious blue-and-yellow male named Junior, who went on to live more than fourteen years, in three states, and articulate in
his squeaky ‘voice’ a large repertoire of songs and advertising jingles including ‘Today You’ll Use a Dunlop Product’, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’, ‘Sha-Boom-Sha-Boom’ and ‘The Banana Boat Song’. And, because his cage was by the telephone, and my mother usually answered it, ‘Hello, 86-4938, Dorothy Drewe speaking.’

  When excited, Junior ran these melodies together in a tweety sort of riff and would warble things like, ‘Today You’ll Use a Banana’ or ‘Tie Dorothy Down, Sport’. Understandable, I guess, after some of his mishaps, like falling headfirst into a cup of black coffee and a sink of sudsy washing-up water. On each occasion, however, his little eyes sparkled again with the aid of an eyedropper of Johnnie Walker.

  By the time he was fourteen, Junior was looking a bit rough around the edges and his skull feathers had turned into a birdy buzz cut. He could still manage the occasional ‘Sha-Boom’ or ‘Come mister tally man, tally me banana’, out of nowhere, but his heart wasn’t in it. At a few months over fourteen he fell off the perch.

  But when he was young and willing to be schooled, he soaked up rote learning at the rate of two or three songs or jingles a week. We’d cover his cage for the night and quietly repeat the words for five minutes. Next morning, off with the cage cover, and Junior would proudly chirp the Dunlop slogan just as my father, a fervent Dunlop employee, with tyres, gumboots and tennis rackets on the brain, sat down for breakfast.

  The other family members taught him for fun, but I was in it for the money. The BBC, I’d heard, was offering five hundred pounds for a recording of the best talking budgie in the International Cage Bird World Contest. I taped Junior, and gave the tape to my father to post, but either Junior’s bananas, kangaroos and Dorothys didn’t impress the judges, who had 3000 rival British budgies to choose from, or my father demurred at sending off the gigantic recording.

  The competition was won by one Sparkie Williams, from Newcastle upon Tyne, whose repertoire was alleged to contain more than 500 words and eight nursery rhymes. Sparkie Williams became a national celebrity, cut a record which sold 20,000 copies, starred in birdseed commercials, and made his owner rich.

  I wasn’t impressed. I thought ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ or ‘The Banana Boat Song’ (if correctly rendered with enough Day-o’s), was more impressive than Sparkie Williams’s version of ‘Incy Wincy Spider’.

  Sparkie shrewdly changed the spider to a sparrow, and then chirped, in Geordie language, ‘Wor little spuggy ran oop the wahter spoot. The rain came down and washed the spuggy oot.’

  Junior’s West Australian accent obviously stood no chance. But those were innocent days in budgie world. According to the Guinness Book of Records an American-owned budgerigar named Puck holds the world record for the largest vocabulary of any bird, at 1728 words.

  Then in 2001, recordings of a budgie named Victor (now deceased) got media attention. Victor’s Canadian owner insisted that not only could Victor engage in contextual conversation, but could predict the future. Indeed, he’d predicted his own death.

  In a statement worthy of Monty Python, Guinness states solemnly, ‘Though some believe the animal was able to predict his own death, as was claimed, further study on the subject is difficult without the bird.’

  TARZAN AND NOELEEN

  I don’t know what caused me to remember my first girlfriend the other day, but I did. I recalled her blonde, bobbed hair, her freckles and her mischievous smile. She was an attractive, physical type of girl, a tomboy, who liked wandering around naked. Her name was Lynette Rumble.

  We were aged five and six at the time. There were no other boys in our neighbourhood so Lynette Rumble and I played together every day. Ours was a new Melbourne suburb, the road wasn’t sealed yet, and houses were springing up everywhere. Homes-under-construction, of course, were regarded as official children’s playgrounds back then.

  Lynette Rumble and I roamed around dangerous building sites, finding interesting sharp and wiry stuff to take home as weapons, making mud pies in the sand and cement, stepping recklessly from bare joist to joist across lounge-rooms-to-be (and regularly falling and cutting our knees). One day Lynette Rumble and I found a can of brown paint. Well, we couldn’t wait to shed our clothes (Lynette Rumble had hers off first) and paint stripes all over our bodies, so we looked like tigers.

  I was determined to marry Lynette Rumble. I envisaged an exciting life together, roaming construction sites, flicking cement at each other, pilfering weaponry, and disguising ourselves as animals. But the in-laws were a problem. Mrs Rumble was loud and tall (though, looking back, everyone is tall when you’re five) with curious lips. Her lips folded back on themselves, which I found unnerving, and showed you much more lip membrane than you expected.

  Mr Rumble sold hair products from a Ford Prefect van and had wavy hair in the style favoured by the politician Christopher Pyne. He said my hair was parted on the wrong side. I didn’t know the hair-product world had strict rules for hair partings. He put some of his company’s goo on it, and combed a precise parting on the ‘right’ side. My hair sprang back defiantly.

  Maybe I could have become used to Mrs Rumble’s curious lips and Mr Rumble’s obsession with my wrong hair parting, but Mrs Rumble’s cooking was the clincher. Even in an era of horrendous Australian meals, hers stood out. They were always boiled sausages, beans and potatoes. The potatoes were mushy and grey, the beans stringy and grey, and I don’t even want to think about the sausages.

  Anyway, my romance with Lynette Rumble was not to be. Fate moved our family from Melbourne to Perth, and my displaced heart would soon swing heroically towards Noeleen Ivimey.

  Noeleen was a central figure in my Tarzan period. She was Jane. After school I would undress, don my PE shorts (the garment closest to Tarzan’s loincloth) and pad around to Noeleen’s house. There, I would climb into her jacaranda tree and beat my chest and bellow the Tarzan jungle cry.

  This was the cue for Noeleen to appear at her laundry door wearing her bathers and with a monkey puppet (Cheetah) on one hand. She would join me in the jacaranda, and we’d pat Cheetah, re-enact the previous Saturday’s film, and indulge in a ‘Me, Tarzan, you, Jane’ domestic routine for a while.

  This was merely the start of our regular game. Eventually we’d ditch the monkey and climb down into her lion-and-crocodile-infested backyard where, oblivious to wild beasts, we would run at each other from each side of the savage jungle until we met with a jarring clash and kissed on the mouth.

  The urgent running at each and kissing was important to the plot. I found it dizzying, but not quite as exciting as movies had led me to expect. I wondered whether Noeleen and I were kissing properly. Maybe you needed to be older than eight. Maybe real romance required us to run faster at each other. But we could hardly collide with greater force than we were. Even at our present velocity we were getting bleeding lips and headaches.

  However, I would’ve happily played our secret Tarzan game forever if Noeleen hadn’t told the neighbourhood about it. That was embarrassing enough. But Noeleen didn’t mention Tarzan. Or even Cheetah. She said our game was called Sophisticated Lady. My face felt hot just thinking about it. If Jane was the point of the game I didn’t want to play it any more.

  DAMPIER DISCIPLINE

  Passing through the burgeoning Pilbara mining port of Dampier the other day made bitter memories of Miss Doris Langridge’s Grade Two class come flooding back. (It seems her grip on my psyche will never cease.) Turtle-shaped, perpetually livid and over-powdered, she relied on a portrait of William Dampier on the classroom wall to maintain disciplinary correctness during writing lessons.

  When I say ‘writing’, I mean running writing. With steel-nibbed pens and ink. We seven-year-olds were made to hold our pens so that the blunt end pointed to William Dampier. If it didn’t (say, if you were left-handed), too bad, you received a rap on the offending knuckles with her fifteen-inch Education Department– issue ruler.

  This notorious weapon featured inlays of many West Australian hardwoods
– jarrah, karri, wandoo, tuart, et cetera – and a metal leading edge, so could be depended upon to give a child ever after both a crabbed writing style and an antipathy to English explorers.

  He wasn’t the only English historical celebrity to decorate our state-school wall, sharing the space with Captain Cook, Clive of India and Elizabeth II. His disciplinary role aside, he made a bigger impression on us than the others because (a) he was a pirate, and (b) he had his own hair. (As of course did the Queen, but not the others, wig-fanciers both.) Lank-haired and saturnine, somewhat resembling Peter Pan’s Captain Hook, Dampier glowered down on us as if he’d been painted while suffering from scurvy or something nasty picked up on the coast of Boca del Drago.

  Nevertheless, no other explorer has been so honoured on our maps than Dampier, who visited northwestern New Holland in 1688 and 1699. Indeed, few other people have featured so prominently in both our geography and commerce. Many Pilbara and Kimberley landmarks, pubs and pizza shops are either named after him, his ships or his other raffish profession. The naming honours came from an admirer, Phillip Parker King, who, more than a century later, retraced his course and always travelled with copies of Dampier’s books, A New Voyage Round the World and Voyage to New Holland.

  Dampier’s local popularity today rests solely on his buccaneering career. His fame as a bestselling author, whose vivid descriptions, maps and drawings influenced scientists, navigators and scholars, is unknown or forgotten. North-west myth has it that Dampier buried a seachest of treasure on Buccaneer Rock, at Broome. Notwithstanding this unlikely event (he liked to keep hold of his rare plunder), it’s impossible to miss his legendary presence in these parts.